Got this in the mail today: A crow was sitting on a tree, doing nothing all day. A small rabbit saw the crow and asked him, "Can I also sit like you and do nothing all day long?" The crow answered: "Sure, why not?" So, the rabbit sat on the ground below the crow and rested. All of a sudden a fox appeared, jumped on the rabbit and ate it. Moral of the story: To be sitting and doing nothing, you must be sitting very, very high up.

This is cool: David Coe mentioned my post in PDG's consistently better sounding and always enjoyable podcast. For all I know this is my first podcast exposure so I'll use this as an excuse to drink something expensive tonight. I'd recommend listening to the whole show and not only to hear the term "bollocks" used properly. I'm mentioned towards the end, they left the best for last. Update: We moved into our new UK premises so we celebrated that with a couple of pints at the manor round the corner which qualifies as an expensive drink. Stella Artois is "reassuringly expensive" after all.

That's nice... Check my Gmail account after a couple of days and have 25 or so "delivery failure" e-mails. What's going on? Is someone using my precious e-mail address to spam the planet? Am I sending out mass e-mails in my sleep? Grumble...

If you think about it for a moment you know someone who'd be the perfect blogger but for some reason isn't doing it yet. After an evening of 8 ball, good wine and geek talk of the highest order with Andy and Mr. Adrian Heywood, it struck me that if anyone wanted, no needed a blog it was most definetly him. First post? A charged by induction, indistructible, waterproof tablet PC. You can see where this is going. I really liked this little sound-bite: Success is being able to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm. Right on.

Bought the magazines, gum, nasty coffee and overpriced slice of pizza. Boarding should start in about half an hour so I've got some time to kill. Just received Battlefield 2 today so I will try to get some gaming done during the flight if I manage to find some elbow room. I can't wait for in-flight WiFi. Off to try my luck with another cup of mistery coffee. Update: Notebook battery was dead so no in-flight gaming. Instead I had to endure Hitch on the world's worst entertainment system. It's hard to trust the technology that flies the plane when they can't even play a movie without the tape mashing up, yes the tape. I don't know which car boot sale they bought their system from but they'd do well with some maintenance. It was a strange scene, the guy next to me watching The Aviator on a portable DVD player (looked good), a couple of rows ahead someone working on an Excel sheet, me listening to MP3s while the crew is messing with the head tracking of the tape player -- "Go back! It was good a second ago, ah, now you missed it..." I know that times are hard so could someone please buy them a 30 quid DVD player from Maplins? Strangely enough, I'm not talking about a bring-your-own-food, fight over seats, rusty winged, drunken pilot charter carrier either; this was none other than the 200 quid ($450) a seat British Airways flight to Heathrow... The food, however, was surprisingly decent.

How cool is this? (Kudos Ant) hack a day serves up a fresh hack each day, every day from around the web and a special how-to hack each week. Perfect if you're the kind of person that gets turned on running Linux in Gmail or building your own tornado machine (I know I am). One for the blogroll then.

I was interested to find out that Kottke still gets excited about being mentioned in Time Magazine. Not saying that being mentioned in Time Magazine isn't anything special but we're talking about quite possibly one of the top 10 bloggers on the planet. Speaking of top 10 bloggers... You know that blogging is in trouble when the words blogwatch, blogebrity, blogosphere and blogger all appear in a single paragraph of a mainstream magazine. Add the terms a-list, in crowd, stars, hip factor and TV show and I just don't feel like being part of this anymore... Just imagine, Scoble bearing it all on Oprah, Celebrity Blogger Big Brother where we watch a bunch of people sit at their computers all day secluded from the outside world (not much change there then), or even E! Entertainment's Behind the Blogging where we take an in-depth look at the trials of becoming a famous blogger, "a small town boy - his life was turned upside down when he was linked on Slashdot..."

Microsoft researchers have announced the development of a Bittorrent-like P2P application that is (obviously) better than anything before it. To be honest I thought Google would do it first but I'm glad to see that distributed file transfer is finally gathering corporate support. There is no reason why in 2-3 years 90% of all file downloads could be distributed freeing up valuable bandwidth and decreasing the cost of propagating media across the internet. One server does not have the bandwidth to deal with all that traffic, so you need to find another way of getting the file to everyone who needs it. -- If the file is broken up into smaller pieces, these can be distributed among a smaller number of people, who can then share the pieces to make sure they all eventually have the complete file. While mostly infamous for its shadier uses many legal sites currently offer Bittorrent downloads. It will be interesting to see what Microsoft decides to do with Avalanche to get the momentum it requires to become useful (you can't have distributed downloading without distribution). I think that some sort of integration within the MSN toolbar, Internet Explorer or even at the OS level could definetly help people "chose". (Kudos, Ant)

Oh, this is nice. After 2 weeks of non-stop work, skipped week-ends, junk food and late nights I can finally stay at home, watch some League of Gentlemen episodes (the only show to ever put me of my food) and play the Battlefield 2 demo online with friends. I'm still amazed of how well this game works, massive 64 player maps, full VOIP communications, self-managed squads and gorgeous graphics. Granted I did just buy a GeForce 6600 to play it properly but it was worth it. Pre-ordered the game from Play.com for 28 quid delivered, not bad. I limited myself to one major online game for this year and picked Battlefield 2 because it's something I could play in quick bursts. Joi Ito picked World of Warcraft, expect him to stop blogging anytime now.

Gosh, who didn't see that coming? Slashdot posts about Google Wallet and the fact that this "significant expansion beyond online advertising" could directly compete with Ebay's Paypal. More on the WSJ. As always, the Slashdot discussions are a great read, here's an example of what to expect: Don't be silly. Real estate developers are the second lowest form of life. They're followed by radio DJs, people who change lanes without signalling, car subwoofer manufacturers, and the cast of Beverly Hils 90210.