I’ve been on holiday in Italy for christmas, and back today so that I can spend new year at home
Since i haven’t been updating my blog you’re in for a bit of a special as is always the case after i get back from a holiday

I’ll start with Desert Island Discs which is a radio show in the UK. We got talking about a variation on the theme where you get to choose 4 tracks, 3 films, 3 books and a luxury.
We came to the conclusion that this is very difficult for younger people as I said I would probably choose 4 different tracks for every day of the week. Fairly sensibly, it was suggested that perhaps the best books would be ones along the lines of “How to survive on a desert island in 200 easy steps”, and I added one though i couldn’t remember the name at the time, but it’s The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook. It includes things like how to get out of quicksand, and wrestle an alligator with just a stout pole
Suggestions for the music and films varied from ones that you enjoy the most already to ones that you’ve never had the time to watch/listen to and would get the most out of.
But the general consensus was that the most interesting choices were those that had a good reasoning and reminded the person of something in the past.
Being under 30, I don’t think I’m old enough to have had that many moments to reflect on

Onward we go – I was thinking about animals that have become extinct and how often they are ones that don’t appear to be missed that much by the layman. But i thought i’d turn it around into what animals would you be more than happy to have extinct which really would make a difference to the layman. My first suggestion was the Mosquito – they’re ugly, a pest, suck blood and some species carry malaria and dengue fever, yellow fever, west nile virus (amongst others). I am not an ecologist, but as far as i’m concerned the mosquito is better to me dead than alive – the World Health Organisation did declare war on the mosquito and largely failed when trying to rid the world of Malaria. I can’t think of any other suggestions i came up with, but would be interesting to hear a few more.

Last but not least, in the in-flight magazine coming back I saw an advert for a piece of software called OnSpeed. It makes some pretty amazing claims for a piece of software and is charged at £24.99 or €39.99 in Euros per year.
It must be more than just an internet optimiser since you have to renew the subscription annually, whereas an optimiser would do the changes and that would be it. It’s won lots of awards, and has mac support (except for email optimisation). It doesnt seem to make a lot of sense though, and it’d be interesting to see if it actually works.

Till next time…