First, call 0845 454 11 11. Once you get through, you'll need to choose Option 4 for Moving Home, then Option 2 for disconnections, followed by Option 1 again in order to confirm.

Hopefully within a matter of a couple of minutes you'll be connected to a real live operator. Once you confirm your address, payment method and what have you, you'll get to the fun part.

After a brief bit of struggle and dispute about why you're leaving - and at least in my case, explaining that my new Be* ADSL2+ installation is working beautifully at a rock-solid 12Mbps, you'll be informed that "Sir, I'm on a BT website now, I can clearly see you can only get up to 1Mbps at your location...".

You'll get to fight this fight for a few minutes, and if you can resist the urge to scream "But obviously, you're wrong. I'm in my house now, I should know.", they will - finally - give up and accept that you've given them 30 days notice and give you confirmation of your disconnection date.

Oh, did I mention how marvellous Be* is, on both price and performance? Sure, you'll never get the 24Mbps unless you're living next door to the exchange, but it's better than paying a premium price for 20Mbps and getting a realistic average of 5Mbps.

Now, I've seen some error dialogs in my time.  Some are informative, some are incomphrensible and some - like this gem that Sony Ericsson have put together - are just plain scary

What had actually happened (I think) was that it was busy querying my K800i when the signal dropped - I was on a train after all.  So I'd rather it have just suggested something along those lines rather than proposing that the world was about to end.

Who'd have thought that a simple "Mobile Networking Wizard" was fraught with such danger?

One of the common horrors on sites such as debenhams.com is that that the designers seem to believe that people think in terms of brands, rather than categories of items - for example, I've visited the site thinking I'd like to buy a gift for an aunt - maybe something like bubble bath. Easy enough, right?

1. Step one, visit the site.
2. Step two, go to the beauty section.
3. Step three, find the "Bath & Body" range.
4. Step four... Select a brand. Huh?

The flaw here is that I can't just browse all the items in the "Bath & Body" section - I have to pick a brand to continue. So now, I need to select a brand and browse through those items; if I don't like what I see, I have to go back, choose another and keep going. Often in these cases I don't even know the brands or have any suggestion of what sort of items that that brand covers - forcing me to navigate continually into areas that I probably don't care about.

Unfortunately for the end user, product managers think in brands whereas most consumers - with perhaps the exception of some high fashion items - tend not to, particularly if they're just trying browse and virtually "window shop" for ideas.

Test post using the Windows Live Writer application. So far... so good.  It seems to use the MT API to actually retrieve the styles of the blog.  Very impressive.

On the left is a complete idiot (who's NOT me), getting drawn on in Tottenham Court Road last week.  Despite having a good look, there didn't seem to be any TV camera's around (ruling out the Jackass theory), nor anyone else other than amused passers-by.

However, the Life at Skype blog has posted a short article about it now that shows it in all its glory, thus saving me the bother!

Week 1: London	Week 2: Tallinn	Week 3: Hospital

Do I win a prize? I think that's reasonable... I should add I didn't actually fall ill in Tallinn, but I didn't really get a whole lot done when I got there.

Not your usual wildlife, originally uploaded by Mark McLaughlin.

There's a stray budgie spending a fair bit of time in my back garden these days. Whether he's escaped or someone let him go is anyone's guess. but he seems happy enough hanging with the rest of the bird gang.

• Joshua Schachter - Delicious - Things We've Learned
• Cal Henderson - Building Flickr
• Tom Coates - Designing Web 2.0-native Products for Fun and Profit

Further and more detailed notes from these and the later afternoon sessions are available at Steve Marshall's site.

At first glance, the idea is awesome, although it might get a little bit overkill with some more popular sites - say Slashdot or BBC News, but it does do exactly what it says on the tin.

However, the killer app might just be a combining it with a keyword based feed such as my earlier Yahoo! News over RSS article, alerting you to stories from multiple sources based on topics of your choice.

Currently the service appears to pick up its feeds via autodetecting the URL's in the selected site's meta tags, but with a little tweaking it might not be too difficult to point it in the direction of a XML file. (The system is very much in beta right now, so the functionality might well appear in the coming weeks nonetheless.)

The amazing thing was that the whole accident was a bit of a non-event. I was slowing down some distance away from a T-Junction doing around 40mph and the back wheel just went and that was that - the bike sloped to the floor and I went bouncing down the lanes of Fifield.

I'm fairly sure the scoot itself is going to be a write-off; nearly every panel on the right hand side was either broken, scratched or scuffed and past experiences with Aprilia spares, particularly as the original Atlantic isn't a current model, suggest that will be the case.

As for me, I'm not a write-off just yet. I do have the joy of four stitches just above my top lip and those funny little Steri-Strips across my nose, making it seem I've done a few rounds with Mike Tyson.

So my biking future is looking quiet for the time being. I'm trying to sneak in a cheeky little Vespa for the summer, but I think I'm resigned to finally taking driving lessons and getting a car licence.

To my mind, playing out the track with those four guys without making a big deal over it, completely throwing the viewer and leaving them with a "Wait a minute, isn't that Snoop Dogg & Xzibit?" would have been far more clever. All that aside, if you've followed the band for any reasonable length of time the general idea is still quite a giggle, not to mention that Snoop is an inspired choice to play Munky.

In preparation for their new album the band have updated their website too, with a suitably over-the-top festival of Flash that laughs in the face of Merlin Mann's idea that label and artist sites already have Too Much Flash (Merlin's in the right here, though.) Your average 14-year-old Korn fan will literally spooge over it; those who are a bit older will sit through the load screens and awkward menu's and wonder if it's the late 90's again.

(Of course, the truly old farties like myself will go, "Wait, wasn't there a game called The 7th Guest that looked almost exactly the same as this about 10 years ago?")

Benjamin Bertie McLaughlin of Sheerwater, 1989-2005