I have an increasing tendency to skim all my RSS feeds in Netvibes just to finish reading them as quickly as possible and not really reading (or enjoying) the content. My therapist recommended some diversion therapy; install the Gregarius aggregator locally on my PC, import my OPML and experiment with Dave Winer’s controversial ' River of News’ concept. Now my previous experiments with Joomla and subsequently WordPress and Drupal have been made incredibly easy by Wamp (a packaged distribution of mySQL, PHP and Apache). ...

Richard Hammond, the 36 year old presenter of Top Gear and Brainiac, is critically ill in a Leeds neurosurgery unit with serious injuries after crashing at over 200 mph in a high-speed jet powered car, Vampire. Let’s hope he pulls through.

Rakesh Agrawal presents an interesting summary of a talk by Carl Sjogreen describing Google’s approach to the software development process. Google Calendar was a relatively small project (3 engineers, 1 product manager). Google talk to real users (‘Grandma in NYC’) not techy geeks to find what users really want. Google ’eat their own dog food’. Lots of internal testing prior to public launch. Gap in the market. Lots of calendar products out there but none do what people want. Typical Google opportunity. Paper based calendars are the real competition.

And just this once, not mine. When you take out a Self Invested Pension Plan (SIPP), most SIPP schemes are unable to accept Protected Rights. Imagine my surprise, then, when Sippdeal contact me asking for authorisation to make a payment from my SIPP to Equitable Life in respect of a refund of Protected Rights payments that the Government are requesting, in turn, from Equitable Life. Equitable Life claim this refund is now very urgent because the original request was made in January 2006 and no response has been received. ...

Yesterday I had a pretty bad day. I got up early and drove to Chesterfield. Unfortunately, the performance environment was not available as originally planned (overrunning weekend engineering works) so I simply collected some data and drove back to London. Still, it could have been worse. The original plan had me staying overnight in a hotel in Chesterfield. Although this unexpected change of plan was inconvenient and tiring, it still wasn’t as terrible as this gentleman’s bad day ...