I’ve been on holiday and I’m catching up on my feeds.  Here are some interesting tidbits from the holidays:

• Privacy state of the planet. It looks like the UK has the same dismal level of privacy as Russia, China and that other bastion of civil liberties, the USA. Link. (Hat tip: Boing Boing.)

  
  Map of privacy. Black represents "endemic surveillance society"

• The war on terror is over. The Daily Mail reports that the Director of Public Prosecutions has signaled a change in UK government policy to the ‘war on terror’. Here’s the quote.
  
  

  "The people who were murdered on July 7 were not the victims of war. The men who killed them were not soldiers," Macdonald said. "They were fantasists, narcissists, murderers and criminals and need to be responded to in that way."

  Link. (Hat tip, again, to Boing Boing.)

  I wrote about the vacuity and limitations of the phrase "war on terror" (and other bogus wars, such as the wars on drugs and cancer) back in April and there was an interesting discussion in the comments. 

• Get all my copy proofread. I admire Andy Bosselman’s new year’s resolution to get all his copy proofread. I regularly get comments from kindly readers telling me about typos and mistakes in my blog. As long-time sufferers of Bad Language will know, I don’t proofread my blog very carefully.  Mainly because I write it at damn-it’s-early o’clock and I don’t make any money from it so I can’t justify a proofreader.  However, I do use a proofreader for my paid-for, corporate work. In fact, it’s essential. I use a couple of people: Sarah Bee (who now has a staff job and less time for proofreading) and Caroline Blood.  You may also like to read my interview with Sarah about proofreading.
• What’s the right font? Ken Adams’ blog is not regular reading for me. It’s about contract drafting. However, I picked up a link to a page about typefaces on it from Lynn Gaertner-Johnston’s blog. It’s fascinating and very, very relevant for anyone who works with documents.  After much thought and analysis, he now uses Calibri.  Without much thought and analysis, I switched over to Calibri about six months ago.  It just felt better to me and the new Office 2007 templates that use look cool.  (Full disclosure: Microsoft is a client and I write about Office for them. But hey, it’s still true.)

  The relevant stat is that reading ClearType was, on average, slightly more than 5 percent faster than reading without it.  Bingo a free productivity boost.

• New Year’s resolutions. Once again, it’s time to dig out that link to Joe’s Goals. Every year, I write out a sort of ‘Project Matthew’ plan for the new year.  Looking back over the past few years, it’s gotten shorter and shorter.  It’s now less than a page.  Mostly, I’ve deleted a lot of the vague ‘nice to have’ goals like ‘write a novel’ and reduced it to a handful of business and personal objectives. The biggest change, though, is that I have condensed most of it into a short list of daily habits that I want to reinforce.  It seems to me that I can do more in a year if I make a daily effort.  This thought occurred to me when I realised that brushing my teeth is supposed to take four minutes a day. Over a year, this adds up to 24 hours.  Wow!  A little effort, regularly repeated, adds up to a lot of work.