Pieces of a Man Think it. Do it. Be it. Embellish.

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Even Christmas cannot quell workers' need to check their office emails, a survey reveals today. More than two in five staff plan to log on to their work emails over the festive period, the survey from Fujitsu Siemens Computers showed.

Not this year. For the last week I've been disconnected from the electronic world as a result of a disastrous decision to try out Bulldog Broadband.

The service has been so bad you couldn't make it up. The first couple of days were spent trying to install equipment in different configurations to try and get a connection that doesn't drop. Even at 4am the service isn't able to sustain for more than a few minutes, and in the daytime the connection is dropped even before the browser has been able to fire up. Then the problems with the PC itself started, a result of being flooded with viruses. Clearly Bulldog's systems offer all the protection of a chocolate fireguard, and the PC seems so knackered at the moment that I'm pleased when I can see Word.

So, until the New Year ... over and out. That's when I'll be able to get to email again, and the rest depends on how BT respond to me begging them to take me back!

Here's a map of the world with each country's size shown in proportion to its population. Britain's huge!

Some scientific facts behind the beefs; the social networks of rappers differ from all other human networks;

On average it takes a chain of just 2.9 people in the network to connect one rapper to another; that is, three degrees of separation. This compares with 2.5 people for the network of movie actors (popularized in the Kevin Bacon game ), 3.6 for company board directors, and 5.9 for collaborations between high-energy physicists. Where the rap network differs from these others, however, is in a property called assortativity. This is a measure of how mixed the collaborations are between highly connected and less connected people.

Here's an amazing picture of runway 31 at Vestmannaeyjar airport in Iceland. To add to the excitement of a low visibility final approach, there is also a nearby volcano, Helgafell. I wonder if it's a RyanAir destination?