Was that Gabrielle Drake? Oh yummie ..

I'll always remember Gerry and Sylvia Anderson creations with huge fondness. The first program I can remember watching is Fireball XL5, and I've always managed to marry blondes all my life in deference to Venus.

I was on the IBM stand at CeBIT for four years in a row. That was a small nightmare - 8 day show, one day build and one day teardown. It was good for weight loss, and pretty much nothing else. Nowadays I attend EHI Live in the UK, and usually another show in London as the mood takes me. In these austere times, attendance at shows is 'self-funded' so one naturally goes only to shows that attract one's eye. The Erotica Show 2012 was in London a couple of weeks ago - unfortunately missed that due to my going to the 'Lone Worker Safety 2012' show.

Facebook launches a new 'Dislike' button, complete with audio of boos and cries of 'shame, shame' recorded from the House of Commons.

Slackware, RedHat, Mandrake, Mandriva, brief parallel running of yellowdog on PowerPC, Fedora, Ubuntu, and last but not least Mint. Not to mention AIX, which as I used to tell my customers is IBMs version of Linux. Oh, how my colleagues from Austin, TX used to laugh.

I don't think I will ever find a keyboard like the IBM Model D keyboard I had in 1980 .. I built a parallel interface to it (with the +8.5v, +5v and -2.2v it needed); I used it on a forth-based 6809 machine I made. It was wonderful .. each key had some 13 parts including a leaf spring - which is why IBM cost-reduced it down later. Of course IBM came out with the PC in 1982, and ravaged my hobby. Still, that brought me the next best keyboard, th 84-key AT keyboard with a sensible sized enter key, and function keys where &deity. intended to put them - down the left hand side.

And Neil was a giant of Mankind. Thank you for being there, to lift us up and show us a view beyond our horizons. You will always be remembered, and admired along with all those who worked as part of the biggest and most successful team ever assembled, to take that one, small step for all of us.

This sounds like an ideal medium for PACS - medical imaging. PACS generates large quantities of data, which may be required to be retained for a very long time to be available for medico-legal reasons. For clinical purposes, 97% of the data over three years old is never referenced, but trying to get anyone to agree to an ILM policy that isn't at least 30 years is a real problem. Given the average acute hospital is generating 20TB of image data per year, this service from Amazon might be quite popular. DICOM copes very well with offline data that takes many hours to retrieve - and medico-legal requests can take days to honour, so this could be very successful. The only outstanding requirement is that for EU citizens, the archive would need to be located in the European Economic Area ...

Sometimes you have to manage your manager out of the organisation you are in .. sometimes you have to vote with your feet and leave. Not enough do.

By the by: other managers were in the same situation as I was; one solved the problem by telling his newly-promoted staff working for him that it was HR policy to give people a 3 rating for the first appraisal after promotion ..! Another happened to have a couple of people on a one-year placement as part of their degree course - they got a 3 to make the numbers up. I decided that in the future, I would always ensure that I had a doofus or two working for me to perform menial tasks and to take the hit.

First-line managers who have to deliver against HR policies like this have my every sympathy. I was made a manager in a certain very large IT company. I managed a team of mixed fixed-term contractors, contractors and permanent staff. My manager came to me at the start of the new year to tell me that during the upcoming staff performance review, I had to make 15% of my permanent staff a 1 performer, 75% a 2 performer, and 10% a three performer. When I complained that I didn't have enough permanent staff of a low caliber (c'mon now, I was doing the hiring!), I was quite neatly told that if I couldn't make up the numbers from my workforce, then it would be OK as from his level he would meet his overall target for 3 performers by making ME one.

Actually, that's what ended up happening, not that any of my workforce found out about that 'deal'. I lasted a further four years of management in increasingly Kafka-esque circumstances until I decided that I should stop trying to rise up the ranks of management, give up and go back to being a techie. I've never regretted the decision, and I can sleep at night.

Did such an arrangement save MegaUpload? I think not, baby puppy.

Of course, now I have RTFA I know there ARE applications out there that can give me some serious benefits for travelling .. so I am now downloading Waze to my Android phone .. oh my.

"easily driven by an AVR or PIC type microcontroller" ... Hmmmm ... the main feature of the HD44780-type alpha LCD is that it is a static device, containing its own memory. The content is scanned by the hardware on the interface board.

If you want similar functionality with a mono or color big size LCD, you have to have something in the way between the AVR and the LCD itself that is going to retain a display memory so that the LCD can be continually refreshed (and don't try to do that with an AVR). You could do worse than putting an FPGA board in the way with a VGA interface on it - that way you could drive any number of LCD monitors .. talk to the FPGA via a serial protocol of some sort and have it maintain a color alphanumeric, or alpha + limited graphic display, or with enough memory a full graphics display. Boards like a papilio (http://papilio.cc/) with a VGA wing would do the job.

In what way was the breakup reversed? Thinking of Toshiba - LCDs, Lenovo - Thinkpads, Hitachi - Storage, Cisco - Networking Hardware, AT&T (WAN), Lexmark (printers) ..all companies that took over product lines. Thinking of the manufacturing plants that were sold off.