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From BBC News:

Doctor Who actress and singer Billie Piper has signed a six-figure deal to write her autobiography

What is it with autobiographies at the moment? It seems like everyone, their dog and their dog's second cousin once removed is suddenly finding the need to write their life story at the moment.

I've nothing against autobiographies in general, by the way. Many of them are interesting, witty, and contain things that really make you re-evaluate the person about which they're written. But I do wonder if we're not reaching some kind of market saturation at the moment.

For example, it seems like just about every member of the Ashes-winning England cricket team have published autobiographies - in some cases just 'part one' autobiographies, I think - not to mention several members of the Australian team, too. Every single footballer in the England squad seems to have one to their name as well.

I have to confess that I'm a little baffled as to why they're all so interesting. Celebrity (and by that I mean 'those people who happen to be in some sort of limelight at the moment') autobiographies are always going to be saleable, true, especially if they offer (usually in big, bold letters) THE TRUTH, or better still THE SHOCKING TRUTH about their subject's marriage / love affair / illegitimate child with an orangutan, but surely once the limelight fades they're going to have a pretty short shelf life. I'd be surprised if, for a lot of the more minor and fleeting celebrities, the books ever quite earn back their enormous advances.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a good autobiography as much as the next bloke, but for me a good autobiography is not one by a 22-year-old sportsman, who let's face it hasn't had much life to fill six hundred pages with, nor by a celebrity whose respectability and notoriety will dissipate faster than a fart in a wind tunnel. Give me the autobiography of someone who actually did something, someone who spent their life doing things not for the money but because they needed, or wanted or were driven to do it. Give me that over celebrity hyperbole any day.

None of this means I have anything against Billie Piper, of course. She's a good actress and will doubtless go far. And if you want to read about her failed marriage to Chris Evans, that's fine. But she's younger than me and probably most of you, which makes me wonder just how much she's going to have to talk about.

Anyway, enough ranting. The glue seems to have abated somewhat this morning, so I'm going to try doing some editing before I get on with some more programming.

Which, let's be honest, is not going to make my life interesting enough for an autobiography just yet. But if anyone wants to offer me six figures to write one, I'd love to give it a go.

What's that you say? Principles? What principles? Principles are for sissies.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm brave.

Perhaps it's a bloke thing. We spend all our lives being expected to be manly, which in most cases means being strong, useful with a hammer and able to de-spider the bath with the minimum of fuss and squealing, but what we don't often say is that we wonder whether, if really put to the test, we'd do what was necessary and not be paralysed with fear.

I've seen some scary things, done some scary things, faced half-frightening situations before and I never, I'm glad to say, chickened out.

But I still wonder if I'm brave.

If I'd have been down in the tunnels on this day a year ago, would I have been brave? Would I have stayed behind and helped the people left, even if they were beyond such help as I could give?

If I'd have been a rescue worker going down into those tunnels would I have been able to go back in after coming back to the surface, knowing what was waiting for me in the long dark?

If I were a police officer, would I have been able to go about my duties thereafter, protecting and serving, even though I was aware that any one of the people I stopped and searched could be another suicide bomber, a man or woman whose logic and beliefs had been twisted by religious fervour into something unrecognisable, alien and unassailable?

I'll never know if I'm that brave. But I salute every single one of those that is, be they victim, rescue worker, police officer, innocent passerby who lent a hand, all of them. Because it's people like these who mean that this country will weather the storm, however long it may last.

I'm a natural hoarder. It's a trait that comes from my mother and from my mother's family. The attic at home used to be chock-full of bits and pieces in cardboard boxes that, for one reason or another, most of which were lost in the mists of time, Mum had put to one side with the reasoning 'it might come in useful for something.'

The stuff up there could have been anything. Cardboard boxes were an obvious thing to store, and the cardboard tubes from toilet and kitchen rolls were favoured, too; as a primary school teacher Mum had plenty of use for bits of cardboard that could be cut into all sorts of shapes and sizes.

