Archive for May, 2010

You’d never believe that this beautiful spot is so close to the centre of US government, yet it’s only a few miles from downtown Washington DC.

Earlier in the week I published a review and giveaway of one of my favourite travel books, Sideways – Travels With Kafka, Hunter S. and Kerouac (which I encourage you to enter, by the way). I was fortunate enough to be able to have a free-wheeling chat with the author while drinking too much coffee and watching pretty girls walk past a couple of weeks ago, and this Q&A session is the upshot. Hope you enjoy it!

There are times when life’s serendipitous moments just take my breath away.
The night that chatting to a random friend of a friend at a dinner party in London many years ago kick-started my career in a way that I could scarcely believe, for instance, or the passing comment on a Tube ride that lead [...]

Juxtaposition of the old and the new on Boylston St in Boston, USA.

I was wrong about Twitter.

There, I said it.

For the longest time, I was probably one of Twitter’s more vocal critics. I absolutely could not see the point of it. As far as I could tell from media and other coverage, Twitter merely provided a platform for narcissistic, irrelevant posturing from celebrities and wanna-be’s. I don’t care what Paris Hilton or Ashton Kutcher are doing. No, I really, really don’t. To make matters worse, such posturing had to be done in 140 characters or less. Given that ppl ritng lik ths in text messages or on the internet annoys the hell out of me, that particular feature wasn’t likely to endear me to the product any more. The silly names (tweets? tweeps? what the … ?) and esoteric punctuation (@ this and # that) seemed to confirm my suspicions about the target audience. From the outside, Twitter appeared to be some kind of teenaged version of Facebook at best and a marketing tool for clueless PR departments at worst, and despite protestations from a couple of workmates in particular I wasn’t even inclined to try it.