Due to requests from Mrs C for BBC4 as they have a habit of putting all the good stuff on there first, I've finally joined the digital TV age via the rather excellent Sony VTXD800U. It's a freeview box so I get the advantage of digital TV and radio without having to spend a fortune on Sky Digital. And before you say, "Well Tony Sky has numptyzillion channels, Freeview has what eight and most of those are terrestial. " I'd say, "But all the Sky channels are bollox!" And I'd be right. Oh and the Minuteman album Double Nickels on the Dime is brilliant. Where was I in 1993 and how did I miss it?

Recently finished the book in the right hand panel (yes I’ll change it to my latest read ASAP) and if you have any interest in games consoles, especially of course the Xbox, it’s worth a gander. If you have no interest in such things then it’ll be a good for your insomnia. It’s a bit of a mixed bag of comments about hacking, in the true sense of the term, security, fair use rights, the issues raised by the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act and lot’s of stuff about how to dismantle the Xbox and change things usually involving a soldering iron. If you want to change the green light to a blue one…look no further. Interested in how to glue extra bits to the motherboard this is the book you’ve been waiting for. OK, so there was about half the book I skipped over as it’s very, very geeky and in many cases breaks the Xbox as a games machine. What it won't tell you is how to copy games and generally pirate stuff, which would under the DMCA would be illegal, but a useful book if you want to know how the Xbox works.

Being the owner of a vaguely sporty German car I do get a disproportionate number of teenage hatchback drivers trying to tempt me into road related challenges. However being a sensible adult of indeterminate age I invariably decline, but having read this I might pick up an old Ford Granada and throw down the gauntlet.

Anyone who has been interviewed for a job has probably had the classic, "What's your worst mistake and what did you learn from it?" asked of them. But I suppose as George ‘Dubya’ Bush probably never had a job before becoming President it should come as no surprise that he made a ‘dogs dinner’ of it when asked this last week. It was his only third televised press conference in three years and his comment, "Hmmm. I wish you'd have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it", probably had the usually compliant American press choking on their Starbucks. This man is supposedly the leader of the free world and he can’t hand the most basic of questions; if the Republicans aren’t worried they should be now. As a related aside, am I the only one to to find this headline from Yahoo funny? "Gay Republicans torn over endorsing Bush."

This is scary.

Read an interesting article in The Observer on Sunday. Apparently during the Battle of Britain German fighter pilots were paid a bonus for every Spitfire and Hurricane they shot down. If the management maxim that compensation drives behaviour is to be believed it should have been a resounding success but it wasn’t. They forgot that their role was to protect the bombers not to chasing around after the British fighters, but more importantly they over estimated the number of aircraft they shot down so thereby changing the way the commanders directed the battle. This approach to compensation is still used today as a way to motivate employees but there is almost no evidence to suggest that it actually works, on the contrary much of the research carried out suggests it is counterproductive. So why do organisations still do it? Well there’s no denying that it has an effect and for most managers this is enough as gives them illusion that they are achieving something, but the reality is that managing people by bribes is a crude and corrosive way to run an organisation. Written in 1968 Frederick Herzberg’s Harvard Business Review article, One More Time: How Do You Motivate Employees points out that satisfaction and dissatisfaction with a job are not as you would suspect two sides of the same coin. Herzberg argues that the opposite of dissatisfaction with a job is no job dissatisfaction. Money, like work conditions, relations with peers, status and, above all, company policy and supervision, were what he called 'hygiene factors' - aspects external to the job that could make people unhappy if they were inadequate, but which weren't motivational. Motivators, on the other hand, were factors intrinsic to the job: achievement, recognition, responsibility, advancement and personal growth. It follows from this that most motivational tools, from exhortation to pay incentives, are useless: people can only motivate themselves. As Herzberg famously wrote: 'If you want people motivated to do a good job, give them a good job to do.'

The John Lewis Partnership, which includes Waitrose supermarkets, is 75 years old this week and is still a ‘mutual’ where profits are shared and decisions are either voted on or at least scrutinised by the staff or ‘partners’. As you can imagine this sort of business model runs stick out like a sore thumb especially amongst retailers where mutuality is considered inefficient and inflexible, but with the current state of many high street names like Marks & Spencer and the House of Frasier you have to ask if JLP have had the right model all along.

The interesting thing about the latest feeding frenzy regards the ‘Beckhams’ is not as we’d be lead to believe that David Beckham did or didn’t have carnal knowledge of someone other than his wife, or that Victoria is still trying to relaunch her career. Who’s going to tell her? It’s the wonderful tabloid language, particularly the use of the word ‘romp’, as in “Becks in drug fuelled romp with Rebecca.” When did you last hear anyone use the word ‘romp’ in normal everyday conversation? Not for at least a hundred years, so what is it about such usage that compels your average sub editor to regress to a time when the Royal Family spoke German?

I was idling channel hopping last night when I happened upon a football match played between some blokes in brightly coloured shirts. They were playing for some London boroughs if memory serves and by all accounts it was quite important. I had to laugh when one of the commentators, for that is what they call them, remarked that the Spanish referee (the one in the black getup) was adjudicating at a very 'English' occasion. He must have felt a prize pillock when his companion pointed out that only six of the twenty two players were actually UK Passport holders. I understand the guys in the red and white shirts lost....ho hum!

Apparently the iPod is too difficult for some people to use. I disagree of course. As usual when a gap appears in the market someone fills it as wePod have proved, they’ll take your CD’s and stick them on your iPod for you. Do you think there’s still an opportunity to help people who still can’t programme their VCR?

Sun and Microsoft kiss and make up. The savings in lawyers fees alone makes this a rather a good idea.