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Mark Burgess once introduced 'Here Today' with these words.

I just read on The Chameleons message board that Mancunian musician, Bryan Glancy, died at the weekend. I didn't know Bryan Glancy. I never met Bryan Glancy. I just happened to see him supporting The Chameleons in Camden back in November 2002. Just very sad for his friends and family to think of another young person gone before his time.

Elsewhere, four young people are convicted of manslaughter (not murder) for kicking a man to death in a random attack on London's South Bank.

A person isn't safe anywhere these days.

Amazing news - whales have feelings and can understand humans.

How a wave of human compassion will have comforted the whale in his final hours

'He'd have known we're trying to help but it couldn't save him'

But what was really amusing about the bottlenose whale stranded in the River Thames story was that a friend recently returned from a holiday in Canada where he went whale watching. He was unlucky and saw absolutely nothing apart in a whole day apart from the bobbing waves. He then returns home to London to find one sitting on his doorstep.

GreatNews, in fact. I just discovered this RSS reader which is a Windows desktop RSS reader but can synchronise with Bloglines for Web based access.

GreatNews is fast, has a clean logical interface, with an integrated browser, highly configurable (2 or 3 pane display), supports newspaper style for reading groups, drag'n'drop for organising folders, auto feed discovery and perhaps most importantly, displays as much content as possible (no ads), enabling you to quickly focus on what is of interest.

You can't display the feeds into your preferred order but there is a 'Most Visited' view which amounts to the same thing.

So, I have exported all my feeds from Newsgator and will be trying out GreatNews as my RSS reader now.

Tonight's Money Programme ( The world according To Google) on BBC2 was about the history, the success and the possible future diversification of the popular search engine, Google.

Now I use Google a lot and to me it is an excellent, fast, free service. I can hardly ever recall clicking on an ad that was presented alongside a search (even if I am actually looking to buy something).

I use Google Groups for searching for technical information as someone, somewhere at sometime has probably encountered the same problem as me and better, someone, somewhere at sometime has probably, kindly, provided the solution.

I don't particularly care if they track all my searches ever, aggregate them or give them to the UK authorities.

I am quite interested in innovative developments like Google Earth. I have a Google Mail account which I don't currently use but might do in the near future to replace my spam ridden Yahoo! email account.

I can remember when AltaVista was the most powerful, standard choice for a search engine and they were discussing a flotation. I respect Google, being founded by two students, coming from nowhere? to a position of virtual monopoly, immense power and wealth.

I don't care if Google staff are all geeks with 5 million dollar houses and rocket lava lamps in the Google colours scattered everywhere.

What I do care about is people continually discussing 'Google O/S'.

Google have a suite of powerful software applications. Google may have (ambitious plans) for an operating system. Google does have links with other computer companies that develop operating systems (Sun Microsystems).

IBM develop operating systems (AIX). Hewlett-Packard develop operating systems. Microsoft develop operating systems. Linux in all its various flavours is an operating system.

However, the last time I looked, Google does not have an operating system.

The BBC have a program called Pay off your mortgage in 2 years. Tonight's episode featured a couple from Cornwall with a mortgage of £90,000.

The program is moderately interesting for the various ideas people come up with to earn extra income (not for the scrimping, living off baked beans and giving up alcohol).

However, the program is spoiled by some very basic flaws.

Firstly, any extra income seems to be tax-free. If they did raise £45,000 in one year, the Inland Revenue would demand a significant element. It's a shame but it's the law, you see.

The mentor repeatedly refers to his very clever 'accumulator principle' which involves simply multiplying a weekly income of 'X' by 104 to determine the additional income over two years. He (and the participants) seems to view this basic mathematics as some startling revelation.

Secondly, the mentor also dangles the thought of all the mortgage interest payments saved as an incentive to realise a livelong dream.

For example, he told tonight's couple that if (surely when) they eventually do achieve their goal and pay off their mortgage of £90,000, this would free them from the shackles of 22 years of interest payments totalling £76,000.

The couple could then use this 'money' to buy a large, light, airy studio for painting and a home office.

The couple looked genuinely astounded and delighted. They did not have the basic common sense to understand that the very intelligent mentor had neglected to point out one important fact; to obtain this dream studio, they will either have to raise a further £76,000 (which might take a while) or take out another mortgage.

Oh, the del.icio.us irony of it all.

You spend 3 months watching your WordPress statistics bumbling along the horizontal axis close to zero.

Some traffic dribbles in. The graph accelerates into 10s of hits daily. You feel better. You will persist with this blogging experiment for a little longer.

At this rate, it may soon be time to consider a proper blog using WordPress.org and Adsense to make the millions that eluded me during the dot com boom.

Then those pesky developers from WordPress.com alter the Y-axis dynamically, on the fly without even asking so the statistics now start at 40 and the graph looks just the same.

Life is cruel.

You can save lots of time and get even more things done by checking in online for your flight at www.britishairways.com.

You can even change your allocated seat (sometimes) which is useful as BA will always allocate an aisle seat if your preference is window and vice-versa. Version 2.0 of the BA site (June 2006) will even include a brief description of your prospective neighbour in order to help you with this difficult choice.

You can also print out your boarding card on your 12 year old dot matrix printer. This means you can skip the short queue at the BA self service kiosks and immediately proceed to the lengthy queue for the curiously misnamed 'Fast Bag Drop'.

However, a word of caution to all you GTD'ers. Wait for the printout to fully emerge and carefully check the output before leaving the BA web site. Secondly, always, always click the 'Click here to print boarding card' icon to avoid potential embarrassment.

Do not be tempted to think that because you work in IT, you know better and it will be far quicker to simply right-click 'Print This Page' to save another 2.4 milliseconds in an effort to get things done.

Trust me. I did it and because I don't know what a 'frame' is, I found myself presenting a rather unusual boarding pass at the British Airways desk that simply said:

"Click the 'Print Boarding Pass' button (you idiot) to print"

I just think everyones out to get me.

Search Term: +Norman Brightside+Blog

Please, please don't let it be the BAA security staff from T4.

Agency: London Rubber Company

Location: Heathrow T4 toilets.

• Durex Featherlite
• Durex Ribbed for Extra Sensitivity
• Durex Extra Safe
• Durex Gossamer
• Durex Lager & Lime
• Durex Chicken Korma
• Nurofen

Obviously two of the above are fictitious but the Nurofen is genuine. A great idea to counter that age old objection - 'Not tonight dear, I have a splitting headache'.

[ This blog is brought to you by Tom Hanks who actually has lived unnoticed in Heathrow Terminal 4 for the past 8 years, sleeping on chairs by night and queuing in various parts of the building by day. ]

People never ask me 'Just who is this Norman Brightside character ?'

Norman Brightside is an alias for a fictitious Oracle Database Administrator based in Solihull, near England. Norman briefly flirted with celebrity, last year, when he had the temerity to criticise Tom Kyte.

Norman Brightside is also a bastardisation of Norman Whiteside, a Northern Irish footballer who played for Manchester United in the 80's and the song 'Mr. Brightside' by the popular American beat combo - The Killers.