Tag: Human Interest

Today I salute Umar Ghuman

  • February 1, 2012 at 9:28 pm

  • Every so often I find myself in an unexpected and memorable situation. Today, 1 February 2012, I am reminded of the time I met Umar Ghuman. I was traveling home to Birmingham on a Virgin train – not something I do often – and I sat at a table with a couple of Pakistani men. [...]

I was lying in bed, trying to remember the name of a song

  • January 28, 2012 at 11:13 am

  • I was pretty sure the song’s title was also that of a sitcom starring Geoffrey Palmer and Judi Dench, so I could easily have Googled it. But that felt like admitting early defeat, so I closed my eyes and tried to remember. A tried and tested trick (by me, at least) is to run through [...]

With all the digital communications tools I have, why does my brain sometimes want pen and paper?

  • April 21, 2010 at 12:45 pm

  • On the train this morning I had with me my laptop, iPhone, Flip video camera and Zoom audio recorder. But my brain wanted pen and paper: why? It wasn’t that I couldn’t use what I had, but that in order to get my thoughts out of my head relatively intact my brain needed another conduit. The thing [...]

Can a private network name breach public indecency laws?

  • October 1, 2009 at 9:32 pm

  • Yesterday my iPhone stumbled upon a wireless network with a very vulgar name. It made me think: if someone found that offensive, could the owner be charged with public indecency? It’s a curious (albeit pretty boring) question: because the network owner would, I suspect, presume that their wifi name is confined to the privacy of [...]

Since using Twitter…

  • May 12, 2009 at 2:14 am

  • I keep telling people how my life has altered since using Twitter, even though I’m well aware of how sad that sounds. The thing is it’s not really about Twitter at all, but about people: all Twitter did was help me find them. This post will appear particularly self-indulgent: it’s trying to articulate something that [...]

Man jailed over accidental Facebook message

  • October 8, 2007 at 7:38 am

  • This is a bit scary: a man who had been ordered not to contact his wife was jailed when he inadvertently sent her a message on Facebook. He claims the sign-up process confused him—in the same way that it confused me—by sending automatic friend requests to people in his existing contacts lists. “I certainly hadn’t [...]