The BBC reports that 1 in 8 people have been ‘harassed by email’. But what is amusing about this story is the screenshot that shows an Inbox displaying emails originating from ‘support@microsoft.com’. Careful. Microsoft is a large, powerful American company. I wouldn’t be surprised if their lawyers are not initiating legal action as we speak. The story itself reminds me about of the old joke about sexual harassment in the workplace where the employee goes to complain to Human Resources about not getting any.

Yesterday, I stumbled across Newsvine which is a very impressive news aggregator. Until now, I didn’t much care for these type of sites. Digg left me a little cold with too many irrelevant, repeated articles (not to mention flame wars) and Slashdot hurt my eyes. I currently use My Yahoo! with various news feeds configured and was starting to experiment with a similar, personalized Google portal with feeds from Google News as an alternative. Newsvine is more focussed on news with feeds from Associated Press, tagging, watchlists, personalisation, discussions and your own news column (articles, links). The interface is well thought out, fast, easy to use and I quickly found myself exploring many different topics of interest. ...

I have been thinking (yes I do a lot of that) recently about managing my personal calendar more effectively. Ideally, I would like a simple Web based calendar that could also sync to my Palm. I don’t really like the Yahoo! Calendar that much even though it can sync with Outlook and the Palm. I simply don’t enjoy looking at the Yahoo! calendar. I just think the interface is ugly and there are distracting ads liberally scattered at the top of the screen. ...

I wanted to find UK related blogs written by people in the UK as most blog indexes and search engines naturally tend to be heavily weighted towards the US. Initially, I searched on Technorati for ‘UK’ tags. However, this included lots of photo blogs from tourists visiting London on whale watching holidays and UK ‘political’ news (yawn). Then I came across britblog.com which is an growing index of UK based blogs which includes blogs listed by region and category in addition to recently added and popular blogs. ...

Good news. A kind, thoughtful, considerate colleague noticed my unattended Palm and placed it in a locked drawer for safe keeping. Unusually, for such a kind, thoughtful and considerate person, he omitted to send me a note telling me. Bad news. I will be writing my own Christmas cards this year. The planned filming of the reconstruction next Wednesday, to be broadcast on this month’s edition of BBC Crimewatch, has now been cancelled. ...