Useful facts of the evening:
- Orange have started sending a Missed Call Alert if your mobile phone is out of range when a person calls. (discussion here)
- St John’s Wood is the only London tube station whose name contains none of the letters from the word “mackerel”.

I’ve been on a diet for two weeks and all I’ve lost is fourteen days.
Totie Fields
I’ll be a lithe, athletic Adonis before you can say “two cream buns and seven flapjacks please”. Not only is there 2 to 3 sessions of rowing a week (that’s the sport, not the arguments – although many might consider that a sport…), but I’m now on the Kelloggs Diet. It consists of Special K for breakfast and lunch, and a normal meal at night. Within two weeks, you should see seismic shifts in your waistline. Most of my office have joined in, and the rows upon rows of milk and cereal in our staff room would give Vanessa Feltz a heart attack.
Clever marketing ploy, or genuine success? Well, I was sceptical. Until Natasha, a work colleague, lost one and a half stone in a month. Admittedly, I started 3 weeks after her, but the Wibbler waistline has barely budged an inch.
And now, after one and a half weeks of endless cereal bowls, I discover to my horror that I’ve been doing it all wrong. Eating after 7, apparently, is a no no. And seeing as I don’t usually eat at home until around 9 or 10 – and it’s never a small meal Chez Wibbler – this is a definite trouser-stretching issue.
So, a fresh cereal burst is in order. I feel fitter – I can now walk up the steepest hill in Guildford without gasping for dear life – but there’s little physical difference. Onwards and upwards.

Can someone tell me about OnSpeed please? Their strapline “Speed up your internet without hassle” come two a penny nowadays, but it appears that this actually works. You can have a dial-up connection at your standard 56kps, slap on OnSpeed software, and it speeds it up by 5 times as much. You can even triple broadband speeds. All for ?2 a month. Their website shows rave reviews from computer magazines, so they must be on to something (although The Guardian’s review was a little more balanced about it, mentioning the poorer graphics and same-speed file downloading). Has anyone used it?

Two stunning new purchases have turned up – the cracking new album from Easyworld, “Kill The Last Romantic” (tracks 2 and 8 are rather fetching), and a huge tome from Boris Johnson, “Lend Me Your Ears“. That’s my weekend sorted.

Two videos:
- Bored kids jump a house with a radio-controlled car.
- The human beatbox. Truly impressive.
(Thanks to the saviour of Friday afternoons, the FHM Newsletter)

Jeffrey Veen: Seven Steps to Better Presentations. All very good points, and even manages to fashionably get a dig at George Bush into it…

A few weeks ago, I reached out to wibbler.com readers for a video of Boris Johnson‘s latest appearance on Have I Got News For You. Then, out of the blue, Richard “Badger’ Lyons turned up with the goods, and a small video-shaped parcel landed on my doormat the other day. Thanks, Badger!

Blair obviously thinks he’s on to a winner with these Inquiries. First the whitewash, now the obscure-question-that-nobody-asked Inquiry. We all want to know the reasons we went to war, and why Blair made the decision. So what does he do? Order an enquiry into intelligence services that, whatever the outcome, doesn’t even touch any political decisions made by him. I’m in awe of the audacity.
But back to the great white Hutton Report. Tim, of bloggerheads fame, has started a campaign to support the BBC in its troubled times:

Click it. Go on. And as Expat says, “The BBC is a venerable institution providing a service to the world, and to have it crippled or eliminated on the basis of an increasingly questionable government investigation would be a travesty.” A travesty that Rupert Murdoch would be pleased about – his media empire loyally reporting the BBC’s demise in America is enough to make you retch…

Workmate Phil: “Right. Plan of action. JLo is single and there’s a Bentley going free…”

Tired of Realplayer hogging your computer with spyware and adverts? There is another way. Uninstall it, and read the following (originally from here):
“The BBC made a unique deal with Real Networks which disposes of their spyware tactics. Basically, if a user clicks on a link (this one) to download Real Player from a BBC website, the referrer script sends them to a page where they can download an expiry-free, spyware-free and nuisance-free version of the player. It’s because the BBC have such a stringent public service remit, that it was offensive to charge people a license fee for BBC content, then make them pay all over again for the facility to view/listen to it.”