Apparently one of Elon Musk’s favourite books is The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, which I can understand. It’s one of my favourite books too, although I suspect Musk and I take away very different things from it. Part of the book that I have been thinking about recently is the part about Deep Thought,…

The wildest thing happened to me the other day. I went to the cash machine, put in my card, entered my PIN, requested £30 and in a totally unprecedented act, it spat out a £20 note and a £10 note.  Of course anyone reading this is going to think that doesn’t sound unprecedented, but that…

The iPhone ruined technology.  There was an article in the paper the other day about Nissan Leaf owners who were angry because Nissan were discontinuing the app service that allowed them to connect with their cars and get updates on charging status amongst other things. In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t such a…

I love science fiction. I love science fiction so much that I retain a subscription to Amazon TV solely for the comforting knowledge that I could, at any moment and without hesitation, watch the whole of The Expanse end-to-end for a fourth time. I love science fiction, but I am very aware that it is fiction,…

One of the things my daughter loves to do on Christmas Eve is look at the Santa tracker. Originally there was just the NORAD one, but now Google have one too. We won’t get into the fact that they can differ wildly in their assessment of where Father Christmas is at any given moment, but…

For a number of years the team I worked in was (amongst many other things) an escalation point for the software support team of our platform. For a shorter period, when they were short staffed, we took on a more direct support role, and I still maintain that I learned more about that system in…

I enjoy writing, It’s one of the ways I work things out. If something is bothering me, a thought is stuck, nagging or simply needs exploring further, writing is a way I draw that out. Literally – it often takes me weeks or months to write something (mainly on my phone during my commute, which…

So the AI came for me. Not in the preposterous Skynet style science fiction way that apparently serious people waste vast amounts of other apparently serious people’s time warning them about, but in he mundane everyday way that already has an impact on the lives of millions of people around the world.  I got an…