Rich of March House

If you use Mozilla Thunderbird as your email client and if you keep all your important emails like receipts for holiday payments, furniture orders, bank/tax account log-on details, address books and a gazillion other important life-essential emails in Thunderbird and if one day Thunderbird opens up completely empty and just gives you a dialog box saying you have to create some email accounts before you can use it and if it gives you no indication of ever having known anything about your previous precious documents then you should read these simple recovery instructions before you run around the house screaming and swearing and having a heart attack.

There's lots of refrubishment going on in our office at the moment, including rewiring. Unfortunately the contractors doing the work don't appear to know their ups from their downs. I hope all the electricity doesn't fall out of this socket.

Hypothetically, if a five year old were to stab another five year old at school with a pencil causing a wound and much distress in an unprovoked attack as the latest event in a history of unkind behaviour if not actual bullying,

a) what should the school do about it?

b) what should the parents of the victim do about it if they have already previously raised concerns with the school?

From our works intranet:

The ... Union have called for a day of industrial action on Wednesday 31 January and are in the process of balleting their members.

I'm looking forward to seeing union members walking to work en pointe, glissading to their desks and making grande jetés to the canteen at lunchtime.  Should be a riot.

I went out for a couple of drinks with my friend Pete last night and we came up with a brilliant idea for an experiment.  What we are going to do is:

1. Pick an academic subject in which it is possible to take a GCSE exam.
2. Gather together relevant course books and revision materials.
3. Pick a single day to learn all we can about the subject.
4. Try and pass a GCSE in the subject after our one day's revision.

For the experiment to work we're going to have to pick a subject that neither of us already knows a great deal about, and one that needs neither coursework nor practise (so things like media studies, art and music are out).  Also foreign languages would be rather difficult to pick up in a single day so they're out.  So far we can only think of geology as a suitable subject for the experiment, but we are going to peruse the list of GCSEable subjects to have a look.  Egyptology maybe?

We also thought we might make a video diary of the experiment and sell it to Channel 4.