Little things annoy me that nobody else in the world could possibly care about. One of them is E-Bay's message at the end of every sale:

"You have bid £3.40 for the item. Hope you win".

Who hopes I win? E-Bay the corporation? The browser? Clearly I'm the only one inferring meaning here, so maybe I mean …

1     When you're eating bacon...
2
3
4               I don't each bacon.
5
6
7     Right, but when someone eats bacon...

I find this sort of thing happening routinely. I suspect everyone else feels more comfortable with waiting for the meaning of a sentence to emerge later.

Whatever happened to saying 'one', …

We're not all in power, by definition.

(Ricky Gervais)

Pouring the rest of my soup into a Tupperware container, my girlfriend-at-the-time asked me to stop.

"That won't fit", she said.

"Obviously it will", I replied, pointing to the remainder of the pot.

And it did, with a millimetre to spare. …

I like half-listening to brainless YouTube videos.

A good chunk of people complaining about the world dumbing with YouTube click-bait no doubt saw the kind of nonsense I watch and thought 'the BBC showed much more enlightening and informative content than this modern drivel'. This comparison doesn't work.

We shouldn't …

I have a personal rule concerning arguments. I accept only two.

I've made this a tight habit. If anyone protests (as they have) that they didn't put forward their strongest argument at the start, then I say this indicates a waste of time even more. Why put forward bad reasons, if you have good ones?

This saves time, …

A group of Victorian gentlemen called the 'Eaterateri' wandered various Scottish restaurants, trying all they could. The now well-known Adam Smith and David Hume regularly talked in the group about their ideas.

I don't know if Hume felt bold enough to speak about Atheism, but Adam Smith may well have developed those …

People rightly irritated by NFTs often lump Bitcoin et al. into the mix, and some of the complaints go too far.

The Use Case

A friend owed me €100, and wanted to send that money to me online. The traditional banks demanded:

• Looking up the IBAN
• About €15 processing (possibly more for Scotland to Serbia, I never looked …

I feel like we all need to stop using 'Did you read that on the internet?', in such a derogatory way. The internet contains just about all writing at this point. It contains academic journals, books, and intelligent discussions by professionals, often on Reddit.

Snarky comments about Reddit also apply - the space …

It's literally three commands:

1. i to insert text
2. Escape to not insert text
3. ZZ to save and exit

An old girlfriend once asked me if she could write a website. This came out of the blue - she had no experience with computers beyond installing Sims.

"Is it easy?", she asked.

I said "yes", then showed …

I've seen a meme trending hard of late. Not a 'funny picture' meme, but an idea: 'Don't compare your thing to another, just show us your thing. Don't say why it's better than the other thing, just tell us what it does'.

This advice might work in some limited way to stop bad writing, but then we may as well just stop …