I went to the see the NBA game at the O2 Arena on Sunday evening on a last minute whim - Chris had a ticket spare. The game was certainly entertaining (everything the Telegraph says about attention deficit disorder is true), even though I know little about basketball. It gave me a chance to try out my (new to me) telephoto lens. I was a little disappointed with the results once I pulled them off the camera - I had trouble sucking in enough light whilst getting stable shots - but I still ended up with one or two reasonable ones, although mostly not of the game itself.

My work Thinkpad (a T61) was becoming a little crufty, so I decided to reinstall it from scratch. Here are a few lessons I learnt along the way: Making a hot copy of your entire drive onto a USB hard disk with VMWare Converter beforehand is a great idea. This basically means you have your entire previous installation still bootable, so you can rescue any data or settings you forgot about, after you’ve done the reformat and reinstall.

Super. After the mean folks at Comedy Central stopped allowing streaming of The Daily Show outside the US, it’s now available again, courtesy of Channel 4 Catch Up. If you’ve never watched it, it’s definitely worth a peek. Jon Stewart is pretty funny, and although it has an obvious leftist bias, it has an even greater bias for ridiculing deserving politicans. Kinda the American Have I Got News For You, without the panel-game element.

I was just about to diversify my savings into a newly-opened Icesave ISA this evening. Boy, am I glad it took me a while to get round to it. Now to try and guess analyse the best place for my money.

Decent Hamburger restaurant in Kensington. Well worth a try. Another similar option is Tootsie’s, nearby.

I suddenly realised that I expect Amazon (and indeed many other websites) to correct my misspellings in the same way as Google: Did you mean: lost in translation ? But it doesn’t. They should fix this.

The son of one of the world’s most influential and talented economists is obviously a total geek. How wonderful. Oh, and get this blog comment and response. Update 16:58: Then, of course, you read this. Why don’t economists get any respect?

I grumbled to the nice folks at TripIt because I wasn’t eligible for their referral competition, so they sent me a T-shirt instead. So I think it’s only fair that I put in a good word for them: Try it. If you travel a lot it’s invaluable. It’s free. It’s better than Dopplr. Er… that’s it.

I’m kinda undecided on the BAA break-up. The FT thinks it should definitely go ahead. But as a fairly strict libertarian, and therefore keen on economic freedom, I’ve always had a problem with monopoly break-up except in the most extreme of cases (and I’m not sure this qualifies). Nevertheless, as my job now takes me onto an aeroplane more than I before, I’m curious and so I read the summary from the Competition Commission’s provisional report.

I’m beginning to enjoy transport in London almost as much as Richard. Got to Waterloo this morning to find that once again, the Jubilee line entrance was closed - this happened last Monday too. Not being a fan of taking replacement buses and braving the crowds with two large bags half-way across London, I copped out and got a taxi. But what’s going on here? And why are TfL incapable of communicating with me when it does?