O you whom i often and silently come where you are that i may be with you,
As i walk by your side or sit near, or remain in the same room with you,
Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me.

I'm feeling memeless and disconnected. I know it will pass, and I know that I'm thinking a whole load of shite, but I feel a need for company, for family. I need to spend time with people who I feel are genuine, rather than a bunch of artless poseurs that I have little respect for.

I need to get out more.

I want this to be a joke. From Amazon.co.uk

The Me Generation: Get upgraded to first class with Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition. Available on September 14, it's all you need to bring your PC into the digital age. More in Software.

I've had a PC for almost ten years now. For almost all of that time, it's been digital.

...was last night. We went to a bijoux French Restaurant called Camargue for no obvious reason. We ate caviar, we critiqued the decor, and then over dessert Mr Twinky demanded a presentation of gifts. I resisted, naturally, but waved the tempting red-and-gold wrapped package in front of greedy Twinky eyes.

"It's probably another gold leaf lacquer box from Vietnam," quoth Mr Twinky. And indeed it was.

I'm rather proud, however, of the fact that the box contained a certificate of authenticity for an original watercolour by one of Mr Twinky's favourite local artists... I feel smug.

What do I want to see in the final episode of Star Trek: Voyager? And indeed who cares? Personally, I'd like to see the ship get back to the Alpha Quadrant maybe six or seven weeks before the end of the run, and focus on some of the problems the crew face there - with Seven being the obvious problem. And then a movie-length finale where some of the crew nick Voyager and go on the run from the Federation for some reason - perhaps even leading in to the currently elusive Series Five?

But we'll probably get heartwarming schmaltz.

The level of English in Vietnam is a lot better than you might expect, but it's far from the best in the world. I'm sure that there are times when I say something and it's completely misinterpreted. However, I find the people are very patient, and eager to learn. They don't take it badly if I have to repeat myself again, and again. I don't get frustrated when they do either. This is such a marked contrast to India, where the level of language skills is greater, but the willingness to listen is almost non-existent.

I think that's part of my problem with India. I go there to train, and to support, but I am met with arrogance and destructive over-confidence on a regular basis. Mainly from the younger people, I hasten to add. Some of the guys I work with there are in their fifties, and we get on fine. But the younger people want to learn but don't want to be taught.

I find myself wondering whether I am prejudiced by the fact that the Indian trainee is a dumpy, homely woman, while the Vietnamese trainee is a nationally famous model. It probably enters into the equation somewhere.

I got an e-mail from Richard that reminded me about my friend Calum. Calum was the first person that I met on-line that I then went on to meet in real life. I turned up on his doorstep in Norwich one November evening, freezing, and walked in to find that there was a family crisis going on. I was perturbed. I was very perturbed, in fact. But I let it all gloss over me, and I had a good time.

At this stage I knew that Calum was ill, but I didn't know what it was. I only found out a couple of months later when he told me about the combination therapy and I looked up the names of the drugs on the internet. At the time, I was very ignorant about treatment for HIV. I still am, and intend to keep it that way. But I digress.

Having met Calum on-line, I proceeded to not repeat the practice for a while. I did keep in touch with Calum, although he kept having to go in to hospital. That was a bit of a wrench for me, since I had no real way of staying in touch with him while he didn't have his computer.

Fast forward to April, and he cajoled me in to a trip to Alton Towers (against his doctor's advice). He got in free in his wheelchair, I got a discount as a 'carer' for the day. It was a laugh, I remember. I went home happy, and thrilled, and didn't hear from Calum again.

I assumed the worse. I was wrong, though. He reappeared on-line in August, having been in hospital for most of the time between. He came across as very tired, and I was able to say goodbye to him properly.

This tore me apart at the time, but from where I am now, I can see it for what it was - a strong, if unusual, friendship and one that will stay with me for a long time to come.

I had lunch with Mr Chan. He seems to be doing well, despite his recent move from the comfort of Bridges Street to the distant shores of Ma On Shan. He is one of these distressingly thin people who seem to have no obvious hips or other ways of keeping up their trousers. I suspect that he has been implanted with magnets to save himself from trouser slippage embarrassment.

In Singapore, couples are to be paid for babies. In the sense of being paid to have babies, rather than being offered money in exchange for them. Apparently the island's population is shrinking to unacceptable levels, and this is the best way to remedy the fact. Now the thing is, it's not an awful lot of money. It's significant, but not enough to offset the costs of raising a child. It's being presented as a reward to families for having more children, but it's really more like a family income benefit than anything else.

Nonetheless, people are angry. After all, the world is hideously overpopulated, and any efforts to increase that can do little apart from appear selfish.

And in my right ear, Air, the so-called "French Band" with their lilting lift-music made palatable, and in the left, my secretary discussing time travel.

Which reminds me that on Sunday night we broke from an evening of enjoying Victoria Wood's Dinnerladies, to indulge in a lengthy consequence of the perceived effects of faster than light communication. My postulated position is this: Consider pushing a button to make the word 'oops' appear on a computer monitor, where the computer works at faster than light speeds, and everything is slowed down to ridiculous levels where the delays can be perceived.

