kierenmccarthy.co.uk

Just received this from my Mum of all people. A good British gag:

“I live on the edge of the county of Berkshire in England.

“There is a huge council house in our street. The extended family is run by a grumpy old woman with a pack of fierce dogs. Her car isn’t taxed or insured and doesn’t even have a number plate, but the police still do nothing.

“Her bad-tempered old husband is of foreign descent but is still notorious for making racist comments. A shopkeeper blames him for ordering the murder of his son and his son’s girlfriend, but nothing has yet been proved.

“All their kids have broken marriages except the youngest, who everyone thought was gay, and two of their grandsons are meant to be in the Army but spend most of their time partying in nightclubs. They are totally out of control.

“God, how I hate living near Windsor Castle. “

A few weeks ago, Sapna and I had some engagement photos taken around the Embarcadero in San Francisco, by our wedding photographer, Peter Kwan. You can see them in a slide show below or by following this link.

I got married to Sapna this morning at Santa Ana Courthouse. I’m pretty happy about that. We do have a much bigger and fancier wedding planned for 3 April next year but since I’m leaving my job at ICANN, and since we really didn’t want to spend alot of time apart, we decided we needed to get married earlier so we can go through the American visa system with the minimum of mishap.

Anyway, it was sort-of the perfect wedding – small, simple, relaxed. Just a shame my family couldn’t make it – although we did have my mum and dad on the phone at the lecturn. So for anyone interested, here are snaps of the day, followed by a lunch and little ceremony we had at Sapna’s aunt’s house nearby. And below that is a video of the civil ceremony itself.

And here’s a video of the civil ceremony.

So I’ve finally updated the software that this blog uses – Wordpress – from 2.0.1 to 2.8.4 – which will mean nothing to most of you but cause others to wonder what the hell I’ve been up to.

I’ve also tidied up the page and fix a range of bugs so the site is clean and ready for some new posts. I’m still undecided how exactly to split up my two main blogs – kierenmccarthy.co.uk and kierenmccarthy.com. Or whether to just point them to the same place.

I’m tempted to make this (.co.uk) my personal blog and the dot-com site my professional face. But then I’m not sure I’d stick with that separation for very long and would find work posts here and personal posts on the dot-com site. Blogs sort-of dare you to be more personal.

Ah well, we shall see.

It seems that the Internet is catching on with the most powerful men in the world. Both the Pope and the new US president Barack Obama have this week announced new web strategies and told anyone that would listen how much they love this Internet.

The conversion is hardly surprising – both men derive most of their enormous power from being able to communicate directly to millions. And if there’s one thing the Internet does well, it is mass communication. Here the question though: who loves the Internet more – Obama or the Pope?

Let’s find out in a head-to-head competition…

Continue reading ‘Who loves the Internet more: Obama or the Pope?’

Yet another extraordinary statement has come out of Nominet – the .uk registry owner – today. This time, the chairman Bob Gilbert lambasts a “number of false allegations” made in a resignation letter from former director Jim Davies.

The letter was posted on the Nominet members’ private mailing list, nom-steer, and contains “sensitive and confidential board and HR matters”.

In it, Davies provides details of an executive compensation package through which he accuses the CEO of unfairly profiting from the non-profit organization, and also alleges that the previous head of IT was kicked out the company for raising a concern about the CEO’s behaviour.

This is just the latest broadside in a war that has been raging at the heart of Nominet for almost a year.

Continue reading ‘Nominet Board fight rolls on’

Singer Jennifer Lopez has filed papers against the owner of jenniferlopez.org and jenniferlopez.net, accusing him of cybersquatting.

The two sites are owned by one Jeremiah Tieman who lives in Arizona and uses the sites to display news, pictures and videos of and about the singer and includes a disclaimer at the bottom stating that the sites are fan sites and are not endorsed by Lopez. However, both sites also include prominent ads and links through to affiliate sites.

Case D2009-0057 was filed last week with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) by Lopez’s charitable foundation – which support women and children on low incomes – rather than her hard-hitting IP lawyers Fross, Zelnick, Lehrman and Zissu who are the registered owners of Lopez’s dotcom website.

Continue reading ‘Jennifer Lopez fights cybersquatting case’

One of the bizarre but wonderful things about living in Los Angeles is that when all your friends are freezing cold or trapped under the snow in January, you get to walk in the sun and witness the most extraordinary sunsets.

Last night I saw the makings of an extraordinary sunset and jumped on my bike to Venice to get some snaps. Here’s one and under that, a Flickr feed of the rest:

Continue reading ‘Sunset in Venice’

There’s nothing like a big event to get people thinking, particularly when that event is the inauguration of a president who brings with him the hopes and dreams of a generation.

Barack Obama will be sworn in as 44th President of the United States in nine days on Tuesday 20th January. There are also a range of events in the weekend leading up to it and on the Monday before – Martin Luther King Day – and all that has got people’s online minds whirring.

Here’s a quick rundown of the best spots on the Net about the inauguration and inspired by the inauguration:

Continue reading Net marvels: the Obama Inauguration

It may be worth declaring a conflict of interest straight off: I can’t stand David Frost.

As a child, he instilled a strange kind of lonely hatred on Through the Keyhole – a formulaic game show in which the preening host would constantly insert amusing anecdotes about some famous person he had interviewed decades earlier.

And as an adult, embarrassment turned to frustration as politician after politician was given an easy ride on Breakfast with Frost – the BBC Sunday morning current affairs show that was finally booted off air in 2005 (but not before 12 years of instantly forgettable and, in some cases, depressingly bad interviews).

But these shows are minor manifestations of the two things that David Frost has been doing with extraordinary consistency for the past 40 years: interviewing people and annoying people.

Continue reading ‘Frost/Nixon: Film review’