pubstr.at
Blogging less than the olden days. Still working to make public services better, now in healthcare regulation.
1,286 posts
879 followers
310 following
Active Commenter
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Yes, crossing the road outside Camden Town station you really do take your life in your hands
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Wow, small indeed.
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Stumbled across Firebrand Shorebreak when I was in Cornwall a couple of months ago and came home with a case. Very suddenly very drinkable.
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And respect to @williamheath.bsky.social that somewhat to my astonishment idealgovernment.com
Is still alive, when cluetrain.com is not. The level of linkrot in old blog posts is always depressing, so the exceptions are to be applauded.
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And impossible now to recreate the sense of what it was like to read it when it was radical and fresh and seemed to be the future.
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If there has been a design change without any explanation there would not much worth griping about. But the explanations in the design guide are too rich not to have some fun with.
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A quarter of a century ago, we had DotP which was supposedly delivering on the promise. And all the people doing all the work for 25 years have got us to... Dot!
We can only marvel at what further progress lies ahead.
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Me too. I had a vague impression of being online, but now realise how wrong I have been.
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Not having been a cool kid for a little while, delighted to find an old school RSS feed. Because it sounds very interesting.
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Exactly that. No extra costs during a migraine, because incapable of any activity; no extra costs not during a migraine, because capable of any activity.
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But your wider point is, of course, spot on
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But it's a great (terrible) example in a different way of gaps in the system. I remember years ago listening in to DLA claims calls, including one from a man with chronic migraines and the horrible realisation that his life was massively constrained, but in ways which meant he would never get DLA.
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Thanks, that is worth knowing
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I am not familiar with his wider work in any detail beyond a rigourous demolition of the muskian Mars fantasy and some niche travel writing, and don't have any sense of his political views for good or ill. But if there is a concern, it would be interesting to know.
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No longer free, but long standing, apparently indestructible and resolutely non-corporate.
pinboard.in
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And then the third runway to finish the job. An obvious conspiracy.
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Great post - and one I needed somebody to write because I have some people who need to read it.
One trivial detail - my understanding is that digital computers aren't digital to distinguish them from human, but to distinguish them from analogue - and in that sense the humans were digital computers
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Its MP is guaranteed to survive
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I once had the pleasure of watching Negroponte explaining to a mostly rapt audience how OLPC was going to transform the world. At the Royal Opera House, to add to the general sense of cognitive dissonance.
It didn't.
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It is the most honourable status. Cousin Sven doesn't fire just anyone.
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Thank you for your apology - it's a rare virtue on social media, and I appreciate it.
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Yes, it would appear that you missed the joke.
Nor is there the least suggestion of aiming to be a great man - that's your projection, not what I wrote.
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There are so few left unfired
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I do hope that in honour of the great man you are aiming to be almost, but not quite, totally incomprehensible.
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But a fair analysis nonetheless
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I write, going extremely slowly round Parliament Square
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And it doesn't matter either way, because when they are being mad they should be ignored and when they are being sensible they are too scared to use the scant powers they do have. Worst of both worlds.
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I appreciate the finesse of 'necessarily' - tell me that you are a DPhil candidate at one of our ancient universities, without...
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Thank you for your reply to me posted 28 minutes after this one.
#Zebedee
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Yes of course. But the replacement put both groups on an equal footing of not knowing, because some information was no longer there to find.
How big that group might have become over time if both information and tools to find it had been present together is something we will never know.
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I think that's right, and there is an element of this which is a power user thing. If you were one, there was a huge amount of stuff, and if you weren't, it was probably pretty opaque. But that's perhaps why those of us who were felt the loss so intensely.
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Of course - accountability is pretty hard without information. But there can be plentiful information without any accountability to speak of.
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I think transparency is the better word here. What was lost wasn't democratic accountability - that wasn't happening through government websites in the first place. But some transparency was very definitely lost and that was very frustrating at the time.
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Thank you - I do understand the frustration you were expressing.
The transition to gov.uk was absolutely the right thing to do and I have huge admiration for those who did it. But there was a price, which was paid by a small group of users who really did lose access to information they valued.
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And since we are reflecting on ancient history, I think I still agree with what I wrote on a version of this problem in 2011 - and it is clear from Tom's comment on it that it was an aspiration that early GDS shared.
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I get that your opinion on this is different from mine - and that's absolutely fine. But your response to me feels rather disproportionate to what I actually said - especially since we seem to be agreeing that there are gaps and that there is room for improvement.
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It was a huge improvement on what went before in what it does and it's understandable that that is what was prioritised. But there is a set of user needs that, however imperfectly, were better met by the old sites - and that need has still not been effectively addressed over a decade later.
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Burial at sea has a long history - now more than 20 years - as being the edge case example of a low volume government service.
Whether it's the least used is a tricky question - but from memory was about ten a year when I was paying attention to it, and there are other services in that range.
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And of course it works the other way too. I remember being baffled by people talking about Hoorheel, the famous British war leader better known as Churchill.
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To be fair, there is no way that an English speaker could look at Żywiec and come close to the right pronunciation without help
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But when you do catch a breeding pair, they are magnificent
flic.kr/p/2omLnBu
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You did, memorably
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You might want to reflect on why you assume that others are as ignorant as you appear to be.
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Open Railway Map shows it as still standard or dual gauge in the Ukrainian section, but there is a suggestion here that the standard gauge element was lifted in 1994.
That might be the bigger problem than upgrading Krościenko on the Polish side.
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I don't need a hint from patronising passers by. But thank you for your kind offer.
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There used to be a very strange PKP Przemyśl-Malhowice-Krościenko service which was domestic not international and did not stop in Ukraine.
A friend who went on it c1984 tells of locked doors and armed guards as it passed through Ukrainian territory.