• I decide to push the button. Signals pass from my mind to my finger that say 'push... do it now'
• I push the button. This sends two signals - one to the computer, and one to my brain, both saying that the button has been pressed.
• The word 'oops' appears on the monitor
• I realise that I have pressed the button
• I notice the word 'oops'

My problem with this is that causality doesn't break down and time never goes backwards. I think I need to go back to basic relativity and build a new hypothesis from scratch.

I just had another cryptic career conversation. At this stage in my caffeine-fuelled afternoon I find myself more worried about the ticklish spot inside my nose, and the fact that while I can barely keep my eyes open, I know that if I close them I won't go to sleep. I want to go home, but I promised an Indian consultant that I would wait for him to get in touch with me, thereby pasting myself into a corner. Foolish.

As a semi-serious question, I earlier asked Mr Twinky what a suitable birthday present would be. The reply "a hug" falls well within my budget, but seemed somewhat lacking in inspiration. I probed more deeply. "A big hug." I think this is a large part of why I fell in love in the first place.

When I was a kid, nightmares would go away if you ran screaming to your mum, woke up half your household and generally caused domestic chaos. Now I've grown up things are a little different.

I've just woken up from the nightmare in question, I can view it rationally, and I know that it's not a prediction of the truth - where would I find a a katana anyway? And at this time of night?? I don't know what the rational thing to do is. I don't really want to go back to sleep, and I don't really want to discuss the gory details of the dream in question, and I don't want to wake anyone up so that they can tell me I will be all right.

So I'm going for the old standby of displacement activity. Online, since I don't want to disturb anyone else by playing loud music.

The Corrs: In Blue

OK, perhaps it's unfair to judge this particular book by its Enid Blyton cover. Maybe they're really a team of ruthless gangsters who are using the music as a front for their more sinister activities.

This is from the BBC. The question is - what sinister activities are the Corrs up to?

I'm sure that the right-thinking public could find out - and be entertained at the same time. Consider this proposition. Tie the Corrs to four chairs, dim the lights, and spot light them. They will either be intimidated or they will start singing. Let's assume that they are intimidated. So we have four intimidated irish musicians. Now get a heavyweight from the world of politics or entertainment - say Madeleine Albright or Jane Franchi to interview them, and indeed cross-examine them. Link their performance to royalties. Can't remember the name of Doreen Corr's favourite track... I'm sorry but your royalties go down 0.1%... Then, at the end, ask them what sinister activities they are planning. Give them a choice of four, let them phone friends, whatever... I know I wouldn't watch it.

What colour is antimatter? I'm sure that of itself, it has no particular colour - I have no idea what colour an electron is so I would have no idea what colour a positron would be. But built up in to pure elements... that would be another matter. Gold, for instance, is golden. Kind of obviously. What colour would anti-gold be? Metallic blue? It probably depends on the circumstances of the observer. Air is transparent - would anti-air be opaque? Or would anti-air be opaque to people, but transparent to anti-people, due to the anti-photons? I seriously doubt that I care.

Tomorrow's acheivement will be getting a wee pumpkin into the internet exploder address bar.

I've just been told that I am the talk of my organisation at all levels, and that my MD is going to put together the best package that he can to keep me here for another year. I've told him that if it was just up to me, it wouldn't be a problem, and that I would work for him regardless. However, now I have more than me to consider and that scares me and comforts me in ways I don't want to understand. So I have deferred the decision once more, waiting for an offer, which I expect before the end of the month. I don't know which way to jump.

I am a corporate whore, playing hard to get. I am also a media whore, using my split personalities for churlish gain and spurious kudos.

Programming my mobile phone to play Axel F. On the cosmic scale, this is probably a meaningful thing.

Geth writes to me to say that :

I just did a back-of-the-envelope calculation, and have discovered a problem with the Annual Gathering. I reckon it clashes rather badly with the last edition of 'Big Brother'. So maybe I'll have to disappear halfway through the dessert course to find a telly to see who wins the prize.

Naturally, I don't care about this, but I am intrigued by the whole phenomena of shows like this. An interesting evolutionary step in television, although I think it's only a matter of time before it pervades all aspects of our media. In the same way that shows like America's Funniest Home Videos evolve naturally into America's Funniest Car Crashes and When Animals Attack, I fully expect to discover that the next wave of shows to include groups of people locked up together in a range of wacky and wacky situations... 10 people stuck in a pub (any british soap), or a prison (Cell Block H) or 10 world leaders locked in a room with Madeleine Albright. I could be on to something here.

The audience gets to vote who stays, who goes. In the case of the prison, they could also determine who gets brutally sexually abused by the guards. In the case of the Madeleine Albright Show, she could set them challenges, like identifying small countries based only on information about their religious beliefs, or their national boundaries, or their GDP. You could probably get that one sponsored by so many companies...

Without a credit card, I am unable to shop on line, and that worries me in strange ways - in many ways it worries me more than the fact that I lost the damn thing in the first place.

I know that some of my on-line shopping will fail. I suspect that I will get a barrage of complaining e-mails, including threats, no doubt. It's kind of annoying. But until I get a new credit card there is sod all I can do about it.

In the mean time my finances are in a mess, and I put down my last mug of coffee somewhere and can't find it now. Still, tonight is 'serial tuesday night' so I can probably plough through paperwork while Mr Twinky is engrossed.