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Archives for July, 2015 - Page 2
Edinburgh Zoo
Lucy and I went to Edinburgh Zoo with my brothers and their kids yesterday. It was a pretty good day out despite the torrential downpour that soaked us at four ish. The highlight was the Pandas, although we only saw the male panda. Tian Tian, the female panda was hiding somewhere in the enclosure. Seeing the pandas was well organised, with timed slots and efficient queuing. We were also lucky to be in the indoor viewing room, which meant that we were very close indeed. Our day started with the meerkats just inside the entrance. The zoo has a fairly new enclosure and there are a number of baby meerkats in the group. This greatly excited Lucy as she loves baby animals and also they kept running around which made her run back and forth to follow them around the…
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Digital Transformation in Government
The purpose of government is to serve its citizens, it should do that as efficiently and effectively as possible. The extent to which any specific government serves its people should depend very much on the needs and wishes of those people. I very much doubt that many people in the UK would disagree with that statement. Almost everyone that I have ever worked with in the public sector holds the first sentence as a core belief. You cannot work effectively for long in public service if you don't. However we seem to have gone astray a little. I think that the reasons for this is rigidity of institutions, exacerbated by thirty years of ideology that the private sector is better than the public sector. The fad for outsourcing on long-term monopoly contracts stifles change. I've seen this first hand in more than one central…
Book Review – Behind the Lines by Russell Miller
Behind the Lines: The Oral History of Special Operations in World War II by Russell Miller My rating: 4 of 5 stars A very interesting collection of first hand accounts by those involved with the Special Operations Executive or the OSS special operations during WW2. The book is split into chapters covering broad themes or areas of operation. Maquisards (Resistance fighters) in the Haute-Savoie département in August 1944. Third and fourth from the left are two SOE officers. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Almostall of the book is in the direct quotation from the various special operationspersonnel. There is a broad range of people interviewed for the book, most of them only appear to have been used in one section, although a couple may have been used more than once. This shows the attitudes they had to the work and the people that…
Book Review – The Annihilation Score by Charlie Stross
The Annihilation Score by Charles Stross My rating: 4 of 5 stars I finished reading The Annihilation Score last night, I really enjoyed it, although it makes a lot more sense now that I've read the spoiler thread comments over on The pitch is Bob Howard's exes set up a superhero team to fight crime. The Annihilation Score is the 6th Laundry novel and the second departure from Bob as the narrator. This time we have his wife Mo as our unreliable narrator. She is tasked to set up an arms length body to get ahead of the curve on an outbreak of superheroes. This is a side effect of CASE NIGHTMARE GREEN, AKA the end of the world as we know it. As well as working flat-out to deal with the superheroes Mo finds her marriage falling apart. Her…
Author Interview – Randall T. Lowe
This week's interview is with Randall Lowe, an attorney that has turned his hand to writing a very gritty urban fantasy series, the Felix Chronicles. Do you write for a living, or do you also do other work? I’m an attorney by day (and often by night as well). I didn’t get the itch to write a novel until I had been practicing law for quite some time. How do you deal with the stranger reviews? Since I’m new to the business of having my writing reviewed I have to admit that I find it all a bit terrifying. If an established writer receives some negative reviews it’s not the end of the world as generally a flood of positive reviews will swallow them up and render the “one stars” almost instantly forgotten. For someone like me, on the other…