I would love it if someone could find a way that I could change the subject line of an email I received so it displayed and was searchable as I changed it but would stay the same as the original if I reply or forward that email. For example I could take an email with subject “My doodad is fubared” and change it to “doodad problem 7” thus making it easy for me to find it again and know what is in it when scanning my mailboxes. Eudora offered this feature I seem to recall…

I just heard about the Blogathon. On August 6th, bloggers will participate in a 24 hour marathon of posting for charity – one post every half hour. I think this is a nifty idea and there are some good charities on their suggested list (though in fact you can blog for any charity you like). I encourage anyone reading to participate themselves, though it turns out I can’t do it myself.

If you are thinking of doing this yourself and trying to find a charity to support, I did some investigation and chose wateraid as my potential beneficiary (when I thought I might participate in the blogathon) because potable drinking water is a basic necessity without which it’s hard to do any further development and the organization appears to be doing good environmentally sensitive and sustainable work in this area.

Wouldn’t you know it I ended up in Bloomsbury where two of the blasts occurred and suddenly it seemed like everywhere I looked were police cordons and other things that reminded me of the bombs. I have put up a few pictures on Flickr that I took using my mobile phone’s lousy camera and added them to the London Bomb Blasts pool there.

A friend I hadn’t heard from for a while popped up on my blog and posted about her concern at “the way these ‘murders’ are somehow seen as worse than the many other ‘murders’ we know of, from rapes and muggings through hit-and-run driving deaths to deaths from starvation.” Well, I certainly wouldn’t go as far as she does on that point – after all there is, I believe, a moral difference between deliberately killing people and neglecting to save their lives when this is possible. But it’s certainly worth thinking about.

Above is a UN map of the proportion of the world’s population that is malnourished (more details statistics are available from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization). While the global media’s attention focuses on an attack which likely killed 50 people, it swivels away from the G8’s inadequate response to the ongoing disastrous situation much of the world where 24,000 people die of starvation every day – a situation that global climate change may only make worse.

As for the attack itself, it seems to indicate to me that the so-called ‘war on terror’ continues to be fought in the wrong ways. No amount of surveillance (and London may be the surveillance capital of the world) can keep determined terrorists from striking. The only way to deal with terrorism is at its source – in other words a ‘hearts and minds’ campaign.

Obviously, the West can’t (and shouldn’t) attempt to meet the terrorists’ ‘demands’ (insofar as they are articulated). But we should, where possible, attempt to deal with some of the Arab world’s legitimate grievances over our behaviour. We should, for example, be leaning on Sharon that if he is going to impose a peace settlement it should at least be a just one which leaves Palestine in a form capable of taking care of itself. We should also be talking a little more about how to reduce civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s outrageous that the coalition doesn’t even publish figures on this issue leaving the counting to volunteers like Iraq Body Count – giving the erroneous impression that the coalition authorities there aren’t concerned with the problem and handing terrorists potent propaganda.

At the back of my mind there has always been the knowledge that London is a prime terrorist target – I had hoped that we would be spared given the time that has passed since 9/11 and Madrid – evidently not.

Thankfully, we are safe and so far nobody we know has been directly affected though of course some people we know have been inconvenienced and a close friend’s wife who could have been near one of the blasts was not heard from for five and a half nerve wracking hours before turning up unharmed at home.

It’s striking that for at least five hours after the blasts there was no UK helpline for people worried about those who are missing (though the State department set one up earlier “For information about American citizens who may have been affected by the July 7 bombings in London, please call 1-888-407-4747”) and it has taken several hours even to get a consistent count of the number of explosions (three on the tube, one on a bus). Some news outlets were still quoting seven for hours afterwards – presumably because where trains were blown up between stations survivors were evacuated in both directions, seemingly doubling the number of tube explosions. The casualty hotline here in London is 0870 1566 344.

Ironically when my parents lived here with me in the 1970s they also had to put up with bombs and scares – at that time from the IRA (and I was here when the IRA bombed Canary Wharf and the City of London).

I’m hopeful that Al Quaeda has now ‘done their worst’ for the moment and since they missed us our lives can return to normal. We’ve been here before and (sad to say) we’ll probably face this again…

A friend suggested that someone should make “an ‘eyedropper’ style tool so I can click to select a location and drag the lat/long onto one of my photos to geocode it with the location information.” (In Flickr, please).

I pointed out LazyWeb exists to help dreams like this come true!

It’s bad enough that crazy frog ads pepper cable TV and that some of the people selling the horrible ring tone seem to have dodgy business practices. If all this wasn’t enough, there seem to be java-enabled banners advertising the ringtone dotted all over the web. They play the wretched tune at me whenever I see them and as often as not they cause my browser to seize up as well. Make it stop!

(Or any other book-fanciers). In last week’s News Quiz (a radio comedy programme that features humorous newspaper and other cuttings alongside topical comedy) they read out this gem from an exhibition programme at University Library in Cambridge:

“Never leave books near mice, pigeons, children and other vermin that are likely to damage them.”

If like me you have a CD collection and a computer with a very large hard disk, do what I am doing and ‘rip’ large parts of your collection to your hard disk then give the CDs away to charity – Oxfam in my case. I have a laptop so I can plug my computer directly into my stereo (and I can’t tell the difference in sound quality between MP3s and my CDs). If you don’t have a laptop though you can get an inexpensive MP3 player (I see they cost as little as £15/$25 these days) and just plug that into your stereo when you want music.

That way you have convenient access to music, you rediscover discs you have probably forgotten about, you have cleared clutter out of your life, and you get to help people lift themselves out of poverty (or whatever charity you prefer). A real win win act!

P.S. If you are worried about how much storage space this would take on your hard disk, I currently have 2730 songs – 7.6 straight days worth of music – in 10Gb of disk space (and you may not need to store every track on every disc – there are probably plenty of tracks you find you don’t want on each one). An external 80Gb drive costs from around £50/$90 these days and would be very useful for backing up as well as music storage (you are backing up regularly, right?)

I just got an email telling me that my publisher is getting rid of its surplus stock of my book Dealing with Email so I’m guessing it won’t be long before it gets remaindered completely. It’s a small book in the Dorling Kindersley Essential Managers series aimed at non-technical managers giving tips on how to manage their own emails and how to handle email in the office effectively (see my companion site at the link above for a more complete introduction).

However the good news is Dorling Kindersley are offering me copies (as many as I want?) cheap so if you would like a copy for yourself or for a friend let me know and I can send it to you for a measly £3/$5 (signed!) plus postage. It may take a while for me to ship them though as I need to figure out how many I should buy from the publisher then they need to send them to me and I need to send yours to you. If you would like something in particular written on your book (or nothing!) just let me know and I would love to know something about you and how and why you found my site…