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	<title>nevstokes.com</title>
	<link>http://nevstokes.com/blog</link>
	<description>Random musings of a child progeny</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Fri, 30 Jul 2010 13:06:02 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>A footballing thought experiment</title>
		<description><![CDATA[To tide me over after the end of the World Cup and before the start of the new domestic football seasons, I&#8217;ve been spending some time trying to put together teams of international legends of the game for my foosball table (which currently lives in the Whitespace office). The table is a Garlando with a [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://nevstokes.com/blog/2010/07/30/a-footballing-thought-experiment/</link>
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		<title>Asking for trouble</title>
		<description><![CDATA[&#8220;It is found that anything that can go wrong at sea generally does go wrong sooner or later&#8221; - Alfred Holt, 1877 (Murphy&#8217;s Law) The Deep Water Horizon disaster is undoubtably a catastrophic occurance. At the risk of sounding unpopular, it is also possibly a great opportunity. The first blowout of somewhere around 50,000 American [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://nevstokes.com/blog/2010/07/27/asking-for-trouble/</link>
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		<title>What&#8217;s the hold up?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The other day in the office we noticed that one of our servers was performing a little sluggishly. We rolled up our sleeves, fired up a terminal window and prepared to take a look under the hood. There were a lot of database jobs backing up in the process list and this confused me &#8211; [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://nevstokes.com/blog/2010/07/21/whats-the-hold-up/</link>
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		<title>Rotten apples</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I ventured out on my bike over the weekend for the first time in ages. Nothing too strenuous &#8211; a short climb on the road to the canal and an eventual 16km loop back home. There is a well-established hierarchy on the road: truck drivers hate cars, car drivers hate cyclists and cyclists hate pedestrians. [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://nevstokes.com/blog/2010/07/18/rotten-apples/</link>
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		<title>Ngiya bonga South Africa</title>
		<description><![CDATA[That&#8217;s the World Cup over with for another four years. The past month has seen some sublime moments of football1 intermingled with the ridiculous and I don&#8217;t think that the higher echelons of the game will ever be the same again. I had an feeling before the matches started that FIFA&#8217;s obstinate stance on introducing [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://nevstokes.com/blog/2010/07/12/ngiya-bonga-south-africa/</link>
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		<title>Stating the obvious</title>
		<description><![CDATA[There&#8217;s been a whole lot of anger about the reception issues on the new iPhone 4 lately and I can&#8217;t help but be reminded of the old joke about the man who goes to see his doctor: Man: Doctor, it hurt&#8217;s when I do this! Doctor: Well don&#8217;t do that then! Seriously, if holding the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://nevstokes.com/blog/2010/07/01/stating-the-obvious/</link>
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		<title>The next generation</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Next week will all but certainly see the introduction of the fourth generation of Apple&#8217;s iPhone. There has been an uncharecteristic spate of leaks that have pointed us towards the upcoming new features of the new product, the main one being a forward-facing camera. I&#8217;m not sure about elsewhere in the world but video calling [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://nevstokes.com/blog/2010/06/01/the-next-generation/</link>
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		<title>Basic maths</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I was reading the Observer UK Factfile at the weekend and something struck me as a little weird. Apparently in 2009 we exported £12.4bn in petrol and imported £14.5bn of the same commodity. Nobody yet has been able to explain to me why this happens instead of just using what we would normally export and [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://nevstokes.com/blog/2010/04/29/basic-maths/</link>
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		<title>There can be only one</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;m a little disappointed at how seemingly everything is being marketed as belonging to a zero-sum situation at the moment. The main example of this mantra at the moment is the flawed argument that HTML5 will kill flash. Nonsense. There is a situation for either one. Replacing the single-use (albeit massively entrenched) scenario of video [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://nevstokes.com/blog/2010/04/20/there-can-be-only-one/</link>
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		<title>British Soggy Time</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Now that the clocks have changed again most people are assuming that it&#8217;s summer and we should all be wearing shorts and sunglasses. Realistically, this heralds springtime more than anything else and rain &#8211; even snow &#8211; shouldn&#8217;t come as much of a surprise to anyone. That said, I have entered the &#8220;summer Nev&#8221; phase [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://nevstokes.com/blog/2010/03/31/british-soggy-time/</link>
