Telling it like it is

A tragic retelling of the Mars Rovers trip to the red planet.

I can sit at my desk for hours on end without a single phonecall, and the instant I'm away for 30 seconds, I get two voicemails. Why is that? Worse is the persistent abuse of the phone when I am at my desk. First I get a call, which I'll send to voicemail. Then another call which I send to voicemail. Then my cellphone rings, so I direct that to voicemail. Then I get a text message, which I don't reply to, then the desk phone rings again. Walk over and talk to me - we work in the same office! Here's a clue : if I'm not picking up any of my phones, it means I don't want to talk to you, or I'm talking to someone else. The more times you call, the less likely I am to return any of them.

As much as Apple's new tablet sounds like a female sanitary product, I want one. I'm watching the live press conference now. It's like an iPhone on steroids.

Attractive women are used to sell just about everything - simple fact. But sometimes you look at a product and just think "wait - what?". Abbyy make optical character recognition software. Entirely automated, it takes scanned images, reads the text and turns it into digital copies. It's techy, geeky and under-the-hood clever, and it has no tangible product other than the CD the installer comes on. Yet their website has this super attractive woman on it, staring out of the screen at you. Whilst I have absolutely no problem with the model, I'm left wondering how she conveys an optical character recognition piece of software.

This guy needs to be shot in public. Jail isn't good enough for him. He's sold $85M-worth of these things - nothing but an empty plastic handle - and thus he's responsible for hundreds of deaths in Iraq. This man is just evil.