I write about virtualisation a lot, often, more than I want to — not that VMworld wasn’t oodles of fun, but you do start wanting to stab the eyes out of the next person who creates a company or a product which involves the letter ‘V’ prominently.

Yeah, it’s cool technology — not really new, the naysayers like to point out, and they’re right. And yeah, it’s green and easier to manage and saves cash. All good things, if you run an IT department. But I don’t.

I did, however, recently get a shiny new MacBook at work. I love my MacBook, because unlike its ancient Dell predecessor, it works. But a year and a half of my email is stuck in Outlook, so over the past few weeks I’ve been stuck on Entourage for my email client.

Unsurprisingly for a Mac-only product from Microsoft, Entourage is a piece of crap. It makes Outlook look good. It made me miss Outlook. It made me really,r eally miss Outlook-add-on Xobni, which is a work of pure genius; it makes Outlook useful and functional. (Will wonders never cease, etc.)

This is a surprisingly easy-to-fix problem, especially when your brain is full of virtualisation crap. So I’ve spent a bit of time today installing VMware’s Fusion 2, not only doesn’t involve the letter ‘V’ but is stupidly easy — it would need to be for me to make it work, seriously — and setting up XP and Outlook and now Xobni, with the help of Rich in IT (thanks Rich).

So now I’ve got Outlook docked in my… uh, dock. I click it, and it runs. Xobnified Outlook, on my Mac — so I guess sitting through all those virtualisation sessions was worth it?

And yeah, it’d be better if Entourage didn’t suck, or if I could sync my Outlook emails onto a better Mac client, but if Microsoft (and Apple) are going to be so difficult about things, I’m pretty alright with using software like Fusion and Xobni to make their products, y’know, work.

I’m in the midst of putting the finishing touches on a feature about the tech behind the Large Hadron Collider at Cern in Geneva, which is set to go get going on Wednesday, either giving us all the answers to the universe or killing us in a super-cool way.

Anyway, it’s a Monday at 4pm, and even shiny science stuff isn’t enough to keep my focus. So I’ve been googling around looking at other LHC stories, and came across a rap a Cern boffin wrote and filmed a video for on location. Yeah, they’re dancing around the collider.

This is either science getting cool, or rap getting seriously uncool — or possibly a little of both. Either way, it’s hilarious.

I propose a party for September 9th. Blow all your cash on booze and whatever else tickles your fancy, because Cern has announced they’ll be flipping the switch on their Large Hadron Collider on the 10th.

Okay, they’re the geniuses and they claim it’s not gonna kill us all. They might indeed be right. But I still maintain that simulating the Big Bang sounds like the sort of thing that could cause some damage, expected or otherwise.

Either way, it’s a good excuse for a geek-out party. Thought I’m not sure the various credit card companies propping up my lifestyle will accept “I thought the world was ending” as a valid excuse for further racking up my bills…

An analysis of my browser history has shown that I’m a man (an analysis of something else would suggest otherwise, but let’s not go there.)

I came across an amusing little tool which analyses your browser history, and spits out a percentage rating of which bits you’re most likely to feature, based on the gender split that use the sites you visit most.

I’m apparently 97 per cent man, three per cent female. For the record, I’m actually 100 per cent female, last time I checked.

I know it’s not much more than a toy, this online guess, but given my Xobni has recently renamed me Chris, I’m starting to get a bit worried…

Give the test a go - it takes seconds - and let’s see how accurate it is… hopefully, not very.

Xobni is a handy and free plug-in that helps make sense of your Outlook — and given my complete lack of email management, this is useful for me when it comes to, y’know, finding stuff that was sent to me before, say, today by someone whose name may or may not start with an ‘H’.

(We can’t all be like PC PRO’s Tim Danton when it comes to reading and then deleting things as they come in…that just blows my tiny mind.)

I downloaded Xobni after our Tech Editor Benny told me to (don’t worry, I don’t do everything he says, and take great joy in not ‘fixing’ the resolution of my monitor) and have loved it ever since. Not only does it search emails in a useful way, it does it quickly, too — something Outlook doesn’t seem to manage. And, it offers up intriguing statistics about who you email the most, and names who’s the most likely to reply, and who’s your top ranking contact.

But it has inexplicably renamed me. Apparently this identity crisis a fairly common error, where Xobni mixes you up with one of your contacts, but the name I’ve been given — “Chris Abbott” — wasn’t even showing up in my inbox. (Turns out, he once posted a comment on this blog, and I got emailed about it ages ago, which has since been archived. Exciting, eh?)

It’s not a huge deal, as it doesn’t show up in Outlook or show up in outgoing emails (it doesn’t for me, at least) and it’s apparently been fixed in an update released today. But it sure is confusing to see this:

… when it is indeed not you. Especially on a Monday morning, before you’ve had a cup of tea… It’s one thing to forget who exactly sent you that email two weeks ago, but it’s generally best to keep your own name straight.

Earlier this month, Google got called out by privacy advocates after it announced it would be bringing its Street View to London. Apparently some people have problems with random unmarked vans touring the streets and taking detailed photos…

I love Street View, because I have a crap memory. I can remember store locations, for example, but not what they’re called — which is a bit of a problem when you want to look them up to see their hours or call them to see if they stock random items (in this case, face paint).

Rather than just walk around the corner, I started googling to try to kick start my memory of shop names, and came across a site called StreetSensation, which features full panoramic photos of entire London streets.

