Just go and try it, right now!  Its one of those ‘wow’ moments when the internet makes something possible that 10 years ago would have seemed completely utterly astounding.

This week was a bit upsetting at work… various people were made redundant, most of them disappearing immediately… ‘out of office’ notices were the first sign, but then they didn’t come back…  it seems worst in our London office though.

Scotland’s going to be hammered.  Glasgow & Edinburgh’s finance districts are basically just extensions of the city of London.

I installed a fresh copy of Windows Vista on my sister’s 2.5 year old Dell desktop PC last night.  Now this wasn’t an expensive PC even then.  She has 3 kids and a husband, and the PC was very well used for games, photo editing, website development, even video conversions, and yet XP had only caused one problem in all that time when it was unplugged in the middle of starting up.

So XP good… but Vista Better!

After a very cheap (£20) and easy upgrade to 3gb of ram, It took less than an hour to install, and then took a while to update itself, but it was easy and I only had to click a couple of options during the whole time.  When it booted up, every single component and gadget was identified automatically.  The PC is a delight to use and feels like a new computer –very quick and smooth.  I also then installed Windows Live Safety – parental controls – to protect the kids from the dangerous internet… it also was easy, once i understood how it works.  Also free!  Highly recommended.

So this reinforces what I’ve been finding over the past few years, Windows computing just keeps improving, and is easier to live with, is cheap, and actually is something i don’t normally think about much (except last night) because it just works, all the time.

Lots of news programmes debating why the country (England) ground to a halt in the recent snow.

One reason that nobody mentioned was, the last time they had major snow there, 18 years ago, cars had quite skinny tyres.  Nowadays cars have ridiculously huge wide tyres, which are HOPELESS in snow.

In some other countries, cars actually have winter wheels & tyres, which are narrower and smaller than normal ones.  Mind you they also have snow chains etc…

The credit crunch has hit Dubai.  Hard.  Very hard.  And my beloved QE2’s fate is now uncertain again.  She’s still sitting there, engines running, fully powered up, all systems alive and kicking… its now well over 2 months since she arrived and in that time, her owners, Nakheel, have cancelled all sorts of projects.

Whats to become of her?  Scrapped?  Sold on?  Just going to sit there?  We shall see…