The Earl of Sandwich's sandwiches were sandwiched between the Earls of Sandwich's portraits.

Woo-hoo - my first app is now up on iTunes. The imaginatively-named "Gold Price" app lets you track the price of gold bullion live:

If you've got an iPhone or an iPod touch you can download it now for free.

At least, that's the plan[1].

fn1. The queen of evil Evian made me post it.

I've just been taking a look at the list of Olympic events. Weird, weird, weird.

Softball, water polo and BMX biking are in there, but not rounders.

Judo, two flavours of gymnastics and Taekwondo make the list, but no Tai Chi.

Wrestling, boxing and fencing, but no fisticuffs.

And worst of all, running and jumping, but no climbing trees.
Or "putting on make-up while you're there"¹.

I'm all for the Olympics, especially when someone else is paying for it, but they really ought to have consulted an expert (like me) when assembling the event list.

And I couldn't find a single mention of Sir Daley Thompson anywhere...

¹ Thank you, Mr Izzard.

Everyone knows that Coca-cola got its name from the fact that it used to made with cocaine, right?

Well, it occurs to me that if history had gone a little differently and they'd made it with heroine instead, we'd all be drinking "Jack Daniels & Hero"...

Idea for a TV show: Britain's Got Torrent! - In which ordinary people up & down the country download something more interesting than a variety show.

"The University of Nottingham is delighted to invite you and fellow alumni to an evening with Sir Richard Hadlee, one of the greatest all round cricketers in the history of the game."

Oh, good-oh. Terrific. Tell you what - you let me know when there's an evening with the inventor of the BBC Model B microcomputer, and I'll buy some tickets.

There are eight people in our office, so yesterday I played this game: "If everyone in the office was one of the incarnations of The Doctor, which one would they be?"

Now you don't know the people in my office, so there's no point me telling you the results, except to say that if we want to complete the set, the next two people we hire have to be either Colin Baker or Patrick Troughton.

Supplemental bonus game you can play at home: Which assistant is my partner?

I've just got a marketing email from American Apparel offering me, "10% Off Fannies".

You'll have to write your own punchline - I'm far too disturbed.

There are only two things to remember:

Gin: Bombay Sapphire. Nothing else will do. Especially not Gordon's. London Dry at a push, but not Gordon's¹.

Tonic: If the G&T tastes harsh, add more gin. If it tastes 'thin', add more tonic. Repeat until perfect, or until you've got a very large drink.

That's my approach at least. Any other useful suggestions?

¹ Yes, I know London Dry is a variant made by the same distiller.

I think we're all agreed - scanning for things is fun.

But at the moment, there's simply not enough stuff you can scan for. At the best, you can wander down the High Street and scan for wireless networks and Bluetooth-enabled devices, but it's simply not enough. I want to be able to scan for beta particles. I want to be able to scan for abnormally-high tachyon emmissions. I want to be able to scan for lifeforms, even if it's faster just to count the things that are wearing flip-flops.

I want to be able to choose between 'active' and 'passive' scanning, even if active scanning runs a risk of rendering the populous of Hammersmith infertile. I'm willing to take that chance if it means we get better data.

I want more data. I need more data. And I need it in a pocket-size device that goes 'bloop'.

We regret to announce that life is still tricky.

The number of deeply fulfilling, trivially-easy activities has dropped to an all-time low. Current projections suggest that pretty soon only "eating sausages" will be a guaranteed path to inner tranquility.

In short, there are no shortcuts.

In this hostile environment we must arm ourselves with the few tools we can rely on. Red wine is an obvious ally. White is your friend too, but a capricious one. Video games can help, but they only focus our strength, they cannot guide it. In the end, our greatest hope is hope itself. Repeats of Bewitched, and hope.

It's not easy folks, but we're trying.

Fantastic - I've just seen the official logo for the Wiltshire Police:

Naturally I have no idea where Wiltshire is, but I'm glad they're taking the Decepticon menace seriously.

If you thought that by looking really closely at your mortgage deal for a few days, you could find a way to reduce your payments by 90%, I think that'd be a pretty exciting prospect.

If you knew that with a bit of time and effort, you could make your car run on ten times less petrol, or get it to move ten times faster, that'd be worth doing.

If took the books you write, or the songs you produce, or the paintings or the whatever, and found a way to be ten times more productive - at the same quality - it'd be enormously artistically rewarding.

This, ladies and gentlebens, is the reason that as a geek, I find performance-tuning about the most exciting part of the art. It's actually possible. Look at a system closely enough, think clearly enough, and you can often find a way to make things run an order of magnitude faster, at no extra cost. I'm not talking the dumb route of "Buy a faster machine". Any idiot can suggest that, and it's usually not half as spectacular as you hope. I'm talking the same system, 10 times more efficient. I'm talking ingenuity. And when you nail it, it's about the most fucking satisfying thing there is.

But if you reduced your mortgage by 90%, you'd be called a financial genius. At least by your partner. If your car ran ten times longer or ten times faster, you'd be hailed as the engineer of our age. And even if your art wasn't the best in the world, you would at least be go down in history as one of the most prolific creators of our time.

But you make a computer system run ten times faster, or even a hundred times after a particularly fine think, and sometimes the best you get is that people stop complaining. Somebody will say something along the lines of, "About time. Why wasn't it this fast in the first place? Are you lazy? I would have typed FAST ages ago."

And that's why performance-tuning is the least fucking satisfying thing there is.

From HM Revenue & Customs:

Dear Mr Jenkins,
We have looked at your Tax Return and do not propose you send returns in the future.

Free! Free from Government-designed websites that take 2 hours and 3 usernames to tell you "Error - please try again yesterday." Free from forms designed by M. C. Escher and peppered with ambiguous English that takes an hour of research to untangle. Free!

At least for now.