The Office I installed Office 12 a few days ago, well Beta 1, and it's not bad. Not bad at all. The obvious things like the update UI look great, I think the ribbon bars are a top idea. Outlook which looked pretty good anyway has been tweaked and had a bunch usability shortcuts added. The LCS integration is already in place and when the WSS and SPS bits are finished it'll be very impressive. Yep...being beta it suffers from some of the usual undocumented features that litter beta software but I'm happy enough with it not to go back to Office 2003.

Pebble smebble... Who was it who thought it was a good idea to render perfectly good looking Georgian houses with a mixture of cement and gravel? I hope the 1950 precusor to Sarah Beeny who dreamt this up has a red hot poker where the sun doesn't shine.

Zens dead baby! Sadly my Creative Zen has died, well not died exactly, but has a terminal illness. Creative have had a few problems with the Zen Micro, specifically the 3mm headphone socket which can drop one of the stereo channels so it sounds like your listening underwater. It seems as if the Neeon has had this defect passed on. As I got it from a guy in Hong Kong via eBay I think I've paid the price of being an early adopter. C'est la vie! All is not lost though as the Zen has a standad Seagate 5Gb microdrive in it and that'll fit nicely in my camera. So....with what remains of my last Ebay sale I picked up a 1Gb mobiBLU DAH-1700. I know I'd never heard of mobiBLU either but they seem to make the world's smallest WMA/MP3 players. The 1700 is about half the size of a lipstick, has a tiny colour screen but...and this is the killer...it's OLED, so it uses about 25% of the juice of an LED screen and can be viewed in direct sunlight. Battery life is a consequence very impressive. It even comes with a video transcoder so will play MPEG4 vids and has a picture viewer too. OK so the screen is too small to watch Star Wars properly but it makes for great geekware.

Xbox 360...it's rather good Had my first play with an Xbox 360 today and I was rather impressed. Played Call of Duty 2 and King Kong, both look stunning. The controller is a delight to use too. It's gonna be a monster especially with the updated Xbox Live.