On the metro this morning (my bike is in dry-dock), there was a women with two young kids (2 years old say), who was encouraging them to sing Jingle Bells and other such seasonal favourites.

Actually, encouraging them! I mean, did she not know, that everyone else listening to an out of tune, kiddy-drivvel version of Jungle Bells just wanted both of the cute small kids to be quiet? Or die. Horribly.

Climbing the stairs to the way out, I was greeted with "Bing, Bing, Bong, The Metro would like to wish you all a Happy Christmas". What's the point of a recorded service announcement about this! Am I suposed to think that a piece of tape is showing sincerity? Canned, automated, templated Christmas greets are a scourge.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Did my taxes this evening. Turns out not to be that hard as it happens, although I was ably assisted by Mike Aird — I mention him, because the last time I put him up a friend of his got in contact as a result. Tax forms in the UK are a right bugger, although easier than many places I believe. I've realised that doing the work was a mistake though; filling in the forms costs more than what you gain.

Spent the rest of the time waffling on about the power of the internet. I heard Erin McKeown's "Fast as I can" the other day, randomly, and was struck by the beautiful use of inverted word order, leaving the whole thing with a real spacy feal. I heard it at work, then forgot who did it, but 20 minutes of determined work with the internet got me the artist, a short hop to the lyrics, a few more got me an MP3 (sample, obviously, not the whole lot), and another minute to find that she's supporting Thea Gilmore at the Sage in a March.

The course I want to on Information Literacy last week, would suggest that I got this all wrong. Apparently, free text searches are bad, and I should really be using structured searching with boolean queries in a database. True 10 years ago, but now? Boolean searching was a bad user interface because we didn't know how to do it better. But 20 minutes to so much information about a song that I half heard a week before? Now, we do know how to do it better.

Just listening to Radio 4 and getting a bit annoyed. A few weeks ago, there was a daft story about invisibility cloaks.

Look, I am sure that it works really well, and potentially it's going to have major technological applications. But it only works with one wave length. In what sense is this invisibility? Have we really reached the stage, where scientific reporting is based purely on how many inappropriate cultural references we can throw in? I like Harry Potter, but this is really starting to put me off.