Remember when I blogged about the stupidity of anti-rhetoric rhetoric?

The BBC is currently considering axing three of its regional news services. The local “opt-outs” for Oxfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Jersey (plus surrounding areas) may be closed as part of the BBC’s money-saving drive, misleadingly branded “Delivering Quality First”. This blog post was written to answer some of the more common questions about the proposals.

It was Shrove Tuesday 2010 and my Christian friend was mentally preparing for her Lent fast. Well, I say “mentally”, but I suppose having a nice lunch counts as physically preparing too. As we ordered dessert, we ended up having a silly debate about how much weight she would lose by going vegan and giving up sweet things. We decided to solve the argument the scientific way by weighing her before and after Lent, so we went to use the scales at Boots.

I popped into the Witney branch of Robert Dyas today. Yeah, maybe I am a glutton for punishment. I found the can of WD40 I was looking for within minutes, so this isn’t another thrilling tale about my epic search for something-or-other.

The internet has been full of people disagreeing with each other for as long as I’ve been aware of its existence. But one particular category of comment has been annoying me more than usual lately, and perhaps this is the best place to explain why. It’s this:

“You talk all you like, but I prefer action.”
"Why don't you ditch the rhetoric and actually do something?"
"Feel free to keep whining, but I'd rather get on with things."

“What we do matters. That’s a point I never thought we’d have to make.” Anna Wagstaff opened the Quality in Publishing summit with a snapshot of the current situation in academic publishing: cost-cutting and outsourcing leading to a decline in quality.

Attempts to harmonize easily strand when considering population environmental banks to harmonize with disease-oriented/clinical banks.

Make sense? Thought not. But that sentence was taken from a medical journal with subscription costs of nearly €900 a year, a journal covering important developments in European medical research.

You probably didn’t realise it, but today is International Dyscalculia Day. You may not be sure what dyscalculia is; well, that’s the whole point of having a day about it. Dyscalculia Day is a grassroots effort organised by ordinary dyscalculia sufferers to raise awareness of this learning disability.

It was standing room only at Oxford Town Hall last week as around 300 people came to show their opposition to library cuts and talk about how we can fight the closures.

Stephanie Kitchen gave examples of people who have found life-enhancing support from libraries, including one woman who described the library as a “lifeline in my search for a job”.

In my post about the Travelodge website I got angry about a webform that wouldn’t let me press the Submit button. This post is about what can go wrong after you press Submit.

Today I needed to contact Nokia about a problem with the battery on my mobile phone. I didn’t fancy getting lost in an automatic phone system, so I decided to send an email to kick things off. So I clicked the link saying “Contact Nokia via email”.