Thanks to Jeff Hunter kindly updating the link on his blogroll, this blog has awoken from a period of slumber. Day 201. Technorati Rank: 187,013 (28 links from 15 sites) Don’t ask me why 3 links and 3 sites have been added (instead of 1) since the last update. Who am I to question the inner workings of Technorati ? However, /Message is currently positioned at an impressive 4,586 (514 links from 269 sites) and Stowe Boyd’s beaming face and black beret continue to taunt me so the struggle must go on.

I spurned my first few invitations to linkedin.com as I already get plenty of spam email. However, I finally succumbed but now I am very fearful that someone, someday will receive the following endorsement from me so please, please don’t ever connect to my network. “Simply the best technical consultant, called Norman, who lives in Inverness, I have ever had the pleasure of working with. Mr. N. Brightside has an awesome and exceptional knowledge of PowerPoint internals. Definitely a member of my A-Team. PS. Always stands his round too which is also important.” ...

One of the candidates on BBC2’s ‘The Apprentice’ is a ‘management consultant’. He was very keen and virtually begged to be allowed to do the sales pitch on this week’s show. ‘Please, let me do the pitch. This is what I do. I am world class. There is no-one better.’ And then, in his sharp suit and with his short haircut, he opened his stilted, stuttering, unrehearsed, nerve-ridden pitch to various hard nosed businessmen (about a charity calendar for Great Ormond Street Hospital) with the immortal words. ...

I’d just like to say that my Palm Vx repaid me today for a small element of all the valuable time it has wasted in the past. A recent change in circumstance meant some changes to my email environment. Easy enough to resolve. Synchronise old environment with Palm. Switch into new environment. Reconfigure Outlook profile. Synchronise. Contacts, Tasks, Calendar and Notes all migrated seamlessly. Finished. Well, I’d like to but I can’t.

Lorelle is getting a little vexed about the the precise semantics and usage of tags and categories. I must confess this isn’t a subject that keeps me awake at night although I do agree that the WordPress category list tends to get a little verbose with all those pesky tags. However, due to circumstances outside my control, I have just had to endure some pain and wasted time converting Outlook Tasks and Contacts to use a flat structure with ‘Categories’ (rather than my previous folder structure Contacts-Personal, Contacts-Work etc etc). Forgive me, Father. I do not know what I was thinking of. ...