Surely no-one can have believed this year’s April Fools’ prank from Google. But I bet a lot of people did.

To my great surprise, when I phoned NTL this morning to enquire about this free upgrade they just upgraded it there and then. So I’m now on a superfast connection.

Very good customer service there, much better than usual. Good on you, ntl.

My archive of emails I’ve sent and received in the fourteen or so months I’ve been studying medicine has just surpassed 12,000. That’s nearly 1,000 emails per month. I only know this because I’ve given up with Outlook now, because it’s running at such a slow pace, probably precisely because it has so much to think about. Thunderbird, by comparison, whizzes along at the speed of light. And it’s a much, much smaller programme. The only reason I didn’t use t before was because Google Desktop didn’t support it… but now it does! Hurrah!

Hospital bosses who found themselves at the centre of a storm today after banning the sale of chocolate and sweets in NHS staff canteens have hit back at their critics.

The chocolate and sweet ban, which applies to three community hospitals and the headquarters of Barnsley primary care trust in South Yorkshire, was introduced as part of a local wider campaign to promote healthy lifestyles, said the PCT’s director of public health, Dr Paul Redgrave.

Well let’s just hope that this doesn’t roll out nationally: Our medical school runs on a constant supply of chocolate and coffee – if the chocolate’s taken away, then things will grind to a halt! I don’t think I’ve sat in a lecture for a long time now when I’ve now been offered a chocolate button or the like. I expect this will only get more prevalent as I move into hospitals, and people really get the munchies.

As this article says, Yahoo search is getting to be very good. I’ve personally been using it more and more of late, as I have the Yahoo Toolbar installed. It’s index is fantastic, and can certainly rival Google: looking at this very site, Google has 89% of it indexed, and Yahoo is very close to that at 86%. The lead between the two is always chopping and changing.

But Yahoo simply isn’t as good as Google yet in terms of the actual searching. There have been a number of occasions when I’ve simply given up on a Yahoo search and reverted to Google, because the results are next to useless. In terms of precision of results MSN is surging ahead – and there’s very little point in having a fantastic index if you don’t have a fantastic search method.

One of the things I’ve come to love about Google (and MSN) is the direct answers feature, where I can type in ‘define x’ and just get a definition. If I try the same query on Yahoo, I don’t even get a link to a dictionary, let alone an acutal definition.

Yahoo is okay for some everyday searches, and it will continue to be a player in the Searching Saga. But the one to watch this year, as I’ve consistently predicted, will be MSN, not least because it has a big advertising campaign underway right now, and once people realise it works, then they will be very likely to move across, particularly as Microsoft will be pushing it from all directions.

The government would like to know why some doctors are not keen on the idea of computerising medical records. Here’s a good example of why they are less than happy.

They claim that Skype is free Internet telephony that just works. It is, and it does. I’ve just downloaded it to try calling phone lines, and the quality is just as it would be over a normal phone. And, even more surprisingly, it really does just work. No messing with sound settings, it just works.

The only problem with it at the moment is that it’s not widespread enough, so there’s no-one for me to call via internet telephony. But it could be very useful if people I knew did download it, as we’d be able to call each other for nothing. Extremely highly recommended.

I do love stories of technological incompentence by the very government which expects us to trust it with an ID Card Database. One would have assumed that the Criminal Records Bureau would have had a fairly secure system, what with its main aim being to protect vulnerable people like children and the elderly, but apparently not:

errors are quite common because the OCRed applications are retyped. And not cross-checked

And, just to remind you, this government can’t even keep DVLA records up-to-date.

Are you sure you want to trust it with your very identity? I certainly don’t.

Not the best publicity for Microsoft, but at least they’re doing something to tackle the problem. But then, I suppose it’s all coming a bit late if you’re one of the 53 people who have been injured or got a burned carpet.

A burglar is today behind bars after picking the wrong house to burgle. His crime was caught in full by a webcam, which the hapless thief stole along with the computer, but not before it had sent pictures of him to a website.

So says silicon.com. And, as you’d expect, they’ve got the photos to prove it:

Still, at least he doesn’t look really gormless…oh, hang on. You’ll note as an observance of tradition he has opted for the time-honoured burglar uniform of a striped jersey and swag bag – just to make it really obvious what he’s up to.

“What’s that… it looks like a camera. I don’t understand. My brain hurts so much I have to take my hat off…”

I’m sure Umbro are delighted with the chavtastic publicity.