Halley Suitt wrote this a week or so ago and I totally agree. If I don't get to the pool 3-4 times a week I begin to feel like things are going out of focus. Let the small things begin to slide and suddenly you're swamped. I hate messiness but slip into it pretty easily if I don't stay disciplined about the small things. More recently she writes about exercise and how important it is for the way you look, and notes that clothes look better on fit and slim models. Hmmm. I think it's more important to stay healthy and exercise for the way you feel.

African women made me totally rethink the way women look at themselves and think of themselves. Size is irrelevant. African women walk tall and proud. They walk slowly, and with grace. Their limbs are loose and their backs are straight. This was true of the women lawyers at the conference I attended and of rural African women who often are carrying very heavy loads on their heads. One morning I watched three tall Zulu women glide away with huge boxes on their heads full of all the empty bottles of wine drunk in a restaurant the night before (what a comment on the wealthy and the poor that was). The women have an extraordinary sense of their own centre of gravity. Like dancers, their backs are ramrod straight, their shoulders are back and they walk from the hip. Just try to carry a couple of books on your head and you'll see how crucial -- and hard! -- it is to understand your body's centre of gravity.

Some of the African women were big women, especially at the legal conference. They wore their traditional dress with their heads very high. When they wore turbans or another traditional headress their heads were magnificent.

All the African women had a different sense of the space they occupy than Western women. They did not shrink and fold inward, trying to make themselves smaller, slimmer, less noticeable. They wore bright elegant clothes and stood their ground. They laughed with deep belly laughs. They were not hurrying away somewhere else, or just passing through. Big and small, they occupied space and were proud to occupy space. It made me grin and feel delighted. All women should be anchored in that way. No woman should appear as if she is apologising for holding her ground. In the west, we often think we have a lot to teach other cultures about what it means to be modern, especially to be a woman. But we live in fast-paced societies that have forgotten much. If we are wise, we'll realise we still have some learning -- and remembering -- to do as well.

From Ben Hammersley: "Some things restore your faith in the internet. And others just require sound. Click on the horse's heads."

So, you use your supermarket loyalty card every time you buy some frozen peas and a six-pack? Own a house? Have an overdraft? Don't worry your pretty head over dull things like data protection legislation and laws on direct marketing? Then check out this link, wherein one UK man obtains his marketing data using the EU Data Protection Act. He's now auctioning it on eBay!

Lloyds TSB: Approximately 500 pages of personal data including an analysis of banking products they believe I might be interested in. Also includes overdraft limit maintenance history (hand written), risk management history data (93 pages) and a full list of letters sent over the previous 5 years (completed by hand). All data and codes come with explanatory notes provided by Lloyds TSB... Sainsbury's: This is a list of EVERYTHING we bought from Sainsbury's over a 3 year period - where we bought it and how much we paid.

The American Open Technology Consortium recently selected eight bad internet laws (though they only seem to list, er, six...) pushed through or proposed by the clueless in Washington -- uninformed laws that lawyer Lawrence Lessig sniffs at as "East Coast Code" (easy to dismiss as Silicon Valley snobbism, and he may be at Stanford now, but he was earlier an east coast denizen, in the courts and at Harvard). The Big Six/Eight, and a gallery of rogue code they are, include: 1) the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA); 2) the Communications Decency Act (CDA); 3) the Child Online Protection Act (COPA); 4) the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act; 5) P2P Piracy Protection Bill, 6) CIPA.

CDA was zapped by the US courts, and the Supreme Court is mulling over COPA. There are links to all the laws/bills and a lively commentary on the AOTC site. Something similar looking at sloppy EU net law (from copyright to revocations of privacy protections to proposals on taxation domain and restrictions on reverse engineering) would sure be helpful! Any informed lawyers out there?

Finally back in Dublin after a very long evening of flying... a plane apparently went on fire on take-off at Heathrow (no one hurt) which shut down a runway and delayed hundreds of flights. I didn't get out of Lyon til 90 minutes after the plane was to have left, and then in Heathrow my 8:45 flight to Dublin eventually left (full of very crabby people) at just after 11pm. That's way too much time in airport lounges, especially when some idiot turns the volume up on the television set so that everyone has to listen to his choice in comedy programs.

However had a useful and informative visit to Xerox's research centre in Grenoble (a very beautiful city, surrounded by the French Alps. All the trees are turning, the mountains are frosted with snow, and  it was snowing hard in the evening when we drove way up into the mountains to a restaurant for dinner. What a change -- the hot Indian Ocean beaches of South Africa on Saturday; then snowballs and freezing weather in la belle France on Thursday night!). Xerox is doing some very cool stuff with intelligent, hierarchical search engines and natural language applications.

Now, all I want to do is get some sleep. I think this is a record week for flights -- seven of them in six days. Sheesh. Wish Dublin was on a direct flight path a little more often...