Posts from 2020

04 Oct 2020

The Owl and the Cowpat...

…went to sea, in a beautiful pea-green spreadsheet. I’ve written before about my love for wiggly lines. Well, I had occasion earlier this week to draw a wiggly line quickly in Microsoft Excel. Delighted to spot this little vignette. (I know it’s an XY scatter plot not a wiggly line but this was how it first appeared)

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24 Sep 2020

Feedback Loops

The most popular post on my blog (at the moment) is a how-to post about locking a VW Passat without activating the alarm. It gets a respectable amount of traffic and I’m always pleased by a small drip feed of grateful messages I get through my contact form. This post is another Volkswagen related how-to. Although I suspect it won’t generate the same traffic levels because it’s even more niche. Who knows.

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20 Sep 2020

The Mozz law of pricing

When I were a lad studying science I always dreamed of having a fundamental constant named after me, or maybe a unit or a law. Not that my achievements would even register on the scale: I’m certainly not claiming I’ve ever got near Planck, Newton and other such giants. The name of Gauss (Johann Carl Friedrich, that is) kept coming up during my lectures: he seems to have earned quite some naming rights.

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20 Sep 2020

Now with added entropy

I’m currently working my way through this jar to make room in the cupboard for a jar of honey and a jar of tahini. I admit to being slightly perplexed by the seeming increase in items for sale which are just two other things mixed together. Salted butter is an oldie. Admittedly, I couldn’t make salted butter (easily) from salt and butter in my cupboard/fridge, but then I never consume butter in solid form anyway.

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20 Aug 2020

Le Condimentâle

We discovered a new type of cheese while on holiday this year in France. In fact, you could say we invented it. If you own a campervan or are a keen camper you might have been introduced to the concept of “Condimental”. I won’t reveal the name of the friend who shared that word with me, but in our family we had already independently begun practising this slightly nefarious and gently thrilling collection activity.

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20 Aug 2020

Holiday humbug

I was already feeling the beginning of this curve before spending a couple of weeks on holiday. Given that I have found time to write a couple of blog posts, I’m (hopefully) on the downslope of the second bulge right now.

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27 May 2020

An idea before its time?

Amused to read that a company is showing off a smartphone app that enables remote fans to influence sports games (Guardian link). Warrington Town had this idea over 20 years ago. It was called InteractiTown. Admittedly it doesn’t work any more, but still.

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09 May 2020

Lockdown Shakeup

Well, it’s been a while since I wrote anything on my blog - and lots has happened since I busted my ankle over 6 months ago. The biggest being lockdown - I’m not going to pretend it’s been easy running a home school at the same time as both parents are working full time, but we constantly remember that we’re very lucky in the grand scheme of things. At work the small team I work in have been livening up sprint-end review meetings with a bit of dressing up.

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