I hated school. Of course, looking back on it, it’s with a certain fondness, but if I’m honest, at the time, I didn’t enjoy it, and I used to think that the ex-pupils who’d made it as MPs or sportsmen (all boys’ school) or writers or something successful then came back and lectured us on how important it was to get a good start in life were self-serving cretins. I always vowed that if I was invited back to do the same I’d accept, and use it as a platform to slate the place.

I’m glad to say I’ve mellowed considerably since then, but that didn’t stop me pausing for thought when I received an email yesterday morning from my old business studies teacher asking if I’d give a presentation at the back end of March.

I’m not particularly inclined to do it. I was hoping to go away at the end of March, but it’s already starting to look busy with everyone booking off time around then. Even so, if I’m in London I’m not sure I’d have much worth saying on a ‘business and IT’ topic. It’s very broad.

So, at the moment the email is sitting in my inbox with an action flag beside it while I have a think. Quite apart from anything else, I wasn’t a well behaved pupil, and it’s going to feel strange calling a teacher ‘John’ rather than tugging at a forelock and explaining my actions.

Meanwhile, I’ve fallen in love with the sound of Venus Hum. I came across them quite by chance, the previous owner of my Mac in the office having left a copy of their album on the hard drive. I’d been studiously ignoring it for the last four months, but… what a mistake.

I listened to the album from front to back three times in a row, then dug it out on Amazon only to find it is copy protected, which isn’t much good if you want to put it on an iPod. The only copy they had in Virgin was the same, so I ended up dropping it back onto the shelf.

It makes a complete mockery of this whole anti-music piracy thing, though. I wanted to buy the album because I liked the MP3s, but because it won’t let me make copies of it to play on my portable device, I’d rather not buy it. So much for MP3s killing the music industry.

Ho-hum.

I also - finally - got around to upgrading to OS X 10.3, which truly puts Windows to shame. In fact, it puts 10.2 to shame, and even that was pretty good. It actually makes connecting the iBook to my Windows network easier than connecting a third Windows PC, which is a pretty shameful state of affairs. Only trouble is, with all the ‘improvements’ I’m losing track of my keyboard shortcuts, some of which seem to have changed for no good reason.

I’m still not entirely sold on Expose, but what I do like, and discovered entirely by accident, was that by holding down the scroll wheel of a Microsoft mouse and turning it either backwards or forwards you can cycle through your open applications. If they implemented that in Windows it would be a great time saver.

Cycling through open applications using the mouse scroll wheel

1. PCW Awards
   It's half past eight and I'm writing this in the office because I don't know if I'll actually get home this evening. There is nobody...
   
   
2. 19,257
   Well, my plans for tripping around the place and meeting people this week have rather fallen through. That's a shame, but it has given me...
   
   
3. Vapid PR alert
   Working in PR. It's not all parties, lunches and chasing up journalists' lost luggage. Someone working in just that industry dropped a mouse in the...