Category: Uncategorized

What follows here is a warts-n-all look at some more of the paintings I did in January, my first month of watercolour painting – indeed, my first month of having progressed beyond the drawing of stick figures. I’m not going to write much here – I’ll comment on each of the paintings, instead. Feel free … Continue reading More Rookie Art

If you’d asked me, before Christmas 2018, whether I had any artistic ability, I’d have said ‘No, I can’t even draw stick men’. And that was barely an exaggeration. But I’d always admired people who can draw and paint, or sculpt, or make beautiful things out of steel, precious metals and stones. And I’d long … Continue reading Diving Into Art

In a recent post, I briefly introduced the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, and I promised to write some more on it. Some (Calder 2016, Fischmann 2018, Lomas 2018) have put the GDPR up as the gold standard in data protection, while others (Geuter 2018, Nielsen 2018) have questioned whether the promise … Continue reading GDPR: Gold Standard or Wishful Thinking?

I’ve pretty much come to accept that anything I do online – even things that are supposed to be private, such as sending and receiving emails and doing my banking – may be observed by people or agencies who have no legitimate reason or right to be observing me. Any last naive hopes I had … Continue reading Is Privacy Still a Thing?

I learned recently that there is a word for people whose only involvement with any form of activism is via online means, such as liking a Facebook post, retweeting something, or clicking to sign an online petition. The word is ‘slacktivist’, and its judgemental tone got up my nose from the start. So I did … Continue reading Activist or Slacktivist? In Defence of Online Activism

On Saturday just gone, we had to farewell our beautiful dog, Cleo. And there ended the sweetest three years of our lives so far. Looking for love It all started in October 2014. We’d had a dog, our Monty boy, for a little over a year and we thought it would be good to give … Continue reading Missing Cleo

I was raised on horror stories about how ‘the government’ was going to track us (‘us’ being the adherents of the religion I was being raised in), monitor everything we did, use helicopters with heat-sensing devices to flush us out of our mountain hideouts, imprison us, separate us from our parents, and make us answer … Continue reading Thoughts from a digital media late adopter

I took the above photo at the Keukenhof in the Netherlands, on 16 April 2004, and to this day, I don’t think I’ve taken a better photo. A year earlier, my Mum had come to visit me, soon after I’d moved to Belgium, and my husband suggested I take her up to the Keukenhof for … Continue reading The best photo I’ve taken so far