This book was picked semi-randomly out of a second hand shop's three quid pile when in a rush to catch a train. The provocative title sounded interesting, and the author's name was vaguely familiar from Radio 4, so I was expecting something moderately entertaining and/or thought-provoking like Radio 4 output often is.

There is a saying that assumption is the mother of all cock-ups. Well, I really dropped a bollock here.

I knew John Hein through some rather entertaining Usenet posts over the years. I'd formed an image of a large red-haired Scotsman who lived in a Glasgow tenement and had a bizarre fasciation with trains and telephone systems. As it turns out, I was wrong: he lives in Edinburgh.

[This post was rescued from an SQL dump of my ancient Movable Type blog. There may be conversion errors and broken links.]

High Performance Web Sites is a book about tuning web sites to make them load faster. It presents fourteen rules to follow to make a web site load faster and is essentially a dead-tree version of the "Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site" page on the Yahoo! Developer Network. But now you've read the web site, do you need the book?

[This post was rescued from an SQL dump of my ancient Movable Type blog. There may be conversion errors and broken links.]

Egg Bacon Chips and Beans is a book inspired by Russell Davies' blog of the same name. The book, and the site, are dedicated to British cafes (aka a "greasy spoon") and the fry-ups therein.