It’s taken me a long time to get around to watching Downfall (Der Untergang), the German-language film that chronicles the final hours of Hitler’s life. Set entirely in his bunker in the heart of Berlin, it is a strangely moving portrayal of a man - albeit an evil one - who realises that his hopes and dreams are crumbling and that with all the might of the remaining forces at his disposal, he has no way out other than death.

At times, the sentimental treatment of this historical monster can be slightly unsettling. For the most part he is shown as gentle and kind, admired by his staff, all of whom he treats well, and to all of whom he is entirely forgiving and understanding. Eva Braun, too, is shown as a doting lover and, eventually, wife, who would happily go to her death because she is doing so beside the man who means more than anything else in her life. She is the happiest, most optimistic and liveliest person in the bunker, neither too morose to throw a party as the Russian artillery pounds away all around them, nor too superior to sit with the infantrymen and get drink with them in the last few hours and minutes.

Perhaps the most tragic and uncomfortable scenes, though, are those which surround the Goebbels family. Joseph Goebbels was Hitler’s propaganda minister, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that his wife, Magda, should be so committed to the cause of National Socialism. At one point she falls at Hitler’s feet, begging him not to kill himself, for she cannot bear the thought of a world without National Socialism as a framework in which they can live.

And yet she was the stronger of the two - in this portrayal at least - in the uncomfortable scenes in which she murders her children. Aged between four and 12, they are drugged and, as they fall under the influence of the morphine and lay sleeping in their beds, she puts a cyanide capsule between each child’s teeth, squeezes their jaw to break it in their mouths and, as they take a single last breath, pull blankets over their faces, exposing their feet. It is the most disturbing and memorable scene of the whole film.

How the Goebbels died - whether they killed themselves or were killed by the SS at their own request - isn’t entirely known, but Downfall chooses the former, with Joseph first shooting his wife in the bunker compound, before turning the gun on himself in the closing scenes.

It is an extraordinary film, and one that will repay rewatching. Its three hours are gone in an instant and, in the final analysis, you can see that these were truly evil people who found themselves in a desperate situation. If ever there was a film to make you think, it is this.

Who would have believed that there was a secret nursery right in the centre of London (see the BT Tower and Euston Tower in the background). This is about 10 minutes’ walk from my desk, and I never even knew it was there.

Found through the power of geocaching, of course.

Poor old Iceland. Its Eurovision song for this year hasn’t really grabbed me, I must admit, but it’s turning out to be one of the most interesting entries so far.

Its lyrics include the words ‘I’ll fucking win’, which apart from being an unlikely prediction contravenes EBU rules as it includes a swear word.

That wouldn’t be such a problem if they hadn’t already pressed all the CDs for this year’s contest, including the offending words. Now the Union has written to the Icelandic head of delegation to point out that the use of those lyrics on the stage would leave Iceland open to disqualification.

Yet changing the lyrics would also contravene the rules, since no lyric changes can be allowed after the heads of delegation meeting six weeks ago.

So, they’re fucked if they do, and they’re fucked if they don’t.

Iceland’s official response came from Silvia Night, its singer: ‘I’ll fucking say what I fucking want!’

The tubes were a mess this morning. Of the four lines I can get to work, three were out of action, leaving x-thousand people to cram onto the already struggling Central Line.

So, I walked. I hadn’t planned on walking more than a couple of stations, but by the time I got to St Paul’s, heading across the river to Waterloo looked like a better bet than soldiering on. So, I took the wobbly Millennium Bridge and remembered, half way across, that I’d been reading about a geocache on the far side.

It was small, wrapped in tin foil and held in place by magnets, apparently. So, I walked along slowly, carefully examining the metal superstructure for bits of tin foil, and almost gave up when I saw a film canister nestled in between two metal struts. It didn’t look like it could have fallen there; it was upright, and perfectly positioned.

So, I paused for a moment and looked into the water and waited for a crowd of people to pass, then bent down to fix my shoe and picked it up.

‘Geocache,’ it said on the outside. ‘Contents non-harmful. Please leave in place.’

I took a quick look inside, but it contained no treasure - just a small strip of paper for people to log their visits. I didn’t sign it; just slipped it back, snapped on the lid and dropped it back where I found it.

Four caches in five days. Not bad going.

I’ve just stumbled across the BBC Programme Catalogue. It’s one of those oh-wow sites that appear from nowhere, and I can immediately see me using on an almost daily basis.

