Lovely

I promised a post about lovely things, so here we go (a certain amount of London-centricness follows, but I live in the best city in the world, so deal):

Wild Camping.

Pottery, in the traditional London style.

Maps, as above, so below.

A full list of archaelogy talks.

Tattoos.

Or just have a cup of brown joy.

Also - I'm having a party today (I just got married to an amazing person). @-me on Twitter if you're in London & want an invite.

And finally, as much as we need to dare beauty, it is worth remembering that by confronting trolls and meeting hatred with kindness, things like this can happen.

The world is getting better. If I have to do it single-handed, I will.

Once again, Still Not Dead

This is just an initial post to get myself started again.

Also, to let anyone who still keeps this blog on their feeds that I will hopefully be posting about broader topics from here on - not just about technology.

Partly this is because a lot of my technology writing is now on InfoQ. I also have a new publisher in the form of O'Reilly, and my new book, the 6th Edition of "Java in a Nutshell" is available in Early Access (and it's 50% off until the 9th of September from here).

This means that when I want to write about technology, I usually have other outlets.

However, I've discovered that I want to write about things other than pure tech. There may be opinion pieces where I talk about the intersection of tech with society, but I will probably be more likely to write about travel, food and drink, reviews and some pure opinion.

To that last point, I'm going to take a leaf out of Charles Stross's book and mention my moderation policy, which is very close to his.

For the avoidance of doubt, and as I am quite likely to stray into politics at some point, readers (especially American ones) ought to note that I am considered very left-wing by European standards, although my views on individual liberty are close to those of proper libertarians (not corporatist idiots pretending to be libertarians whilst calling the police on people who say things they disagree with), however I distrust corporations at least as much as I distrust governments and am given to musing on questions such as "Is the legal fiction of the limited liability company really a good thing for society?".

My posting a political piece is not an invitation to debate me if you disagree, and I may fail to post or delete any comments for any reason whatsoever, or none. This is my blog. If you want to talk about politics, get your own.

With all that said, I'm going to post this so I can clear the decks for an actual proper post about something lovely.