In the early days of the Internet, someone put forward a proposed new technical standard under the touchingly polite heading “Request for comments”. The label stuck, and all Internet standards are now RFC something-or-other. RFC5441, for example, is “A Backward-Recursive PCE-Based Computation (BRPC) Procedure to Compute Shortest Constrained Inter-Domain Traffic Engineering Label Switched Paths.” Wow!

I find it heart-warming that people with the brains to think up stuff like this should still be so diffident about their ideas. In a similar spirit I would like to offer up my own little website for your comments. Read all of this

I’ve just finished delivering 150 leaflets for our local residents’ association, inviting people to our next meeting. A simple enough task, but not without its hazards – and their accompanying insights. Read all of this

Sir Gus O’Donnell is the British government’s cabinet secretary. In other words, he’s a pretty top civil servant. His job is to make sure that ministers and their advisers uphold agreed values and codes of conduct.

So it’s a surprise to find him making a common mistake in a statement he issued about the recent ‘smearmail’ scandal that has engulfed Gordon Brown’s office. Read all of this

Boris Johnson, mop-headed sometime journalist and now Mayor of London, is always going on about Latin, quoting Virgil, Cicero and the like. It may just be because he went to Eton and had it beaten into him, but it’s more likely that he actually thinks it helps him make a point now and again. Read all of this

Style manuals often ignore the problem of length, offering little advice about making things shorter as well as clearer. But space, or the lack of it, is frequently the biggest problem that the writer has to deal with. Read all of this