But there were other, less useful things, too. Lengths of old washing line, dirty and frayed; large pieces of foam rubber with chunks missing so that they looked like they'd been chewed on by a giant mouse. I once discovered a leather drawstring purse full of what looked to my eight-year-old eyes like doubloons - I had just read Treasure Island as I recall, which had more than a little to do with it. It turned out that they weren't gold after all, but were instead old British pennies, the big pre-decimalisation ones with Britannia on one face, sprayed gold. The reason that they'd been sprayed gold was that, many years before, they'd been used in a play for which Mum had been props mistress - they were playing the part of a drawstring purse of doubloons, as it turned out.

It seems that my hoarding instincts have been refined over time. Living in as small a house as we do, we don't have enough room for me to collect everything that might come in useful for something, but nevertheless I do try my best.

There are my bits boxes, for example, which hold spare computer parts that I've snaffled over the years that I've been doing tech support for people (luckily those times seem to be coming to and end now; I've learned to say no more often than not). There are cables, motherboards, RAM sticks, hard drives, floppy drives, processors... I could probably assemble two semi-working PCs from all the parts that I've got in the bits boxes, although I'd be short of cases for them since I don't have room to store the old ones that I no longer need.

I've got box files full of cuttings from New Scientist and other journals and magazines, ostensibly because at the time the articles seemed like good starting points for stories, or highlighted something in which I was particularly interested in, but I come back to them now and wonder why I took certain cuttings. Most of them I don't remember cutting at all, and since I haven't deigned to make notes about why they might be interesting to me I've found myself in the dark nine times out of ten.

But worst of all my habits, I've discovered today, is my habit of hoarding data on my hard drive.

The great hard drive fiasco of '06 came to a head the other day with a full scale and rather impressive lockup of my main system, which subsequently refused to boot. Much fiddling around with partition managers and spare disks gave me a bootable, useable system, but, as has been pointed out, keeping your data on a known flaky drive is like playing Russian Roulette with it. It was time for a new one.

So after it arrived and I'd put it in place I set the copying process going. The root partition, on which the operating system lives, was relatively quick and easy to copy, taking only forty minutes or so (luckily I'd remembered to clear out the apt cache this time, which reduced copying time significantly).

However, I hadn't really bothered to look at how big my home partition had grown in the time that I'd had a large drive to fill. To a reasonable size, it turns out: ninety gigabytes of stuff, or thereabouts. And the real issue that I've noticed as I've sat here for the last twelve hours or so watching the data make its sluggish way from one drive to another, is the fact that I could have done without around about sixty percent of it.

Amazingly, I seem to have got into the habit of downloading sometime, an operating system DVD ISO for example, burning it to disc and then, because I'm always concious of my ability to lose discs or, at least, damage them beyond usefulness, leaving the image on my hard drive for months without so much as looking at it again.

There are ISOs on there for Mandriva (which I don't use), Fedora (which I don't use), CentOS (which I played with just to get a feel for but - wait for it - don't use), Debian (which I've got two CD copies of now), Ubuntu (Including an old version that I don't use)... You get the picture. I don't like to throw anything away, not even ones and zeros on a hard drive, apparently. Which is why I've sat here for the last twelve hours or so watching the data copy, and which in turn is why I've ended up with a numb backside. And the worst of it is that it's not like that kind of stuff has any sentimental or historic attachments. It's just stuff; there aren't any doubloons to be had. There are some traits that I hope I don't pass on to my kids. This, I think, is one of them.

From the department of Things You Hoped You'd Never Need:

Colonic irrigation enema kit +500g Therapy Blend Coffee "This is not the kind of coffee that you will be able to enjoy with your after dinner mints or your morning croissant, that's because the coffee doesn't taste very nice, after all it has not been blended for taste but strictly for enema use."

Not quite up to Warren Ellis's standards, I'll grant you, but I thought you'd enjoy it nevertheless. Night all...