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		<title>Ineffective mnemonics</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The clocks changed last night and we&#8217;re now in British Summer Time. I can never remember which way they change and I find the old aide-mémoire &#8220;spring forward, fall back&#8221; (which I&#8217;ve just had to search for on Google) effectively useless. I&#8217;ve fallen forward just as many times as I have fallen back &#8211; if [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://nevstokes.com/blog/2010/03/28/ineffective-mnemonics/</link>
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		<title>End of an era</title>
		<description><![CDATA[&#8220;He who dies with the most toys is, nonetheless, still dead.&#8221; - Riposte to the No Fear T-shirts of the mid-90s After four years of student life and nigh on a decade living as a bachelor, I&#8217;ve just taken a huge step and moved into a new flat with my girlfriend. To say that I&#8217;m [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://nevstokes.com/blog/2010/03/25/end-of-an-era/</link>
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		<title>Catch-up</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Being the first mover in a field can obviously provide you with a tremendous advantage &#8211; but only if you get it right. Judging by the response from the rest of the industry, Apple certainly got it right with the iPhone. Decrying the product before it was even released masked a degree of nervousness from [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://nevstokes.com/blog/2010/03/23/catch-up/</link>
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		<title>Really?</title>
		<description><![CDATA[What is it with the demand for &#8216;realistic&#8217; movies all of a sudden? Case in point: Roman Polanski&#8217;s new film The Ghost. Sidney Perkowitz suggests that every film should be allowed to ask us to suspend our disbelief on one occasion only. Currently, movies fly seemingly permanently in the face of what would actually happen [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://nevstokes.com/blog/2010/03/21/really/</link>
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		<title>New features</title>
		<description><![CDATA[There&#8217;s talk afoot of the next iteration of the iPhone and it&#8217;s operating system and multitasking is getting a lot of mentions once again. Frankly, I can&#8217;t say that it&#8217;s personally something that I&#8217;m overly bothered about but maybe that&#8217;s because I&#8217;ve not experienced what benefit it can offer. However, two very simple things that [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://nevstokes.com/blog/2010/03/17/new-features/</link>
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		<title>The unknown</title>
		<description><![CDATA[&#8220;He is educated who knows how to find out what he doesn&#8217;t know.&#8221; - George Simmel As I alluded to in my previous post, finding out what you don&#8217;t know has never been easier. While the mobile Internet has all but curtailed the fevered pub discussions about pointless trivia, Google is far from having made [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://nevstokes.com/blog/2010/03/06/the-unknown/</link>
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		<title>There may be trouble ahead</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Now I&#8217;m not an economist by trade nor training but in this day and age of Google and Wikipedia, educating yourself is far easier than it ever has been before. The odds are that we&#8217;ll have a hung parliament in a few months. Despite the tempting mental image that this conjures in light of the [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://nevstokes.com/blog/2010/03/04/there-may-be-trouble-ahead/</link>
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		<title>Olympic spirit</title>
		<description><![CDATA[The Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games got off to a horrible start with the death of the 21 year-old Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili during training and there&#8217;s no doubt that this terrible event will cast a dark shadow on the memory of an otherwise excellent couple of weeks. If this terrible accident was the low [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://nevstokes.com/blog/2010/03/01/olympic-spirit/</link>
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		<title>Passing you by</title>
		<description><![CDATA[I wrongly assume that my &#8220;normal&#8221; friends (i.e. non-geeks) see most of what I encounter on the Internet. I forget that they&#8217;re unlikely to spend nigh on ten hours a day connected. They are probably not subscribed to Gruber nor Kottke and neither do they typically use Twitter. If you&#8217;re not drinking from the firehose [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://nevstokes.com/blog/2010/02/23/passing-you-by/</link>
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		<title>Spring to, er, &#8220;spring&#8221; soon</title>
		<description><![CDATA[Here in Edinburgh, the nighttime temperatures are still well below freezing point, giving motorists a thick frost to scrape off their windscreens in the morning. The &#8220;thin ice&#8221; warning signs along the Union canal are almost obsolete: the patches of ice that do remain would struggle to support the weight of light waterfowl, nevermind that [...]]]></description>
		<link>http://nevstokes.com/blog/2010/02/21/spring-to-er-spring-soon/</link>
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