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When you turn to the light and start to fully embrace the River of News, the sickening realisation slowly dawns that you might actually have been mistaken and partial feeds may just have some redeeming features while full feeds are indeed the work of the devil.

Full feeds potentially interrupt the flow of the river. The title alone isn't enough to determine whether the article merits further consideration. Expanding the article should give you just enough to determine whether you want to read the full text.

This effect is spoiled by the lengthy verbosity of the full text feed for articles you are not interested in whatsoever.

The ideal compromise would be a 2 line precis of the article but Peter Scott is the only blogger in the universe who is thoughtful enough to do this.

BBC2 Friday night. A repeat but memorable for some great footage, interviews and these two quotes from Mark E. Smith

John Walters wrote me a letter and said, you know, 'you are the worst group I've ever seen in the [laughs] in the history of mankind' [laughs]. He was good like that, John Walters was. You ever meet him?

No, he was f**king fantastic. He said, 'you were the worst, tuneless, rubbish I've ever heard', you know, 'even worse than Siouxsie and the Banshees'. This is what he wrote 'you're even worse than Siouxsie and the Banshees. I didn't believe it was possible.' You know what I mean? [laughs] He was a gem, what a gem. He said, 'please do a session' [laughs].

All the group stayed up to watch the Old Grey Whistle Test. Not that I would, personally but you couldn't see the group, that was the funniest bit. They stayed up to watch it with all their parents [cackles]. And all you could see was like Michael Clark baring his arse on the f**king screen, you know. F**king great. It was dead funny.

Google recently announced some enhancements to the Notebook and I must admit that, while the concept left me cold initially, I am now starting to make more use of this software.

While I use Blinklist for shared (more permanent) bookmarks, I tend to use Google Notebook for snippets, jottings, interesting links and, err, notes that I may need to access from both home and work (in fact potentially from any computer).

For example, yesterday I had a query about my online tax return and was forced to call the pension administrator followed by the Inland Revenue and jotted down answers to my questions.

Previously, I might have emailed myself the notes from work to home so I then could write a followup letter. This would mean the information was accessible from work (Sent) and home (Inbox) but having it available on a Google server is preferable and less typing.

I used to keep draft blog postings in WordPress but didn't like the drafts cluttering up the dashboard so now these random thoughts also get stored in Google Notebook.

Obviously, all of my notebooks are private but there is some interesting information out there lurking in shared notebooks that isn't accessible from conventional sources.

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).

And so it proved again. A mere 7 minutes to get Gregarius working. A further 29 minutes to fail to work out why Netvibes has chosen to resurrect and export some dear, dead departed feeds (with Japanese writing) from beyond the grave.

Gregarius has the conventional two pane (feed-article) view and you can quickly review all articles from all blogs in reverse date order. You can then choose to expand any articles of particular interest.

Of course, for the full cascading river effect, I had to collapse the feeds and remove all tags, folders and categories to simply let all feeds flow as one raging torrent. There are no Oracle blogs anymore. You are all fighting for a place on the raft.

The default Gregarius theme is a little monochrome for my liking or maybe that is the default 'Newspaper' view (black and white and read all over) but there are other themes available to liven up the RSS experience.

So now I am no longer skimming my 81 feeds but blissfully wallowing in this river of news.

All of this excitement is almost enough to encourage me to investigate pricing (again) for hosted PHP/mySQL providers so I can read the same feeds from multiple computers.

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 Googles 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.

I ask Sippdeal why they didn't forward this original letter from Equitable Life to me in January. The answer was simple. Sippdeal did not receive any such letter from Equitable Life in January 2006. Sippdeal are efficient. Sippdeal communicate via email. Sippdeal send me copies of correspondence from Equitable scanned into a PDF. Sippdeal answer my emails promptly. Sippdeal are well informed and helpful.

So I contact Equitable Life directly and ask them why a refund of protected rights contributions is required from a SIPP that was legally unable to receive any protected right contributions.

Inevitably, after a lengthy delay and some 'research', it transpires the letter (both of them in fact) were sent to Sippdeal 'by mistake' and should have been sent to my other pension provider.

I'm not sure whether my decision to consolidate all my pension plans into a SIPP was the correct one and whether my SIPP funds will outperform the fund managers in grey suits.

However, for the pleasure of not having to deal with Equitable Life any longer (apart from the rare interruption caused by their unbelievable incompetence), I'm prepared to take my chances.

