Over the last few days, I’ve had a lot of comments on my blog. Which is all well and good – and there’s even genuine-looking content on said comments, implying they’ve at least looked at the blogpost in question.

However, each comment leaves a link to a website of their choice, which turns out to be a purely commercial enterprise, whether it’s a weight-loss programme, a Chicago lawyer or a Southampton business directory.

Which leaves me wondering why people would take the painstaking time and effort to come to my blog, read an entry, make some comment related to the blogpost in question – all for a link from my blog. The last time I checked, my Google pagerank was 4, which isn’t exactly huge in the grand scheme of things. Besides which, WordPress automatically adds a nofollow tag to each outgoing user-submitted link, so adding links to my blog is a somewhat pointless exercise anyway.

So, faux-real spam commentators, what on earth *are* you doing here?

So, the man third in line to the British throne is caught on camera joking around and calling one of his Army colleagues and ‘mates’ a “Paki”. Apparently, it was all just a bit of joking, Harry gets called ginger quite often (so that’s alright then) and anyway it was all three years ago, he’s a different man, we apologise on Harry’s behalf, can we please all forget it now? Lest it be forgotten, this is also the same guy who wore a Nazi uniform to a fancy dress party.

Er…. no.

It points out the huge flaw in British society where the guy is so cut-off from the rest of British society, he’s missed the fact it’s been an insult for the last thirty-or-so years. And unless said Army colleague goes around saying “Hello, I’m a Paki” (which, frankly, seems a tad unlikely), you certainly don’t call a friend that.

What amazes me are the people who rush to his defence. Have they not been anywhere in the last decade or so? You rather expect latent knee-jerk racism from his grandfather the Duke of Edinburgh, since he’s 2000 years old. But from a 24-year-old?

Personally, unless I see an actual apology from Harry – not his office or whatever – then I’ll continue to believe he’s ignorant at best, a Hooray-Henry racist thug at worst.

Quite a few bloggers (see the full guestlist) and I were invited into Central London to preview what exciting things Microsoft had in store for us for 2009/2010, in an event apparently termed Microsoft-hosted CESfest 09. So off we duly went.

The mystery about what was going to be revealed at said event was somewhat spoilt by the extensive press coverage from CES 09, including a preview of Windows 7 and some enhancements for Windows Live Messenger, but they revealed all to us (and a webstream) anyway.

So now you’ll be wanting to know what exciting new improvements there are to Windows 7….
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Admittedly, I’m not exactly a trained economist, but it doesn’t take one to spot that despite lowering interest rates four times to their lowest ever levels, banks still won’t put their own money into the system, and consumers won’t spend.

In the meantime, sensible consumers who didn’t buy huge houses they couldn’t afford during the good times and instead saved, are now being punished by interest rates so low they’re not worth bothering with. My tax-free savings account now attracts a woeful interest rate of 1%, which is a pretty useless rate – and the top-earning equivalent only gives you 3.6% interes – and even then, a previous bank kept “losing” my application for their ISA account.

It’s almost as if the government wants me to blow my savings on a wild spending spree in the economy – and then rely on the welfare state when the inevitable still happens and I lose my job. Because the banks certainly aren’t going to keep saving interest rates high, and mortgage rates low – so who else can pump money into the economy? Surely the only thing left to do is for the government to start actually spending its money on the country, providing jobs, instead of propping up an increasingly irrelevant banking system?

Having rebuilt my Dad’s laptop over Christmas so it can now write in the version of Chinese that he wants, I unfortunately seem to have left it wide open to the point where he keeps getting pop-ups insisting that he has a virus, and that he has to pay $60 to get rid of it.

Obviously, it’s just one of those spammy pop-up things, but what’s a good one-stop application to block most security loopholes? I’m loathe to install Norton AntiVirus or whatever since it just tends to slow down everything in its’ path!

to be announced on BBC One tomorrow afternoon at 5.35pm.

I notice that myself and David Hasselhoff have a window in our schedule, so we’re still in the running I guess.

Of course, I still have a £20 bet on David Morrissey, so there’s hope yet.