Ruth Stalker-Firth

(The Great Fire of London map at the British Library website)

In the 1530s when Henry VIII realised that dissolving the monastries would get him much needed assets, he commissioned a map of London, paying particular attention to ‘lawless’ Southwark. He wanted to see if the borough had any money he could take off them. Henry VIII was a smart man, he knew that the right sorts of information bring wealth and power.

I saw the resulting map last year at the British Library exhibition London: A Life in Maps along with many others - maps of wills and estates, Victorian cab fare maps, cycling maps and tourist maps. Each map was primarily motivated by the need to learn more about an area of London in order to make or save money, especially when making your way around the ever growing London.

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Normally, I have violent fantasies about the things I would like to say when on the telephone with the Inland Revenue. Yesterday I didn’t say a word when interacting with them as I filed my self-assessment online. (more…)

At: http://www.chami.com/html-kit/services/favicon/ they offer a service to upload any picture and get it turned into a favicon that you can put in the header of your page. Last time I created a favicon it took me a good while longer. I followed the tutorial http://photomatt.net/2003/11/13/how-to-create-a-favicon/ which was good but it did take me longer than the two minutes I spent today on choosing a suitable picture before uploading it to chami.com. Perhaps my attention span is getting smaller as I get older.

I have kept an electronic diary for three years now. I upgraded my handwritten diary back in 2003 and have never missed pen on paper. Yes, searching your own diary is geeky but I like it. It is something I do much more often than I thought I would. It is much quicker to have a search engine go through your words rather than flicking through pages of handwritten stuff. (more…)