Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Bank holiday! Lovely. Still recovering from my birthday picnic: one reader did uncover the URL -- as it was his birthday too he was spending the day elsewhere. But take a bow, Bill Pechey of Hayes, whose nose for a party is clearly as keen as Hayes' modems are for gobbling data.

Any rumours that a hardy bunch of picnickers was later thrown out of the Flask pub in Highgate for crimes connected with overrefreshment are false, and should be disregarded.

Tuesday

Yikes. International Computers Limited -- Britain's answer to IBM in the days when we built jet airliners and had a space programme, a car industry and absolutely no sense of style - has thrown its lot in with Microsoft. The press release talks in glowing terms about jobs created (500 in the UK), people trained, citizen-centric computing