Hearts 4 Dundee FC 0. A poor performance by the Dark Blues in Edinburgh. My report for the Dundee FC website. dundeefc.co.uk/match/heart-...

I loathe the Hearts press box. It is exposed to the rain and the view is terrible. Half the pitch is blocked by screens to try and keep the rain off electrical equipment. It is awful for a stand that is only seven years old

I've just noticed I sent a message in which, as an afterthought, I referred to a famous work by Richard Strauss. I actually typed 'Also Also Sprach Zarathustra...' without thinking it odd. 'Also' is one of the classic false friends for students learning German.

Falkirk 2 Dundee FC 1. The Dark Blues threw a point away at the end. They were short of their best but should have taken a point today. My report for the club website. dundeefc.co.uk/match/falkir...

Driving up the A846 on the Isle of Jura at sunrise. It's surely one of Scotland's most scenic 'highways'.

Populists live on simple answers and cheap applause. When those no longer work and they are confronted by unpopularity, they have nothing.

Aberdeen 4 Dundee FC 0. That was awful from the Dark Blues, who got what they deserved. My report for the club website. dundeefc.co.uk/match/aberde...

Is internal audit dead? No, but if it doesn't learn some important lessons (especially from the Post Office scandal) it might as well die. My blog. clarotesting.wordpress.com/2025/10/03/i...

I don't think I've ever seen a more stupid insult than "lanyard classes". Taken literally it means anyone with a job. In practice it just means "people I don't like".

I have watched his bit and the bit after Kuenssberg asks the question about 20 times and my ribs hurt. Janey, Janey, Janey, still making me laugh from beyond.

I love these old family photos I found. My newly married great-grandparents, Duncan & Florence Macpherson in the 1890s. My grandmother, Dorothy (Dolly) Macpherson, May 1920, at the Birks of Aberfeldy. That summer her boyfriend, my grandfather, left the army after joining up at the start of WW1. 1/3

St Mirren 1 Dundee FC 0. The Dark Blues can't do enough to save a tight game. My report for the club's website, which is awful to work with. The formatting is screwed up and won't recognise my HTML code to sort it. One is not amused.😒 dundeefc.co.uk/match/st-mir...

I'm reading the excellent "The Black Friar" by @shonamaclean.bsky.social. A character called Marchamont Nedham has been introduced as the Proctorate's "mouthpiece to the masses... he would write whatever it paid him most to write, regardless of any truth". From that description I immediately...1/2

Dundee FC 3 Livingston 2. I quite enjoyed that. Well, most of it anyway, and certainly the 97th minute.🙂 My report for the Dundee FC website. dundeefc.co.uk/match/living...

Dundee FC 1 Motherwell 1. Strange game. It was an awful first half from the Dark Blues but an ok(ish) second half, so we'll take the point. My report for the club website. dundeefc.co.uk/match/mother...

The chief executive's expression tells us what she thinks about kids taking over the council.

Reform UK's economic policies are incoherent; tax less, spend more on popular things, and reduce government debt. The figures are implausible, and I've got a letter in today's Dundee Courier pointing this out. For once the party helpfully revealed enough detail for us to see it's all nonsense. 1/2

Everything was rosy here in Pictland after we got rid of the Romans (with the help of our weather). Then immigrants arrived in boats from Ireland, rebranded themselves as Scots, and started acting like they owned the place. Scotland? Who are they kidding? Pictland for the Picts! Send the Scots home!

86 years ago the UK went to war. That afternoon my grandparents took their children for a walk. My grandfather told my father, who had just turned 16, "the only consolation is that you’re going to be too young for this one”. He was wrong. claro2.wordpress.com/2016/12/04/m...

The River Almond in Perth provided excellent sport for Labradors this morning. Enough of a current to be interesting. Not enough to be a problem.

To be clear, the extremist that Musk is supporting here wants to expel from the UK all British citizens who are not pure white, even if they were born here. Mixed-race citizens would be deported too. Does that mean Musk is supporting a neo-Nazi? You can decide.

When I saw references to this, from a former Conservative MP, I thought it might be a spoof. No. It is genuine. This sort of poison is entering the political mainstream now.

Dundee FC 0 Dundee United 2. The Dark Blues never got going and can't have any complaints. My report for the Dundee website. dundeefc.co.uk/match/dundee...

I've got a letter in today's Courier pointing out the ludicrous rewriting of history from a fan of the vile Clive of India. It's not 'woke' to argue that Clive was a villain. Calling him a hero simply reveals ignorance of history. He is no more admirable than Putin's thuggish military.

