I made a nice loaf of bread at the weekend called a “Pain de Campagne”. It is a rustic country bread which improves with age and can be eaten for up to a week after baking. The recipe I used I obtained from Ken Forkish’s book, “Flour Water Salt Yeast”. Ken Forkish left a corporate […]
When I made a chatbot (Watson) for my websites with the IBM Watson Assistant programme in November 2018 I was stunned as to how intelligent it was, and the potential it offered. I was also stunned by the reaction from some humans. Let me explain. Watson’s intelligence is founded upon Natural Language Processing which is […]
I traveled out from my office yesterday, with my trusty secretary, to witness the signing of wills for a couple who are cocooning at home as a result of the Covid 19 pandemic. And it was a surreal experience, one I never imagined I would witness. We drove through the entrance to the property at […]
I read an update on LinkedIn the other day from a small business owner who has evidently embraced video marketing as part of her marketing strategy. This is a first, crucially important step which I am repeatedly banging on about and encouraging on this blog, on my YouTube channel, on my Instagram, and anywhere else […]
For the last five years or thereabouts most of my leisure reading has been reading books that are known as “classics”. How you might define a classic book or what distinguishing feature allows you to say with confidence, “that’s a classic book” I simply do not know. I am sure if I searched online and […]
Imagine being a publican at the moment. Imagine you are in a sparsely populated rural area and there is a couple of generations of the same family working in, and trying to extract a living from, a pub. Things are tough enough to begin with, especially since the drink driving laws have tightened up in […]
I was busy at the weekend-baking. In this post I will review what I baked, what worked, what didn’t work. Firstly, though, where do I get the recipes? I have been baking for about 12-18 months now, I believe, and am beginning to become more ambitious and broaden my horizons with different recipes. I received […]
I am listening to the audiobook “The Return of the Native” by Thomas Hardy at the moment. It is narrated by Alan Rickman who has a wonderful voice, so rich and velvety and authoritative. On starting the book, however, I was taken aback with the level of detail of the physical location of the narrative […]
J. Alfred Prufrock may have measured out his life in coffee spoons. I have measured out mine in championships. Gaelic football and hurling championships, to be specific. And the most appalling vista is looming large in my mind-that is, that there will be no championship this year as a consequence of the coronavirus/covid-19 catastrophe. I […]
I have this old, brown leather case or document bag. Calling it a briefcase would probably be stretching the definition of briefcase at this point in its life, but it probably started out life once as a briefcase. When I qualified as a solicitor a few years ago I started out trying to get clients-criminal […]