High Street erasing our sense of value.

Pencil end erasers. Pretty colours ain't they. 35p from Wlkinsons. A bargain.

Pop along to W. H. Smith and you'll find a pack of 10 of the same* for £1.99. Ya gotta wonder why.

*OK, they might not be exactly the same. The Wilko ones are from China. I don't know where the Smiths ones are from and I'm not going to waste £1.64 to find out.

Fi Fa Ho Hum

There was an old boy called Sepp Blatter,
Who kept his job with his smooth patter,
The world thought him sleazy,
But he was quite breezy,
So his wallet got fatter and fatter.

Bloat, bloat, glorious bloat.

My laptop, which is not quite two years old, is full. It has a 120GB hard drive split three ways: C: has roughly 20GB for the system and programs, D: has 83GB for files, and most of the rest is a restore partition. D has only 52MB (yes MB) free. I've been using an excellent little disk analysis tool called Disk Space Fan (http://www.diskspacefan.com/) to help find the junk and programs that I never use and try to find a bit of space until I get a chance to fit a new drive.

It's quite revealing. You wouldn't believe how much space some programs take up. For example, Adobe takes up 266MB. Within this there's an old version of Photoshop, Elements 2 at 91MB, and Adobe Reader 8 at 174MB. Why? It reads PDFs. This isn't Acrobat, it's just the reader. Admittedly 95MB of those 174 are setup files but why does it take Adobe 79MB to do something that Foxit manages to do, arguably better, with less than 10MB? The Foxit PDF reader can be found here: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/

Don't sniff at the power of the old bill.

Following the case of the Ayrshire driver who was fined for blowing his nose whilst in a queue of stationery traffic with the handbrake on (as reported in the Daily Mail), perhaps all traffic officers should be on the lookout for boxes of tissues on vehicle dashboards. The next time you're pulled over, don't be surprised if Mr Plod starts grovelling around on the floor looking for snotty tissues.