Reasons to be cheerful:

• It's Friday and I have a weekend of variety: 2 days of fun and frolics lie ahead of me.
• It's Mr Falletti's birthday so we've forced him to dress as the magician he is.
• After 3 months of unpleasant uncertainty, I finally own my home; so now I know where I'll be living for the foreseeable future, and can get on with the various jobs which have piled up over the last 4 years. Massive weight lifted from mind.
• It was the cats birthday yesterday, and they celebrated by murdering their first bird. I returned home to a pile of feathers and half-chewed sparrow parts. Part of me is appalled at their obvious love of cruelty, whilst part of me is proud that - just occasionally - they can be Proper Cats, red in tooth and claw.

This Place is Not a Place of Honor: "There's no telling who might be around to exhume our radioactive sins in future centuries, but the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) mandates that warnings be erected which will warn away potential intruders for the next 10,000 years, whomever those intruders may be."

Wonderful, and obviously reminiscent of the work the Long Now Foundation do.

The phone of the future: wired to run your life: "Harry Santamäki vows to take a sip of cod liver oil from the bottle on his desk if he ever utters the word phone."

The ideas interview William Davies: " My plea is simply that we should give serious and sustained thought to what types of cultural norms are going to be needed to make ours a civil and decent society which can respect the norms of public space, without being locked into private forms of entertainment and quasi-socialising."

I posted some brief thoughts on SMS and instant messaging a few weeks back which triggered a bit of discussion... and prompted Jag to email me this document - a white paper he's co-authored looking at IP messaging from an operator perspective, and making some suggestions for approaches.

When I last saw Jag he mentioned a Spanish operator who had an interesting pricing model for IM: users are billed one-off at the start of a conversation, but get X minutes of messaging thereafter included into the price. So your typical use cases (short conversations) are still priced at a flat-fee, whilst longer conversations generate more revenue. Good to see there's still room for experimentation here - and that some operators are giving new stuff a go...