"You have a car that holds 20 litres of petrol, but it has a leak and is losing petrol at a rate of 10ml per minute. If I know I can get 20 miles on 10 litres how far can I travel before I must refuel?" teacher

"Well I'd only go 5 because there's a Halfords just near my house and my mate Dave is a whizz with fixing fuel tanks," student

"But what if you were not at home?" teacher

"I'd look up a station on my satnav," student

"Okay what if you couldn't find one?" teacher

"I'd call the AA," student

"What if your mobile phone didn't work," teacher

" I'd use my other mobile phone I always charge it at night," student

"Well what if there wasn't mobile phone coverage?" asked the teacher

"Well since my mobile phone operator has 98% coverage it means we must be in the Brecon Beacons where I went last year with my dad and the closest station is 7 miles and they even give you a free retest on your MOT there," student

"I give up..." teacher.

We have four cats Oliver, Oscar, Lucy and Owe. Owe isn't her real name, it's Willow but she's started doing some incredibly annoying things. You guessed it – she makes loud "owing" sounds all the time.

Now you would think this would be down to something she is unhappy about such as cat litter not being clean, not enough food or not enough attention. But "Owe" gets all of these things complete with generous servings of ham from the fridge from time to time Owes favourite treat. It's been particularly annoying for my wife who works from home and has to put up with "Owe" owing when she's on the phone. Eventually we decided enough was enough and took the annoying cat to the vet , who of course told us that nothing was wrong with the cat "maybe she's a little stressed?". The vet sold us a cat calming infuser you plug into the wall. It's supposed to calm your moggy down, a bit like camomile tea for cats.

The problem is Owe still continues to "owe" even when standing directly in front of the infuser. The only thing that seems to stop her and is a bit drastic is if you wet her coat a bit she's spends about an hour cleaning herself which gives us some rest.

Was annoyed by this problem for ages, for some reason Jquerys unblockUI method was not working in Internet Explorer. The solution to the problem was "code your HTML properly" I had placed a form tag inside a table when it should have been on the outside. Once I had corrected this problem like magic the unBlockUI worked.

Is it me or does the Russian Eurovision song contest song Believe by Dima Bilan sound a lot like Maxi Priests "Wild World" . Not the words but how its starts and the beat?

It's strange when you listen to a lot of the songs how they remind you of songs you have heard in the past, but can't quite put your finger on.

Having been off sick and confined to feeling sorry for myself on the sofa at home I decided to try out the delights of my recently installed Windows MCE 2005 PC via the Media Extender in my living room known as an Xbox 360. What that last sentence means and I know it sounds like complete gibberish is that Windows Media Centre (Microsoft's media'd version of Windows XP) can play its TV shows, DVD's and movies through something other than your computer screen but actually through your Xbox 360. Using your Xbox kind of like a conduit to your TV screen which you can control with your Xbox controller.

The idea behind it all is super, but my main goal was to watch some of the SkyAnytime shows I have on my Windows MCE machine. I selected "Online Spotlight" from the menu screen now displayed on my TV screen and selected the SkyAnytime feature from here. After that my whole love affair with being able to interactively select SkyAnytime shows from the comfort of the sofa of my living room disappeared. Some how the Microsoft spotlight service thought that SkyAnytime was available to use from within the Media Center. Sky's website on the other hand had other ideas, the Media Centre informed me that Sky's website was not compatible with Windows Media Centre browser. What was more annoying was there was no plugin to add it to my "more programs" section. While I could use the SkyAnytime service in a normal browser on the Windows MCE PC I couldn't use it in the MCE browser. What was the point of that! To top it all, a lot of the other items available in the spotlight menu also didn't work or their sites had long since changed to be incompatible with Windows MCE. The experience was shoddy to say the least, while I know I could download shows separately in BBC iPlayer, SkyAnytime or 4 On Demand and place them in a folder for MCE to pickup and display to me via the Xbox, it was a hassle and my Windows MCE machine was far from the sofa. Microsoft and these 3 players really haven't thought it out properly they could have made so much more out of this and in my mind the user interface is a real shambles. Annoyed by my experience I switched back to good old fashioned morning chat show TV complete with adverts by loan companies such as Ocean Finance which soon sent me back to the land of nod.

