Less well publicised however is the wine black hole that is the security area at Heathrow; on a recent visit Sneak noticed hordes of unfortunates having their wines and spirits confiscated from their hand luggage and placed carefully into a large bin, no doubt for "examination" at a later date. Sneak isn't saying the pain of losing a laptop is the same as these absent-minded travelers experienced but as I watched my very own £15 bottle of Shiraz hit the bin I can honestly say it took my breath away.

According to the email from EMC's PR agency, "The page will discuss industry trends such as Web 2.0 and new legislation, and the implications these have on technology innovations in enterprise content management, security, etc." Oh ... my ... god! Sneak is literally giddy with excitement. A pity though that it doesn't look like the page will feature pictures of the content management team at EMC in various states of annihilation after a hard night on the pale ales. Which is basically what Facebook is for, after all.

It seems the frequency of - 'Vendor 'X' IT hardware installed at CERN's large hadron collider' press releases has cooled somewhat over the months since Sneak last reported - rather like the superconducting circuits being used to deliver the magnetic fields needed for CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to dig out that rare beastie, the Higgs Boson or 'God Particle' as it has become known.

Anybody reading about LHC will usually be only a sentence away from a superlative - as in - "The LHC is the world's largest cryogenic facility". Any mention of cryogenics nowadays means superconducting circuitry, which means using a lot of liquid helium to cool said circuitry. At LHC, 96 tonnes of liquid helium is needed to maintain the 1.9K temperature required for superconductors, to - well, superconduct, and provide those important magnetic fields for the LHC to collide exotic particles together in CERN's search for glory.

That temperature of 1.9K, on the centigrade scale, is -271 degrees C, quite nippy - in fact another two degrees gets you to the ultimate in nippiness - absolute zero. You can see how cool the experiments at LHC are - online - here ...

One of the problems with liquid helium is that the damned stuff keeps evaporating, and the levels have to be topped up now and again. In fact there are scenarios where the helium evaporates on a lot quicker timescale than normal. This happens when the superconducting wires loose those superconducting properties and effectively become resistors, rapidly heating up, causing the helium to expand explosively, in what's known as a 'catastrophic quench.'

Sneak originally envisaged staff at the LHC suffocating helplessly after a 'quench', whilst shouting, "Help!", in Mickey Mouse-like high pitched voices. However, LHC has quench detection and protection schemes, besides which magnets like these are manually 'quenched' just to check the cryogenic gas venting systems work properly. Of course if the venting fails ..... well, even then it looks highly unlikely that mass Mickey Mouse impersonations would be taking place, although there have been suggestions that a big enough quench in large superconducting magnets like these, could cause the air to liquefy and 'rain out'. Nice - well, I suppose it's less dangerous than a mini-black hole turning up anyway.

But despite the millions of pounds spent by the e-commerce giants on fraud prevention tools, the downfall of this e-Bonnie and Clyde duo appears to have come in the offline world, when a cheque Kirsch submitted to pay for her hair extensions bounced. So two lessons here: fraud prevention tools are not infallible, and if you're a fraudster, don't pay by cheque.

The ads continue the story of Adam and Jane, the apparently loving couple that spend their time discovering new features in their BT internet services and discussing them with total strangers. This seems like a fairly good basis for an unfulfilling relationship, but it has always appeared to work for them.

Now, however, things are not so rosy for the pair.

Adam, it appears, has left the family home and is chasing his dream career. Not all is going well for him, however, as he has also spurned one other family member, the BT connection.

During a particular pointless IM discussion about whether the pair should still be together Adam's wireless connection falls down, meaning that his partner is left wondering what's going on, and whether she ought to take garden shears to his wardrobe, or his private parts.

Sneak is unimpressed by the whole idea. Especially as he uses a BT Homehub at his own home and finds it as unreliable as his own time-keeping.

According to reports in the The Arizona Republic, a combination of high temperatures, wind and "organic materials" from birds and other wildlife have come together to create a noxious gassy stench which now permuates the homes of the hapless residents. The culprit? City-owned evaporation ponds built 14 years ago to purified wastewater pumped from Intel's reverse osmosis system nearby. Intel? Bah .... you stink!

So not only is TFL rubbish, it's even losing itself money through IT incompetence. Maybe worth trialing any Near-Field Communications (NFC) technology well before you buy.