A whistleblower says that a former senior US government DOGE official now at the Social Security Administration copied the Social Security numbers, names and birthdays of over 300 million Americans to an insecure private section of the agency's cloud. 1/2 www.npr.org/2025/08/26/n...

The office on International Dog Day.

May I point out that it is never acceptable to write a date as DD/MM/YY (or MM/DD/YY if you're an eccentric from the far side of the Atlantic). It is always YYYY, even if you're only labelling food for the freezer. Yours authoritatively, a former Y2K Fix/Test Manager. (Some scars never heal.)

Kilmarnock 0 Dundee FC 0. Nothing special, but a solid, organised performance and a clean sheet on the road. Nothing much to moan about there. My report for the Dundee FC website. dundeefc.co.uk/match/kilmar...

This shows what a great view I had in the Ibrox press box. It's all the more entertaining because of the mass seething from the posh seats behind us when Rangers are toiling. Maybe it wasn't diplomatic to wear a green jacket, but I think I got away with it. Btw - it should never have been a penalty.

Rangers 1 Dundee FC 1. Rangers are happy to get a (barely deserved) point against the impressive Dark Blues. My report for the Dundee website. dundeefc.co.uk/match/ranger...

This captures nicely the scepticism many people in IT have about the enthusiasm for adopting AI.

I let a goat from my local zoo run SQL commands against prod without protection and it nuked my data The comments: have you tried this other much smarter goat

Dundee FC 5 Montrose 0. Aye, well that was better. Almost ok at times. But there's still plenty of room for improvement, despite the happy scoreline. My report for the Dundee website. dundeefc.co.uk/match/montro...

Off to the football. Another game without VAR! Ya beauty. The VAR pain starts next week. :-(

Want to know how to make your Labrador love you even more? Roll up from the football at midnight and hand over the last few chips you've saved from your fish supper. The lad is clearly devoted to me this morning.

I love this photo of my parents, the couple on the right. It's February 1967 according to the note on the back, in London. I've no idea what's going on. An audience participation showing of "My Fair Lady"? A recording of "The Good Old Days"? I think my father's a couple of drinks behind the others.

My wife was working at a children's holiday club today. She was teaching the kids to identify wild flowers growing round the church. She was introduced as "an expert who studied plants at Cambridge University". My wife couldn't hold back. "Oxford, not Cambridge". Some things really, really matter.

The excitement mounts at the most famous hedge in world football.

I doubt if a foreign student using the same antisemitic term on social media would get away with pleading in defence that they were pig-ignorant. They would be on their way home. www.forbes.com/sites/alison...

I'm not convinced by this. This part of Lanarkshire isn't typical of Scotland. In some ways it was the ideal Scottish constituency for Reform, and they could still get only 3rd place. There are many voters in that constituency who love populist British nationalism. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I love this photo of our Labrador in our garden.

My wife has handled the bookings for our upcoming holiday. Somehow she has ended up with priority boarding and I'm with the peasantry at the back of the queue. She is mystified as to how this happened, but her lack of distress leaves me wondering if I am now an economy measure.

Kilmarnock 3 Dundee FC 2. Much the same as last week. Dundee can't defend and VAR only seems to create confusion. My report for the Dundee website. dundeefc.co.uk/match/kilmar...

I can't wait to get started on this, "I can's stop thinking about VAR" by Daisy Christodoulou. It explores some aspects of VAR that infuriate me.

My brother in law is a fisheries biologist in Wester Ross. He can walk to the office. This is his daily commute.

80 years ago today. 1st Airlanding Light Regiment, Royal Artillery, liberated Stavanger in Norway. The local paper interviewed my father about it before he returned with my mother for the 50th anniversary. claro2.wordpress.com/2020/05/04/p...

I created the very final version of a spreadsheet with a file name ending ".... v16 (this is the one)". Nobody spotted the Stones Roses reference. Deeply disappointing.

Hearts 0 Dundee FC 1. That was exactly the sort of performance that the Dark Blues badly needed. My report for the club website. 🙂 dundeefc.co.uk/match/heart-...

This BBC story is relevant to the talk I gave in Edinburgh on Thursday. PFI was a totally inappropriate way to write contracts for developing systems like Horizon, and Fujitsu exploited the problems with the format. #PostOfficeScandal www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

From a Scottish friend into folk music: