JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Nov 20, 2009, 11:04 am
There's a long-running BBC TV show called SMart. It's about art and it's aimed at children. So why the name 'SMart'? Well, obviously, the word 'smart' contains within it t...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Nov 19, 2009, 3:08 pm
The Wikipedia page on Derby, Iowa begins: Derby is a city in Lucas County, Iowa, United States. The population was 131 at the 2000 census. A city with 131 inhabitants! That made me laugh. Even St Da...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Nov 18, 2009, 2:56 pm
The company behind the adhesive 'No More Nails', UniBond, also makes a foam filler called 'No More Big Gaps'. What a great name. However while 'No More Nails' is a substitute ...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Nov 16, 2009, 5:36 pm
It looks like the Eastenders crew has been having some fun with language. The cafe in the BBC soap opera is owned by a character called Ian Beale. And instead of the traditional BLT, Ian's cafe o...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Nov 13, 2009, 11:49 am
According to Metro, a paper not renowned for its understatement, this portrait of Gordon Brown's wife Sarah "would struggle to make it on to the fridge door if it was painted by a three-year old"....
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Nov 12, 2009, 3:16 pm
I've been on a training course called 'Managing High-Performing Teams' for the past couple of days. I've enjoyed it, and maybe I'll write some more about it tomorrow, but for now I...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Nov 11, 2009, 2:50 am
So I'm all signed up with Google Wave after wangling an invitation out of one of my senior colleagues. It's fun to play with but I'm getting a bit tired of seeing this error message: Appa...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Nov 9, 2009, 4:32 pm
On Friday, I walked past a folded, discarded copy of Metro and caught the first deck of its two-deck front page headline. It read: "Major massacres". This left me wondering what massacres it was refe...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Nov 6, 2009, 10:40 am
How long ago is 'a long time ago'? The answer, my friends, is 2006 - at least according to my PC. I've been uploading some video files to our publication's YouTube account. The videos...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Nov 3, 2009, 2:47 pm
Replacing swear words in a news story with a string of asterisks may protect the sensibilities of easily offended readers but it doesn't always aid understanding. For example, Metro's front pa...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Nov 2, 2009, 12:03 pm
At the weekend I went to order a particular product from the Amazon website. But I hit a problem: the product in question was available from a number of sellers, all of whom had almost identical price...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Nov 1, 2009, 12:31 pm
Footballer Frank Lampard recently appeared in an anti-obesity advert (pictured) with the caption "Even the best finishers need someone to start them off". At a party yesterday, someone pointed out to...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Oct 29, 2009, 5:20 pm
I use Wikipedia quite a lot, and only occasionally spot acts of vandalism. But here's one possible example, from the entry on Tolworth (check out the final sentence - and click on the image to see...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Oct 28, 2009, 4:20 pm
BBC News is running a story today about a French love letter in a bottle that washed up on a Cornish beach. The man who discovered the bottle, Martin Leslie, is quoted as saying: "I assumed that it w...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Oct 27, 2009, 1:35 pm
So Marks & Spencer charges 5p for each of its regular carrier bags, partly "to encourage customers to reduce the amount of bags they use". Today I bought a few groceries at Marks & Spencer, and the c...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Oct 26, 2009, 12:06 pm
So the tool we use at work to track our website's page views is feeling wildly optimistic today (click on the image to see a larger version): There's a clear weekly pattern, and when I took t...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Oct 25, 2009, 2:50 pm
So my local Indian takeaway has an interesting item in the 'specials' section of its menu: Nihari £9.95 Lamb on the bone is slow cooked to release all its flavours making a rich, very disti...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Oct 23, 2009, 1:25 pm
I did mention this great typo on Twitter yesterday but I think it's worth recording for posterity on the blog. You never know, the Daily Express might get around to fixing it at some point: Daily...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Oct 22, 2009, 3:49 pm
Two things have annoyed me recently. Firstly, the discovery that Blogger blogs can only have a maximum of 2,000 tags (or 'labels', if you prefer). Secondly, the error message that Blogger gi...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Oct 20, 2009, 12:44 pm
I've been meaning to share these links for a while: Bab.la Phrases: translations of useful phrases to and from any two of 14 languages - with a special focus on formal writing (business and acade...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Oct 19, 2009, 11:13 am
Today I took an online course on competition laws ('antitrust' to some of you), and I was pleased to see it contained this example of infer/imply confusion: Great photo too.
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Oct 17, 2009, 10:06 am
Recently I overheard this piece of office humour: Colleague A: "We need a workplace outing." Colleague B: "OK - your magazine's gay!" (For those who don't get the joke - 'outing' can...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Oct 15, 2009, 4:05 pm
So singer Leona Lewis has been punched in the head at a book signing. Here's the BBC News headline and intro: Even if the man who attacked Lewis bought a copy of her autobiography and queued up n...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Oct 14, 2009, 1:35 pm
I spotted this sign while on the train to Ely recently: Cambridge, home of Anglia Ruskin University. Wait a minute - isn't there another university in Cambridge too? I can't for the life of ...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Oct 13, 2009, 4:31 pm
A recent email from our CEO talked about "plans to sell our businesses in the Nordics". The Nordics? I'd thought that 'the Nordic countries' and 'Scandinavia' were synonyms (if I&...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Oct 12, 2009, 4:37 pm
As regular readers of this blog will know, a couple of weeks ago I received an email from James Brown wanting to know if I had sun loungers for sale. Undeterred by my lack of response, Mr Brown has w...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Oct 8, 2009, 1:19 pm
I first saw this headline out of context - in a giant news ticker in the window of my local Sainsbury's supermarket. It left me wondering what Grant seals were, and why they had abandoned Portsmou...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Oct 7, 2009, 6:57 am
On Monday the London Lite ran a short piece on the entries for this year's Turner Prize. Here's part of it: I feel sorry for the caption-writer on this one. David Enrico sounds a more plausib...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Oct 6, 2009, 4:27 pm
The notebook I use at work is "microperfed", which I assume means it has tiny perforations. To my surprise, the word throws up a respectable 25,400 results on Google (and that's not including var...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Oct 5, 2009, 2:07 pm
For the first time since I was at school, I'm a magazine subscriber. I've been bought a subscription to Wired UK as a birthday present, and my first issue dropped through the letterbox today. ...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Oct 2, 2009, 5:13 pm
Pete Docherty sung about the 32nd of December, but my web mail seems to be inventing dates of its own:
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Oct 1, 2009, 3:31 pm
More correspondence, this time an email I received in my official capacity as web production editor. It was from our, um, "obscenity checker" at work. I'm assuming that's a program rather than...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Sep 30, 2009, 12:27 pm
At work today I received a letter addressed to my publication's press office. Press office? The website only has a dedicated editorial staff of two. Mind you, we're both press (technically) a...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Sep 29, 2009, 11:10 am
The Engine Room has received a great bit of what I can only assume is spam email: I am Mr. James Brown and i am contacting you to know if you do have sun loungers for sale?I will like you to email me...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Sep 26, 2009, 5:01 am
A few weeks ago the BBC News website ran a story entitled Hundreds on Armstrong Tweet ride. It began: About 300 people have joined an impromptu bike ride with cycling legend Lance Armstrong after he ...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Sep 23, 2009, 2:24 pm
I'm currently reading the historical novel Imprimatur, by Rita Monaldi and Franceso Sorti. It's enjoyable, but rather hard going in places. Here's an extract in which the narrator, a servi...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Sep 22, 2009, 11:08 am
The ninth headline down in this BBC News 'Most Popular Stories Now' widget caused me some confusion: What was this brown book, and why was it breaking records? After a moment's thought, ...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Sep 21, 2009, 1:36 pm
Satellite TV company Sky had a promotional van parked in my local town centre today. Among the services and products being promoted was a "professional standard install". This could mean: a) The stan...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Sep 17, 2009, 5:01 pm
At work, whenever I want to use an image on a web page, I first have to upload it to the database - at which point it becomes known as an 'asset'. Recently I've been experiencing a frustr...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Sep 16, 2009, 4:08 pm
News stories, in print and online, can catch your eye for all sorts of reasons. Absurdity is one of them: A colleague of mine called me over to his desk just to share this Empire headline (and strapl...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Sep 15, 2009, 7:08 am
I didn't blog yesterday evening because I was at the Science Museum here in London, listening to a talk by Sir Tim Berners-Lee - the inventor of the World Wide Web. I've written about it for ...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Sep 11, 2009, 4:23 am
So I've fallen in love with a website: Overheard in the Newsroom. Unsurprisingly, it's a collection of "the best quotes overheard in the newsroom". So many of the quotes I can relate to: Rep...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Sep 10, 2009, 4:51 pm
An Indian restaurant near my office has closed down "due to unforeseen circumstances beyond our control and the current economic climate". That suggests to me that the owners of the restaurant either...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Sep 9, 2009, 2:18 pm
R Mason spotted this poorly written headline on the Times Online website: She writes: When I first read this, I wondered: why would a mission hold a journalist? Why would Gordon Brown give it orders...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Sep 8, 2009, 2:03 pm
Here's a Multimap screengrab I took today: Is it just me, or does this map make it look like (the) Wirral and England are two neighbouring places? You can find the town of England just east of th...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Sep 7, 2009, 4:15 pm
I've just started reading David Mitchell's novel Black Swan Green, and already I've found a passage I'd like to share. The voice is that of 13-year-old stammerer Jason Taylor: Most pe...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Sep 3, 2009, 4:33 pm
Sarah pointed out this recent Metro front cover to me: The lead headline reads: Cocaine deaths jump by a fifth The headline above the photo of the teenage girl reads: 'Angel' who died in he...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Sep 2, 2009, 1:07 pm
A couple of years ago, Apus wrote about one of our colleagues who had uncovered some interesting names while working on her family history: notably, Arthur and Walter Bottle. That same colleague has ...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Sep 1, 2009, 1:59 pm
Cooking instructions for a Morrisons 10" fresh vegetable pizza: Cooking appliances vary. These instructions are given only as a guide. Make sure that the food is piping hot throughout before serving...
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JD (The Engine Room) posted an article on The Engine Room - Aug 27, 2009, 11:01 am
Evidence from Twitter that GCSE exams are easy: Among Twitter's trending topics a few hours ago were GCSE, A's, B's and C's - but not D's and E's. Or it could be that there&#...
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