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

I'm still here. I've been in hospital after accidentally locking myself in one of my beehouses. I was stung so much that I have given up beekeeping as a pursuit.

I am certain he has made the correct decision in giving up beekeeping. Maybe he should now study 'How to unlock a door - quickly !'

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 ?'

'Oh just forget it. I'll use some of my babysitting money.'

[In a amazing development, the entrepreneur reveals she has a second business which she hasn't even disclosed]

'What babysitting money ?'

'I got 20 pounds for babysitting for the Barnstormworths last Saturday night'

'Why the Barnstormworths ?'

'Well they pay the most and I always babysit when Mrs Barnstormworth is driving'

'What do you mean ?'

'Well - it's 3.75 pound an hour but if Mr Barnstormworth has been drinking, he can't do the sums for quarters of an hour so he just rounds up to 5 pound an hour.'

'Any plans to grow the business ?'

'Well Mum said next year, I could babysit in mid-week if my homework was finished and after midnight the rate doubles'.

'OK. Let me tell you where I stand...'

'Dad - please can I just have 5 pounds or I'll miss the bus ?'

'I like the sound of the business model but the valuation is simply ridiculous so I am prepared to make you an offer of 4 pounds for 10% equity in the CD racketeering business and 40% equity in the babysitting company. '

[After this astounding and unexpected turnaround, this young person looks to have secured the funding]

'However there is one important fact that you have completely overlooked a fatal flaw...'

'What's that, Dad ?'

'You won't have any time for babysitting as you'll be staying in looking after Norman Junior while me and your mum go out and enjoy ourselves. This service will be completely free of charge. Therefore, I am withdrawing my offer. You didn't pitch well. You don't have a viable business plan. You don't know anything about

CRM.

You're young and inexperienced. You don't listen to advice. So that's it. I'm not interested in working with you and I'm certainly not interested in investing so I'm out.'

'Mum - can I have 5 pounds ?'

[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.

I noted with interest, Matt's recent experiences with Plaxo but decided that the name sounded too much like Sage & Onion stuffing. Also, the Plaxo Thunderbird plug-in doesn't currently support multiple address books.

Then I happened across EngTech's superb blog and this excellent article which describes how to use ScheduleWorld as a synchronisation hub (using SyncML) to synchronise anything to anything in any direction and put an end to all human suffering (well almost).

I signed up for a free ScheduleWorld account (the login page looks strangely reminiscent of Google) and successfully synchronised ScheduleWorld with Google Calendar.

Then I downloaded the Calendar Sync4j extension for Thunderbird 1.5 and synchronised an appointment ('MUFC v Celtic') from the Thunderbird Calendar to ScheduleWorld onto Google (and all the way back again).

The I remembered what I was actually supposed to be doing and configured Thunderbird to access the ScheduleWorld LDAP server. This worked once I read the documentation properly and used the numeric ID (instead of the email account).

This is not truly synchronisation in the old sense of propreitary conduits and commercial products. This is purely storing data on a server with an open, standard (LDAP) interface manipulated using various client applications to perform, err, synchronisation.

Now Thunderbird could retrieve contact details from ScheduleWorld. Unfortunately, Thunderbird currently has no SyncML support embedded so Thunderbird is unable to modify the address book. However, I was able to export addreses to LDIF format, import to the ScheduleWorld server and manage (clean) the data using the ScheduleWorld Web interface.

ScheduleWorld doesn't currently support bisexual bi-directional synchronisation with Gmail contacts which would be the 'killer app' and the icing on the cake but if/when the Google API allows it, even this may be possible.

The only disadvantages in this blissful state of nirvana is the fact that the Palm is now an legacy application, an islolated silo and I will erase the entire contents of my Palm address book. Consequently, I will forget to send Great Auntie Agatha a Christmas card including my traditional round-up of the year together with a delightful family photograph.

This is because Great Auntie Agatha doesn't have an email address and her details solely resided on the Palm. Great Auntie Agatha will then pass away peacefully in her sleep next May. All my relatives will be rich beyond their wildest dreams while I will receive absolutely nothing after this Christmas card debacle.

I will then be forced to pursue legal action against 'EngTech' and the brilliant author of 'ScheduleWorld' so if someone could furnish me with their real names and addresses, I would be eternally grateful.