My desk(s) at home, in the office. Actually, we're being polite here and we call it the office so as not to offend it; actually it's one side of the loft room - hence the 45 degree angle of the ceilings in some of the photos.

And so, in a clockwise direction we have an Apple eMac, with 512 Mb of memory and running OS X Panther.

To be honest this isn't ours, it belongs to a friend and I'm in the process of upgrading it to run OS X Tiger.

To be really honest I haven't actually started upgrading it yet but I will real soon now. Promise.

My desk at work. Which merely confirms my suspicion that I'm a hardware hoarder. First off, there's a Dell Optiplex GX260 (2.4 GHz P4, 1 GB of RAM, Intel 82845G graphics controller), running Windows XP SP2 ...

Alison bought me John Peel's (semi) autobiography The Margrave Of The Marshes for Christmas, which was a superb present as the venerable Mr. Peel was responsible for the formation of a sizeable percentage of my musical tastes.

Competing with The Margrave was an unofficial biography, John Peel: A Life In Music by Michael Heatley, which was offered up as one of the "if you like this then you might like this" choices by Amazon.co.uk.

It's not often that I have to struggle to finish a book but it's taken me over a month to finally reach the end of Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln's The Messianic Legacy, which is supposedly a sequel to The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail.

The original was a work of genius; I didn't believe a word of it but it was as plausible as most politician's platitudes and it played to the inate conspiracy theorist inside me.

The sequel is nowhere near as controversial as the dust jacket would have you believe; unless it's controversial that the authors actually got paid for their work. This isn't a sequel. It isn't even a coherent book. It's three disparate sections, bound as a single volume, and which have a, sometimes tenuous, connection to THBATHG.

Two ways to make money. The first, find a stray rabbit and ransom it on the net; give me $50,000.000 or I eat the rabbit. If you've got any spare cash then Toby's owner would love to hear from you.

The second way is software licenses. Windows licenses to be exact. Microsoft has finally started to come clean on its strategy of licensing Windows. Which you can read about in all of its patronising glory here. Or you can read another version of the same information here. Which would be funny if it wasn't so damn accurate.

The bottom line is, want to run Windows cough up your cash. Cough it up quickly in a large sum or more slowly in smaller sums, it's all the same. Time to start thinking about making a business case for Linux or BSD.

Last week I suffered a major hardware failure. We're talking catastrophic failure here; a drive which does nothing but emit plaintive clicking noises and which won't even show up in the BIOS.

The drive which failed hosts this web site. Backup? Well, you're amongst the poor deluded few who actual read this, so yes there was a backup.

This is good.