Or he's Brian May-of Queen, with a PHD in astrophysics from Imperial College... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_May

If you're in the UK, http://www.bitsbox.co.uk/ is excellent, good passive component packs, although a lot of time if you're doing analogue design you'll need 1% accurate resistors, preferably in the E196 series, and if you're doing digital you can probably get away with keeping 1ks, 10ks and some resistors for LEDs in stock. Useful for prototyping though

Fortunately none of them can find Slashdot any more...

I've just bought a new scope at work, we had Agilent and Tektronix to play around with for a couple of weeks, so might be of some help. We were looking at MSOs, combination scopes and logic analysers which I can throughly recommend if you don't need all the triggering on a full logic analyser. The Agilent scope was simple to use, its all menu based with quick access to the most common features off the front, but its worth getting a tek scope in to play with the Wave Inspector technology, allows you to pan through long samples really quickly. Its worth getting a bigger sample memory, especially if you have transient events to find. Personally, I found the ability to decode I2C, serial data etc on the fly useful in debugging, but it depends on your needs. Oh, and the 12.1" screen on the agilent scopes is a pleasure to use.