A fresh Thunderbird install puts a single, unread "Welcome" message in your inbox, doesn't it? At any rate I always find my "268 unread messages" depressingly accurate. :(

Derren Brown writes about this in "Tricks of the Mind", as something that NLP advocates are quite fond of. He warns that if you do it in a very deliberate fashion you come across as profoundly creepy, but that on the whole it's not a bad idea.

It's pretty obvious what the alternative meaning was, not "the PS3 limited us" but "we overstretched on our original idea". I'm not sure why Kotaku has a bug up its ass about this, it's not like they came up with the story, they just blogged it.

Yes, you can get it in the UK. It's at the .co.uk address.

@gomakemeasandwich: I'm not entirely sure why Office Ultimate is even on the market at that price. Only the deranged "I'll spend my own money on a fancy laptop and the best Windows so I can work from home" workaholics are going to pick it up.

@kureshii: Uh, the UK and most of Europe are on 50Hz, and we're about as far from the equator as the US is.

Two things to note about Mac power adaptors:

Stitching software isn't just about panoramas. You can make ridiculous 35Mpixel photos which would otherwise demand a wide-angle lens and the CCD from an astronomical satellite, by half-shuttering a simple compact digital camera and shooting away.

Vista's Presentation Mode is pretty useful for this, but like any sane person, I limit my Vista exposure to the laptop I use for report writing. I recall that Windows 98 had a feature where you could choose a corner of the screen to leave your mouse pointer, and the screensaver would be disabled as long as you left…

I just assume my critical voice is wrong unless it can provide me a sound explaination as to why something is amiss. It's something I learned in Art class - if you think something's wonky but can't say why, you shouldn't be touching it as you'll just make it worse.

What a base suggestion! I know I won't be alkalining up to try this out.

I have all the installers in my documents backup so I just reinstall stuff as I remember that I need it. Gets rid of a lot of crap that way.

He's not suggesting that people never come within a hundred yards of eachother. He's suggesting that being trivially in contact all the time is bad for getting the job done. You can get together and collaborate when you're not trying to do other stuff.

(Incidentally, he now has an office a similar distance away, and I have noticed the benefit of having to walk to him to ask him something.)

My PhD supervisor commented on this. He used to have an office about 5 minutes' walk from his students' lab, so when they had a problem and set off to ask him, they would invariably come up with the solution just as they were reaching his door. It acted as a sort of filter to get rid of the low-priority questions.

This would probably work quite well with rail tickets too. Very practical.

I did this myself recently too. Good headphones from bad, for the cost of a £1 part in my case (none of this fancy metal stuff, just a plastic housing).

Administrative Tools is only under "Control Panel" for me, not "All Programs". Vista Business.

I do something fairly similar to what's described here after lunch: I put my feet up, close my eyes and let myself begin to nod off as I ponder what I'm doing in the afternoon. My thoughts usually start to wander after a short while which can lead to some interesting ideas. I keep myself awake though, I just can't…