I refute it thus. #theoldlinesarethebest

I didn't think you were - that's why I played it completely straight. Otherwise I would have added: "Dickhead".

No supermarkets, and most shops except for local convenience stores, are allowed to be open on Easter Friday, Easter Sunday, Anzac Day until 1pm and Christmas Day. Very few, if any, supermarkets are open between 10pm and 8am. We get by.

No - we've just got a better sense of humour. There's used to be an ad on the telly where the participants repeatedly said "Bugger". I think it garnered two or three negative responses to the Broadcasting Standards Authority.

Hourly - I use Time Machine. I don't have to think about it. And it's saved me a few times. It doesn't have to be used often - but it has to work. It does.

It's unfortunate you're not a customer of mine - I have code which deals with your name, and MacLean (and Machine!) and Fa'atau (Samoan) and A'Court. I appreciate that a certain number of people with Mc/Mac prefixes want the next letter to be lower-case: I used the local phone book as my guide; assuming (loosely) that they all had their names presented correctly, the majority had an upper-case letter after the 'C'.

When first and last names are stored in the same field, I often want to strip off the surname from the first name(s). This is in most cases straight forward, but is more complicated when the surname is compound, like Te Heu Heu (Maori), Ter Borg and Van Der Water (Dutch) and Le Blanc (French). If someone's first name is "Van" and his surname is "Der Water", I'm going to get it wrong. But these situations are rare. Without extra information, it's just not possible to get it right.

So the idea is to design the data entry form such that these are minimised. Make the parts of the name distinct entry fields, and put error checking behind each one of them. If it's possible, do the mix-casing in the background code, so the user can see how it's going to appear. Then if it's wrong at that point, Mr O'Leary, it's your fault!

But it will never be 100% right. And it will only be part of the solution. The next bit - name matching, is hard. It will always be hard. False positives and false positives will always pop up. I leave that to much clever people than me to try and fail.