I tuned into this fun film, but five had decided to screen it in 4:3. For a modern action film this is disgraceful. A lot of people have widescreen televisions these days and to cut the picture down like that removes large portions of the action.

Oh well, I'll just have to borrow the DVD from someone and watch it properly. The only time I've seen the whole film was on a lousy video recording.

Tonight I watched the scariest TV I've seen in a long time. Horizon was about a phenomenon I'd never heard off called Global Dimming. It seems that all this global warming we've been worrying about has been partly cancelled out by sunlight being blocked by all the crap we put in the air. Now that we put out 'cleaner' gas from our cars and power stations the dimming effect is lessening, but this means that warming may accelerate. There was a prediction of a 10C rise in the next 100 years! That is seriously bad news.

So what can we do? As individuals very little apart from making an effort to cut consumption of energy and goods. I try to do little bits like not using more lights than necessary and driving economically, but I do drive about 400 miles a week just to work, which is not really a good thing, but I'd struggle to find a comparable job nearer to home.

The politicians need to really wake up and do something. Air travel is too cheap and needs to pay towards the damage it does. Do people really need to fly that much? If it's this cheap they will do it more.

For the sake of our children we need to do something right now.

To be honest I could go for one, if I had some money to throw around. It is cute, but there are alternatives. I just saw this at Cheeplinux. I don't know anything about the company, but for the approximate price of the Mini you can get something with a DVD re-writer, wireless keyboard and mouse, a much bigger disk and a card reader. It's not as fast, but it's probably fast enough for non-gaming use. I'd be interested to know how quiet it is. That's becoming one of my priorities for any future computers. My old PC is making a real racket here.

When I was living in Germany I kept a diary that I can go back to and cringe over. I keep thinking I should start it again, but of course I can't be satisfied with writing in a book these days.

I tried a diary application on the Palm, but it was awkward to use and the Palm is not great for entering lots of text.

Recently I thought that I could do something in email. I spend most of my waking hours in front of a computer and email is convenient. My thought is that I would mail myself, possibly using a dedicated account. Entries would be automatically date sorted. I could even encrypt to prevent anyone else getting at my secret thoughts.

An extension of this would be to then extract the emails and convert them to some easily searchable format.

This is a diary for private thoughts. Anything public can go on here or Multiply.

Strange coincidence on the radio coming home last night. I got in the car and Classic FM was on playing Verdi's Anvil Chorus in it's traditional form. Tuned over the Radio 4 and listened to the amusing The Consultants, then flicked around for something else. A show was just starting on Radio 2 and kicked off with.... the Anvil Chorus, but this time as performed by Glenn Miller. Slightly different style.

A couple of times in the past I would be flicking around the channels in the morning and find the same song playing on both Virgin and Xfm.

Last night I finally got around to attending a meeting of the Hertfordshire Linux User Group. It took me a while to find the venue in a community centre tucked away down a back road. When I got there I found a room full of geeks (not a derogatory term) with a selection of PCs running various forms of Linux. I spent a merry couple of hours having some interesting conversations and was even able to help someone to install Firefox.

I'm still finding my way with Linux, but this looks like a good resource for local help.