Virtually every photographer in London seems to shoot the redesigned Great Courtyard in the British Museum, but that didn’t stop me either.

Others soon weighed in with even more fine shots.

A bit old, but this Guardian business article is a good summary of the problems facing WH Smiths and by extension, many other long-standing-high-street-names-who-aren’t-Tesco.

…Not only an archtypal seaside pic, but also the November winner of the Nikonians B&W contest! I’d like to acknowledge the untiring efforts of the people of Saltburn-on-Sea, who must have to look at that view all the time.

I’ve more or less ceased posting images in the Nikonians picture forums. All the recent ones have gone up in my gallery.

Julian Baggini pleads for some degree of civility, advice which would make Manchester at least the tiniest bit more bearable (e.g. on the tram).

(Also worth reading his books, or checking out his other pieces. Alternatively, you could just go to the source.)

Some concise tips for successful bidding on eBay, to help you avoid winning a secondhand broken toilet brush that cost £500 and wasn’t even shipped before the seller disappeared with your money.

This Slashdot posting neatly summarises one of the main shortcomings of “CSI: Miami”, although it fails to mention the David Caruso school of acting (remove shades; look around and narrow eyes as 500 megawatts of Florida sunshine burns through your retinas; replace shades; repeat in every scene), the overly-solicitous pathologist who tries to bond with every corpse and the ballistics expert who probably couldn’t say “calibre” without making it sound like the next move at the local square dance.

BB looks forward to the day when racism is successfully eradicated from football, since that implies a lot less football players, managers and above all fans, thus reducing the game to a minority sport, at which point the government can ban it for causing cancer or something. But the behaviour of the Spanish fans at last night’s match was shocking, simply shocking. OK, we might have the odd racist amongst the English fanbase but at least they’re our racists and not some bunch of greasy, castanata-clicking dagos foreigners!

In case you still use IE (and you’ve been living in a cave for the last year, which seems a likely combination of circumstances), why not get Firefox before you experience one of those “I’ll get me coat” moments in polite company? It’s only a 5Mb download. It’s faster than IE, has more features (e.g. tabbing), doesn’t carry a huge “Hack me” sign, highlights bullshit in huge orange letters and … it’s extensible … extendable … expandable. Whichever.

Much as a death is always a sad occasion (sniff), BB is looking forward to hearing “Teenage Kicks” by the Undertones again (and again, and again…), just to remind ourselves how much we hated John Peel’s latterly eclectic but uniformly dire taste in music.

Of course, we don’t get to make gratuitously snide remarks about it while supposedly presenting the Glastonbury festival. So we’ll settle for doing it here. Rather like an Egyptian king, it would be nice to think of Morrissey and co. being buried alongside him. He’d like that. So would we.

I’d only tangentially heard of the sinister “Out Of Memory Killer” in the 2.6 Linux kernel series, until a few nights ago when my system experienced its devastating efficiency.

It turns out that, as well as a mechanism for killing “random” processes when the system runs out of memory (remember: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature), 2.6.8 also has a gaping memory leak triggered while burning audio CDs. This is not a happy combination, even when the price of blank CD-Rs is negligible.