Here’s an example. Let’s pick an old show at random: That’s Life. Typing it in, we find there were 448 episodes, broadcast between 1968 and 1995. Let’s get more specific and look at That’s Life episodes from 1973, the year I was born. There were 13, all well detailed. The 18 August issue was the one closest to my birthday, and the running order was as follows:

ITEM 01: Administrative errors with AA membership ITEM 02: False calims of dodgy mail order companies, new laws to prevent this ITEM 03: Linda WEBSTER and Mike WALJER get to do a round in Brands Hatch. ITEM 04: Dodgy new and second hand cars. Esther i/vs David TENCH from the Consumers Association. ITEM 05: Judith and Stephanie sing ‘Rack and Ruin’ (2m35) ITEM 06: George presents a humerous look at the autumn programme schedules ITEM 07: Finding foreign objects in food ITEM 08: Esther helps Joan DAVIES to remove her manure heap by donating it to gardeners.

Item 8 would no doubt have been the highlight of the night. Clicking on any of the names in there, though, takes you to individual records for each ones, and there are supplementary links for all the metadata attached to the show.

The most extraordinary thing about it all, though, is the sheer scale of the undertaking. The database contains 948,329 items, covering every news story ever presented, every feature on any BBC radio show, every contributor to help out… And with it stretching back to the 1920s, a lot of it has been transcribed from the original handwritten notes, as they only started using computers to log things in the 1980s.

You can’t work in London (or even visit) without spotting the Jubilee Walkway circles. Some of them - the original ones from 1977 not yet worn to nothing by countless passing feet say Silver Jubilee Walkway, and mark the original route of the walk, as laid out to celebrate Her Madj’s 25 years in the big house. They missed out the large northern loop around Camden on the first attempt, perhaps on account of it being too bohemian for royalty, but that was put right in 2003 when Mayor Livingstone redrew it to mark a doubling of the regal milestone.

So, having seen these all-too familiar circles for most of my life I decided, today, that the time has come to follow the route and see where they actually lead. They start and finish in Leicester Square - that much I do know - but beyond that they are a bit of a mystery, since they seem to appear at seemingly random intervals beneath my feet as we cross paths on random excursions.

Fortunately there’s a web site that explains all about it, and includes an interactive map. In this case, though, ‘interactive’ means hobbled, to such an extent that it’s no good when you’re out and about. What I want is a PDF of the whole thing that I can print out and take with me, but the designers seem to have split the whole thing into a dozen separate parts, each of which must be downloaded and printed on its own.

Yet if you did deep enough, there is a fold-out, all in one, free map, which is just perfect for walkers. Shame, then, that they didn’t have the foresight to put it online. Instead you have to fill in a form and they will post it to you, although the stated timescale is ’soon’, so it could well be next week, next month or the end of summer before it arrives.

If you take time to read the laughable privacy policy, it quickly becomes clear why they want you to apply for it, and why the application fails if you don’t also include your email address and phone number (both of which I faked).

Personal data which we collect about you when you visit this site will be disclosed only to the following types of persons:

* Business Associates and other professional advisors
* Central Government
* Local Government
* Data subjects themselves
* Employees and agents of the data controller
* Local Government
* Other companies in the same group as the data controller
* Persons making an enquiry or complaint
* Suppliers, providers of goods or services
* Survey and Research organisations
* Voluntary and charitable organisations
* Transport for London

It’s the ‘persons making an enquiry’ and ’suppliers, providers of goods or services’ that worry me, since they’re so general and non-specific those two clauses alone could conceivably be used as justification for passing on your data to anyone and everyone, despite the assurance that ‘we will only collect and retain personal data to the extent that it is strictly necessary for our purposes’.

Suddenly those silver discs no longer look quite so innocent.

Rain rain rain, then grey skies. It wasn’t until gone three that it finally cleared up, so I decided to make the best of what remained of the day and head out to try and find another geocache. It didn’t go well. It was down on an old disused railway line, which has lain dormant since 1953. Quite picturesque, very green and fresh, and totally deserted, but muddy, too.

I’d taken the Chinese worry beads I’d picked up in the first cache yesterday afternoon, planning on leaving them in this cache for someone else, but despite making it to the coordinates and finding a fallen mossy log (one of the clues) I couldn’t find the cache box anywhere. I spent about half an hour tramping around in the nettles looking for it and almost slipped into a stream at one point, but had to admit defeat, and headed back to the car.