Okay, not quite Street View’s level of detail, and it’s not on every street, but it could help find what’s across the street from Primark on Oxford Street, remind you that the pub you stumbled out of last night is called the Fitzroy Tavern, or uncover the name of that awesome restaurant you stopped in at while shopping on Neal Street.

Didn’t help me find cheap face paint though. I had to go for a walk for that. William’s Newsagents on the corner of TCR and Goodge Street, if you’re ever in the need…

I need to start being frugal, and save up some cash. (My creditors would argue I should already have this attitude…). Why? In 2013, Steve Bennett hopes to have his independent space rocket up and running and ready for passengers… passengers with a spare £100,000 kicking around for a ticket, anyway.

Bennett showed off the latest version of his space rocket (video here at the BBC), which he hopes to test launch in September. And if jetting off into the sky wasn’t cool enough, the Nova II (as it’s been dubbed) runs off of recycled tires.

I’m not sure how sturdy the thing is, or if it’ll even work. Or if a rocket can indeed run off of old tires. But £100,000 for 20 minutes in space sounds like a pretty good deal to me. Of course, on my journo-salary, we’ll all be living on the moon by the time I can save up enough…

One lucky kid will get to press the launch button in September, after a tour of schools to inspire kids into science and techie subjects. Is my advanced age of 26 too old to be considered a kid? ‘Cause how cool would that be…

The man who implemented the first business computer - effectively, the first corporate electronic systems analyst - died in London earlier this month.

I have to admit, I couldn’t have named him before stumbling across his obit online earlier today. And I never would have expected such a person to be a British employee at a tea company.

David Caminer, who died at 92 on 19 June, was the developer of a computer called LEO, which automated back-end processes for J. Lyons & Company, a tea company which also catered events and ran hotels.

The first program which ran on the Lyons Electronic Office - back in November 1951 - worked out costs, prices and margins for baked goods. According to the New York Times: “At that moment, Lyons was years ahead of IBM and the other computer giants that eventually overtook it.”

In that newspaper, Paul Ceruzzi, a historian at the American National Air and Space Museum, said: “Americans can’t believe this… They think you’re making it up. It really was true.”

It is pretty hard to believe some guy trying to make posh event catering more efficient could do what IBM had yet to, but (also according to the NYT) the LEO could calculate an employees pay in 1.5 second, something it took a trained clerk eight minutes to do. (How’s that for ROI?!)

It’s pretty hard to imagine that nearly sixty years ago someone had already automated business processes - an area we’re still working on today - and it wasn’t some geek at a tech firm, either.

Indeed, I hear over and over again how IT needs to stop being about tech and start being about how to improve business - maybe we just need more business people getting involved in the development side?

A new study from the smart people at CERN — that would be the big lab hidden away in the Swiss mountains where the web was invented — shows that their Large Hadron Collider (which does exactly what it says on the tin) will not kill us all in a rather spectacular way when the power-switch is flipped later this summer.

The LHC is a massive underground machine which will slam particles together to try to recreate the origins of our universe, which is one hell of a cool science project. But some are concerned — myself included — that this is going to have some sort of negative side effects, such as creating a black hole and ending the world.

I’m actually afraid this will happen, but my fears are completely unfounded as I know nothing about anything, let alone this. It just sounds scary to me, but in a cool sort of way. Some other dude actually sued CERN, saying they’re gonna make us all go the way of the dodo bird, which as far as lawsuits go, is wonderfully less frivolous than, say, spilled coffee being hot.

In response to the LHC suit, CERN scientists decided to look into things (they’d looked into this before, actually, thankfully) and produced the fascinatingly titled: “Astrophysical implications of
hypothetical stable TeV-scale black holes”.

The authors of the study said they saw no basis for concerns that such black holes could “pose a risk to Earth on timescales shorter than the Earth’s natural lifetime.” Right, then.

“Indeed, conservative arguments based on detailed calculations and the best-available scientific knowledge, including solid astronomical data, conclude that there is no risk of any significance from such black holes,” they added.

Unless, of course, they’re wrong. So let’s hope they’re right.

Going forward, end-to-end, low-hanging fruit — what are the business-speak phrases you hate the most?

The BBC has rounded up a hilarious collection of readers’ most hated office jargon. There are some great ones in there; I quite like the “idea showers”…

As a business journalist, I come across a lot of these double-speak phrases (often in press releases). Everyone loves the infamous ‘world’s leading’ claim, but I prefer the more subtle descriptions. A software product paired with services becomes a ’solution’ — a solution to what, exactly? A deal between companies is called a ’strategic partnership.’ What would a non-strategic partnership be, a random hook-up?

The word ‘leverage’ just makes me cringe, as does ‘drill down,’ and any use of ‘2.0′ not preceded by ‘Web.’

I’m also a fan of anything called an ‘enabler’ and low-hanging fruit, which would be an awesome name for a band or a really good video game, I think. (You’re a monkey, or some jungle creature, and you run around plucking low-hanging fruit from trees for points. Someone make me a flash game of this.)

For example, and thankfully I just made this up: “Thanks to our world leading strategic partnership, this business-enabler, end-to-end solution will help users drill down to leverage metrics to target those low-hanging fruit.”

What does this mean?!?! Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Instead, how about: “Thanks to the deal, our new software will let customers better look at data and hopefully make more money.”

Which sentence makes you want to buy this imaginary product… bet it’s not the first. (If it is, you need help.)

What business jargon most makes you want to start throwing punches? And which do you find yourself using accidentally? Let us know in comments below or by emailing itpro@dennis.co.uk.