In yesterday’s Guardian, Simon Hoggart wrote about The Halo Effect, a book that looks at how well companies touted by business gurus actually did. Not very.

This week the magazine Real People accidentally sent every reader the winning scratchcard in its weekly competition. Chaos ensued. This serves to remind me of the Great Hoover Disaster of 1992.

Although many people think that Finns are unavoidably wacky as a result of cultural artifacts like The Leningrad Cowboys and the record-breaking Eurovision entry that was Lordi’s Hard Rock Hallelujah, the cultural climate is quite often conservative. We saw this quite clearly tonight in the televised finals to choose this year’s entry for the contest that will be held in Oslo sometime in summer.

GMail, and the work of Jeff Raskin, both point towards a user interface that differs radically from the desktop that we have beome used to. Raskin even had a term fo it: the humane computer environment.

The ascii smiley is officially twenty five years old today. How do we know? The man who invented them has a note to this effect on his web page.

In 1967, after his near-fatal car crash, Jan Berry attempted to record a new Jan & Dean album using a variety of guest singers. Although he was suffering from both aphasia and dispraxia he was still able to write music. The album was finished but then rejected, and now finally it is being released. With a cover by Dean.

I got an email today fomr the people at Metaplace, a virtual world that started a few years ago with high hopes of making a platform that would make the 3D web mainstream. The email said that over the last several years, we here at Metaplace Inc. have been working very hard to create an open platform allowing anyone to come to a website and create a virtual world of their own. They failed.

The honor for producing the first working GUI goes to Doug Englebart – at the time an employee of Stanford Research Institute. Englebart and colleagues created a program called the oNLine System in 1965-‘68.

Follies and Fallacies in Medicine has been unfairly forgotten, but it is available as a free download from the Skrabanek Foundation.

Huge forest fires in Russia remain untouched and the smoke is causing problems across the Baltic region.

I found a website yesterday which claims that in another dimensions the Beatles never broke up. It has been started by a man who wishes to be known as “James Richards” for the moment.

Last Saturday, after forty years, Tunnelin Levy closed forever.

The other day I was thinking about the fifties television western series Wagon Train. I was thinking about it because I remembered that Gene Rodenberry had pitched Star Trek to the television networks by describing it as “Wagon Train in space”.