The Sandbox theme recently added to WordPress is pleasant enough but the original themes developed by Scott Wallick from plaintxt.org are absolutely superb. Clean, white, minimalist, striking, understated and refreshingly different from the thousands of themes out there.

I am interested in IT, technology and gadgets. Not obsessed but interested and curious. Recently, I find colleagues making increasing use of technology in the workplace to try to help distributed teams to communicate more effectively. Or maybe they’re just geeks who are afraid to pick up a telephone. People use Web conferencing to share desktops. This is an excellent use of technology. For example, I recently tried to help a customer in Copenhagen by remotely accessing the servers over the network from my kitchen fully equipped home office. The speed was slightly sluggish and the experience was a little frustrating at times but certainly much better than laboriously dictating (’l’ ’s’ ‘space’ ‘slash’ ’t’ ’m’ ‘p’) over the phone or getting on a plane. ...

Take my advice. Never buy flowers for your wife. Ever. I am working at home, trying to finish a report. I don’t have a home office so I work on the kitchen table. For the last couple of days, two things have been slowly nagging away at me like a dripping tap. My wireless mouse sometimes loses the will to carry on working at such a frantic pace. It squeakily demands a cup of coffee or just half an hour of ‘Richard and Judy’. I stoutly refuse so the mouse pointer slowly descends vertically down the screen which is fairly irritating and virus-like. ...

Last night’s ’ Money Program' was about the increasing consumer demand for broadband services and the various options available from the suppliers. Broadband services from the major players (Carphone Warehouse, BT, NTL and newcomer Sky) were all reviewed for various households with different requirements. British Telecom has an incredibly strong brand with the older generation. One grandmother on the show simply opted for a BT Video Phone because she implicitly trusts that the service will work because ‘it is from BT’. ...

OK. I own up. Although I have superb taste in music, I can’t help but hum along whenever I hear No. 2 on this list. ‘Don’t Fear The Reaper’ by Blue Oyster Cult also falls into the same category.

I really enjoyed this comedy co-written by Steve Coogan. The opening sequence features Coogan struggling to keep his calm in an ‘Anger Management’ course and is always hilarious. Unfortunately, the final episode of the series was on Monday night but, no doubt, it will be endlessly repeated on BBC3 in the near future.

I just watched this but I am starting to wish I hadn’t.

Knowledge management presents a difficult challenge particularly when you work in a relatively small department of highly intelligent, technical consultants who are scattered around the globe and travel a lot. I just started another blog as an experiment to see whether we can try to improve the way in which we share knowledge and communicate with each other. Searching email archives is so 1990’s, don’t you think ? The blogging interface and the set of CMS features isn’t as rich as WordPress (or alternative Content Management Systems) but that’s not really the point. ...

Arrived at a client’s offices in Birmingham this morning just as Radio Five news reported a major power cut affecting businesses and homes in the area. Apparently, vandals had set fire to two tyres and rolled them into the electricity sub-station last night. Whatever happened to the good old days of getting drunk, singing songs and placing red cones on top of traffic lights. Still, the outage freed up two hours for an interesting discussion about disaster recovery. ...

As predicted, another fantastic weekend.