The back-story to this post is that I’m the secretary of the company that owns the freehold to my flat. In the UK, Companies House keeps records of all the companies in the UK. One of the documents they keep on file is called the Memorandum and Articles of Association. This ream of legalese describes what a company is allowed to do and how it should go about doing it.

I first saw this on Seth Godin’s blog and thought it was a good idea in principle:

This might be a useful exercise. Doesn’t matter whether it was a hit or not, it just matters that you shipped it. Shipping something that scares you (and a lot of what follows did) is the entire point.

It is, however, quite hard for people who don’t live life in public in the same way that Seth does. I’ve spent a lot of the year doing pre-sales work either with clients that don’t like being named or for deals that we lost (and therefore not something a lot of people would want publicised). And now, in my new job, one reading of my contract means that I can’t even send out press releases.

I didn’t think that I had blogged very much this year, but now that I look back over it seems that I’ve done quite well. There have only been a few PhotoFriday challenges that I’ve missed and I’ve managed a fair few travel and even the odd technical blog.

None of this years blogs have done especially well in terms of page impressions but here are a few that I liked for various reasons.

One common refrain after the BNP made an appearance on Question Time last year was that if only more people went out and voted then right-wing extremists would not get elected. Of course that’s not the whole story but there’s some truth in that. Since we will have a General Election this time next week this becomes a very important point.

This got me thinking about my experience with the British electoral system. As far as I can remember, I’ve voted in every election that I have been eligible except for those when I have not been at home. In fact I was in California in this last election when Griffin was elected to the European parliament.

People are impressed by the Academy Awards ceremony, all the glitz and glamour, the celebrities and the recognition for their work. However there are much easier ways to pick up your own Oscar statue.

I got a lot done and with the ninety minutes I saved by not commuting I went to the gym, but there are problems with working from home…

It’s that time of year where all the papers, magazines and websites devolve into the best of the year articles rather than actually generate new content. I didn’t want to feel left out so here’s my contribution.

Of course “best” can mean any number of different things, so I’m going to pick a few top fives.

Here are the most popular pages viewed this year:

1. Installing Oracle 10g Express Edition on CentOS 4
2. Professionalism
3. Oracle 8i for Linux Installation HOWTO
4. Minolta Dual Scan II
5. Review: Belkin Wi-Fi Phone

It continues to surprise me how popular the Oracle pages are. They are now very old products and the pages have not been updated for quite some time now.

Ever since I’ve been “into” Macs, Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference has been a draw. As an iPhone developer this years was especially interesting to me. Unfortunately it’s not a full time job to me so it was hard to justify the time off work or the expense of the ticket.

I was, however, in the Bay Area just before the event and managed to have a quick walk around Moscone. I felt a bit geeky taking pictures of a trade conference, but I wasn’t the only one doing so and I didn’t have my nose pressed against the glass unlike certain people!

If you’re a regular visitor you will note that the ZX81 has an exciting new look and feel. It has never looked more like a real ZX81. It’s also about as usable as a real ZX81, though it does have more memory available and the wobbly RAM pack is likely to be less of a concern.

I’m currently running it as a one day trial but may extend if popular. Please let me know what you think.

Apparently today is “Atheist Pride Day.” You are supposed to “change your Facebook profile picture to the [Out Campaign Logo] And change your status to something like ‘I am an atheist’ (or whatever).” I’m not on FaceBook so you’ll have to make do with this little post.

It turns out that the timing is quite good, too. Last night I went to a British Humanist Association talk by Daniel Dennett called “A Darwinian Perspective on Religions: Past, Present and Future.” It was chaired by Richard Dawkins. Here’s a fuzzy iPhone picture of the Q&A session at the end. (If only I’d brought my 50D!)