Sorry for the lack of posts, I've been on holiday in the Caribbean for a week. It looks like the BBC iPlayer will soon be available on Freesat. Now what I find interesting, is that if the BBC iPlayer gets onto the Freesat service it wouldn't be too hard for Channels 4's, 4 On Demand service getting on there to. They basically use the same Microsoft DRM technology under the covers like Skys Anytime service does. BBC iPlayer is already available on Virgin Media's TV service. On demand TV is definitely the future and to be honest Sky's attempt at it from their set top box has been pretty shoddy in comparison to what Virgin and Tiscali have on offer. I have heard a rumour that Sky may be offering a better on demand service from their newer set top box's that is served over the Internet. Lets see what happens hey?

Not many of my friends know this but I do use Linux and have a Debian Linux server running at home which I remote into (where ever I am in the world) using Xceed. Its actually one of the most reliable machines on my home network and its the one I usually hop onto when things go wrong with my Windows machines. I installed Debian more as a learning exercise, at the time (5 years ago) everyone was going on about how good Linux was and I thought I had better check it out to see what it was all about. Windows really didn't have anything to worry about in my mind Linux was still wearing the "geek mantra". Even though I like to credit myself as being a geek, I still needed a Linux guru friend of mine to show me the basics and help me to install Debian on the old IBM desktop, I had managed rescue from being placed on the skip.

Now 5 years later I have decided to checkout out Unbuntu Linux, would this be faster to install? Would I need a Linux guru to help me set it up? Would I have issues with network cards and hardware not working with it? The simple answer to this was NO! I was so amazed by how easy it was to install Unbuntu on my brand new Vista laptop.

Wubi

The ease of installation is all thanks to to Wubi a program that allows you to install Linux on your Windows based PC without having to worry at all about partitioning your PC's hard disk and worrying about deleting your data. Wubi actually creates a Virtual Image file on your hard disk from which it boots Unbuntu, pretty neat hu? I must admit when I first ran the Wubi installer from my Window Vista install I did take a second look at the install docs (which don't give you much assurance) that I was not blowing away my Windows Vista installation but low an behold Vista still worked as normal...super!

The Hardware and WiFi

Usually my next gripe with Linix installs is the lack of support for the machines hardware, but with Unbuntu that wasn't a problem Unbuntu even picked up my Bluetooth, firewire and USB ports, now that's impressive. That aside my next gripe with Linux was the support for networking cards I have had all kinds of problems in the past finding drivers, but not with Unbuntu it picked up my Wireless card in a matter of seconds and then proceeded to show me a list of network available - great! The next test was to see if I could log onto my work Wifi which uses WPA which is hard enough to connect to with XP or Vista as it is. Unbuntu connected straight away I didn't need to configure anything all it did was ask me for my log in credentials and I was up and running.

My verdict is that Linux has finally started coming of age. Its seems as though someone has finally said "Lets start thinking about usability guys!" the older installs of Linux has always been more in "geekdom" we geeks always think that because we understand how something works everyone else should ... right? Microsoft has always had the leading edge on this part of the OS market. You place the CD in the machine and it sets up the machine for you. Linux used to have all kinds of issues with this but Unbuntu has definitely changed that.

I've seen a lot of articles and demonstrations on how Windows XP is faster run as a virtual PC under a Linux desktop. What gets me about these demos is if you run Windows XP as a virtual machine under a Windows XP desktop you actually get more or less the same results. The reason being is that Windows XP is incredibly fast the first time you install it anyway, it only after a few months of usage that XP degrades in performance. Virtual PC's can be made to run incredibly fast, I have had some pretty good performances with virtual PC's running on compressed images and in machines with plenty of RAM. I actually do most of my development work inside virtual PC's where I keep the host operating system as pure as possible to boost performance.

This is quite an amusing link http://boortz.com/mp3/archive/countdown.swf