I’d arranged to meet up with Mark. There should have been a dozen of us, and we were going to watch this year’s Eurovision preview DVD, but in the end it was just the two of us, so we played Russian roulette with his videos and ended up watching A Song for Europe from 1990. Terrible songs, terrible fashion, terrible hair on Terry terrible Wogan. I can’t believe the oversized suits and nasty hairdos they all had were acceptable back then. Neither can I believe that I’m now twice as old as I was back then.

On a side note, Balazs drew my attention to the Degree Confluence Project today, on account of it having interesting parallels to geocaching. It’s a far simpler idea: simply that you visit every coordinate integer (eg N 53, W 01) and take a photo there. Every point in the UK has already been done, to produce this gallery here.

I’ve spent the day geocaching. In the rain, and despite the boggy weather made two good finds.

The idea is simple: people hide a cache - usually something in a plastic box, containing a little bit of treasure and a log - then put a starting coordinate and a clue on the web. You punch the coordinate into your GPS device, pull on your dustiest hiking boots and a fleece, and head out to dig it up. Once you’ve found it, you sign the log, take something out of the cache, replace it with something of your own and then put it all back where you found it.

It’s a modern day treasure hunt.

So, despite the weather, I downloaded two this morning and, after lunch, headed out with Glenda the talking GPS woman, to find them. She took me through Billericay first, and out into the countryside towards Basildon, eventually demanding that I stop beside a very pretty church with a picturesque graveyard in the middle of pretty much nowhere.

It was actually a very easy find, this one. Once you’d walked past the graves and out through a gap in the hedge at the back, there was a long ditch, crumbling slightly where the tree roots were eating away at the ground. My eye was caught by a wooden cross that had obviously fallen from one of the graves, and I assumed that it had been strategically positioned to point at the cache, but despite a bit of ginger digging it appeared to be a red herring. As I stepped backwards, back across the ditch, though, I spotted a small pile of twigs among the roots and, beneath them, a snatch of blue. It was a plastic box containing the cache.

Picking it out, I opened it up and looked through the contents, which were impressively multinational. This had clearly been visited by people from the far east as it contained Hong Kong dollars. and a small set of Chinese worry beads, which I took, and replaced with a half-full loyalty card from Virgin, which will give someone a head start on a free CD if they buy two more.

The next cache on my list was about 10km south. When you start looking for these things, it’s amazing how many there are. If you do a search for caches within 20 miles of my postcode, it turns up 202 results.

Anyhow, this next one was much more difficult. It was in the Lion’s Gorge, which is a big chalk pit with 100ft high walls and steep banks. I got infuriatingly close on my first attempt, but it was obvious I needed to be at the top of one of those walls, rather than the bottom. I looked up, but couldn’t see anything, despite the GPS map showing I was practically on top of it. Little did I know at the time it was practically on top of me.

I eventually found a little steep path and scrambled up to the top where I could look back down into the gorge. By now it was raining, but I spent 15 minutes hunting for the treasure, which was small and, the clue told me, held in place by magnets. It obviously had to be stuck to something metal, so I clambered around the fencing, but couldn’t see it.

By the time the rain was coming through my coat I decided to look for some shelter, so headed half way back down the hill and stood under a tree, studying my map. On looking up, though, I noticed that the bung on the top of one of the fence posts wasn’t properly seated.

I went over and lifted it up, and inside…

…a small zip-lock bag containing some paper, a pen and four magnets, which held it to the inside of the post. A really devious, but quite excellent hiding place. Nobody could have found it by chance, and yet looking at the signatures on the log I was the second person to have been there today; someone else had dug it up (and obviously left the top a little loose) just two hours before.

Messy, messy, messy. Drunken hacks, a table full of drinks dropped into a fireplace, press party food, questionable questions, disputed answers, an argument, a free bar, Paul T spending the night beating up Dave S. A great night had by all. It was, of course, the inaugural IT portfolio quiz night. Can’t wait for the next one.

Paul T explains to those of us who’ve not seen it what Clockwork Orange was all about

Paul T, Dave S and Mother Theresa

Clive probably can’t remember much about this

Dave B needs you

Nik and Dave S

Aston and his halo

A very special fax from a reader today, so furious much of it was illegible:

My experiences of Macs especially security is shitty.

I’ve spent