I was in Australia last week as the guest of the New South Wales Teachers Federation, which was holding its annual conference. I saw a lot and learned a lot and over the next few…

I’ve posted a handful (literally) of reviews on the Amazon website. I didn’t even remember that I had, but I just now had to post one about the new James Bond book so I returned…

I wrote my first computer program back in 1985. I was writing in a long-forgotten programming language known as “RPG II” for an IBM System 34 mini-computer. (Mini-computers were not what you think — they…

Meet “Robbie”, the newest member of our family. Robbie is a Roomba household robot, a product of the iRobot corporation, and something I’ve wanted to own for a long time. It costs about the same…

Nearly four years ago, after weeks of experimenting reading electronic books on my Palm handheld computer, I wrote a short essay here called “Hooked on Ebooks“. I thought that the electronic book as displayed on…

That’s what you get when you send an unencrypted email. It’s like sending all your messages by postcard, without an envelope. Of course if you don’t mind governments, employers, corporations, and ISPs reading your emails…

In the last several weeks, unions in a number of countries have been engaged in a wide-ranging and often acrimonious debate over the subject of boycotting Israel. In Britain, both the National Union of Journalists…

I’m attending a conference today organized by the Trades Union Congress (TUC) here in London. There seems to be some kind of wireless Internet connection, so if I can, I will blog throughout the day…

The BBC has just aired a special two-part episode of the hit television series “Spooks” in which the villains — a team of terrorists — turn out to be agents of the Israeli government.