Beware the automated tweets of convenience

If you use timed tweets or an automated bot for twitter, be it for personal or business use, you want to be careful. Whilst they can be really useful, there's no substitute for actually posting things yourself and there are other pitfalls.

Asking: Why?

Where I work we have a monthly staff lunch at which there's usually a short talk from someone with something pertinent to share. We've so far heard from an architect, the HR director of a large multi-national company, the leader of a church in Leeds and there's more good stuff to come. Most recently the speaker had to pull out so we watched this TED talk instead.

Why should I buy it from you?

In the market for a compact laser printer, I did my research, chose an HP model and found Amazon was the cheapest. Just as I was about to hit buy, I remembered that Amazon don't seem to pay any UK tax. As someone who does pay quite a lot of tax this annoys me. So I decided I would instead visit the beleaguered high street and buy my printer from Dixons. Turns out there's a reason the high street is struggling.

Why I care who's paying

A while ago I posted this while mulling over a task manager web app called NirvanaHQ. Although I flirted with it for a while, I've decided it isn't for me in its current state. I've just registered for Wunderlist which looks promising, but the same questions rear their head: If it's free, who's paying?

Drupal and Nginx

I'm responsible for this website which is hosted on a Linode vps. Recently we've switched from using Apache to Nginx. In this post, why and what we've found has happened as a result.

The proper channels

If you want to achieve something, there's often two ways to do it. The proper way, or the way that will actually get results. Do you have procedures and processes that get in the way and other people have to work around?

Marching orders

I'm not the most political of people, but I do try to keep abreast of what's going on in the governance of the country I live in. I read a few political blogs and I've noticed something that I'm increasingly finding irritating. It seems you can't be a lefty/liberal/etc and a Christian.