‘Dad - please can I have 5 pounds ?’ ‘If I were to give you the 5 pounds, what exactly would you spend the money on ?’ ‘I’m going into town to buy Emma a CD for her birthday.’ ‘…but surely 5 pounds won’t be enough.’ ‘Well Mum gave me 15 pounds but I can get the CD for 8 pounds from Tesco’ ‘Oh I see. Now you’ve got me interested. You have already secured seed funding from an angel investor. Net margin close to 100%. What will your turnover be in years 2 and 3 ?’ ...

[With apologies to Cabaret Voltaire] I want to synchronise my Thunderbird address book between work and home and my Palm Vx. I also want to synchronise Google Calendar with Sunbird and my aging Palm. This is for two reasons; to synchronise and simultaneously back the data up. I feel nervous and exposed, like an Oracle DBA relying on nightly exports. One option was to repeatedly export/import the data between applications but that is far too time consuming and I am lazy. ...

What’s going on ‘ere, then ? Woof.

I briefly used Box.net as a virtual 1GB memory stick. Briefly because after the initial transfer of important files, the onus was on me to identify files I had changed recently and upload them. Mozy seems better suited to lazy people. You simply download a lightweight client, identify folders you want mirrored and Mozy encrypts and mirrors them, quietly in the background. When you add new files, Mozy mirrors the incremental changes. Mozy offers 2GB of storage for free. ...

Thankfully, I don’t have cause to use Microsoft Excel much. My kids can produce pretty charts about the demographics of pet ownership in the classroom better and quicker than I can. Excel is a very powerful product but the sheer size and complexity of the software is just overwhelming which makes it difficult (for novices) to accomplish straightforward tasks. For example, people are kind enough to send me gargantuan, complex spreadsheets where I want to freeze the header row while scrolling data down to the sole point of interest on row 23,538. A seemingly simple task. ...