Monthly Archives: June 2008

New York was once in Leicestershire hands

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While my uncle is reportedly the last surviving member of the Royal Lincolnshire Regiment I was reminded of the history of the Royal Leicestershire Regiment today with a visit to the Newake Houses Museum. Little did I know that in 1776 the forerunner to the regiment, the 17th Regiment of Foot, helped capture New York in the American War of Independence. There’s a pic of a button left in New York as way of anecdotal proof.

By the way on the subject if the number 17 it’s a curious contradicttion that if you search wikipedia that against ’17 (number)’ that it both appears as “the high incidence of the number 17 and its function as ‘the most random number‘ as described by MIT“, and the “least random number (17), according to the Hacker’s Jargon File“.

 

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It’s not just your ex who’s looking you up online

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Interesting comment from Dennis Howlett in the ICAEW’s IT Counts social network which , in response to a post from Jennifer Whitehead, on the real risk that employer’s will use Facebook to check on employee’s activity:

“Recruiters and talent management people are VERY interested in what they can discern from Facebook profiles. As one very senior exec recently said to me: “I can learn a lot more from a person’s social graph (connections etc) than I can from their resume.” Trust me on this one, these sites will be central in selection processes. I’m already seeing the prototypes for discovering and sifting these froms of data. In fact I’d actively encourage companies to go this route.”

Blue Monday

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There was a sense of chaos in Monday, quite apart from the banks ‘Black Monday’ as City AM titled it.

The fire engines from Shoreditch were out in Copthall Avenue.

And the C2C trains were severley delayed going out of Fenchurch Street.


BBC website distorting the market? It’s no surprise to some.

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This extract from the Guardian on Thursday on the effect of the BBC website on the market..of course this kind of distortion it’s no surprise to some, notably those in the educational software market.

ITN’s chief executive, Mark Wood, said the commercial news provider, which also competes directly with the BBC in the area of online services, was “alarmed at the extent of the BBC’s website funding and its ambition in the dot com world”.

“Commercial competitors thought the BBC website was already over-funded at a declared budget of