Discussing datacentres and backup strategies in general, Ingle related the story of a firm whose backup strategy was what he said was a 'cave' underneath its building connected by a network link to another 'cave' nearby.

It was fairly easy for Sneak to knock out an acronym for this - Compute And Virtualisation Environment - easy, peasy - job done! Consulting an online acronym checker showed that CAVE had been acronym-ised many times before, and although there were many close ones, none fitted Sneak's version exactly. OK, maybe some words are the same and Sneak can almost feel the sneers of derision emanating from IT managers world-wide, but with application virtualisation on the climb, royalties from patenting the acronym should keep Sneak in Irn Bru for the foreseeable future.

Speaking of ancient ancestors, it seems that virtualisation rollouts may soon require more personnel skilled in the art of capacity planning - that well-known craft, critical in getting mainframes to run efficiently. It seems that experts in capacity planning could well be important in firms' virtualisation of production business critical applications. Would these people be called CAVEmen wondered Sneak - warming to his task of trying to create a fairly tenuous link to his headline...

It seems that Associated Newspapers, the publisher of the Daily Mail, has had one of its laptops, containing thousands of journalists' financial details, stolen. You may remember these same Daily Mail journalists launching attack after incensed attack against "criminally careless" government departments such as the "bungling Ministry of Mayhem" as the HMRC was dubbed. Um, maybe they should have been more careful about their own data security.

Alright, to be honest the research just applies to music, so it doesn't bother Sneak that much, after all, most music critics are over-privileged pretentious buffoons who seek to name-drop and reference as many bands as possible in a single article to show how clever and sagely they are. But Sneak is slightly worried that this trend might continue into other spheres. Could the IT hack's days be numbered too? Noooooo!

And now this. The pic shows EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media Viviane Reding, at the Cannes film festival this year. OK, so she's also there with EU Commission president Jose Manuel Barosso. But who the hell is that dude in the shades? You're not fooling us Viv, we know you've no idea who he is. Um, actually, Sneak isn't sure either ... is he perhaps a member of a popular music band?

Mr Asahi, or Asahi-san if you want to be really accurate, is the firm's answer to all of our bar queuing prayers. And the good news is he's coming to town. Yes folks, the world's first robotic barman can serve a pint in under two minutes, and will be available for our enjoyment at Selfridges.

HPC has undergone quite a change since Seymour Cray started manufacturing his liquid refrigerant cooled X-MP systems, and today's clustered computing systems have taken over number crunching the jobs Sneak used to queue on the mighty Cray's Inbox for it to chomp through. Even financial services firms seem to deploying these systems to calculate exactly where they went wrong - selling over-priced houses to people who couldn't afford them.

Will the power of HPC result in chocolate tasting so exquisite, they'll have to actually reduce the size of said Mars Bars. Sneak supposes that anything could be possible, once the genetic engineers are let loose on cocoa DNA with their molecular spanners - a tweak here and a nudge there, and before you know it, something - 'Not of this Earth', could appear.

Now that the Government's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill is wafting round the Houses of Parliament, Sneak wonders how long it will be before the first Human-Cocoa hybrid, launches on an unsuspecting world. Of course, the bill says that no hybrid would be allowed to develop after 14 days, but two weeks in the life of such a beast - could well be enough to grow something quite spectacular.

Sneak will leave that to your fertile imagination - but is trying hard to stop thinking of a giant Smartie with Tony Blair's face on it.

HPC - it's not all good news.

Located on the shores of the Lossie estuary, the Foundation serves as a retreat where yoghurt-knitters and tree-huggers come from around the world to recharge their psychic batteries.

Sneak was reminded of this when he read about the Symbian Foundation, the new body tasked with developing an open-source unified handset platform that will be available royalty-free to any handset maker that wishes to use it.

It seems to Sneak that the word "foundation" has become short-hand for any endeavour that seeks to promote itself as being altruistic. It's supposed to conjure up positive feelings and kind thoughts. Indeed, Sneak is convinced that if Microsoft started calling itself the Redmond Foundation, any negative feelings for the vendor that IT managers might harbour would disappear.

Sneak was amazed to be the recipient of a survey from self-proclaimed leading 'navigations solution provider' TomTom recently, which had him gnashing his teeth in denial at its findings.

For instance, one of the questions was, "The use of satellite navigation devices heightens awareness and reduces the stress levels of the driver."

Well, Sneak supposes it does when the device 'does what it says on the tin', but there wasn't a question in the survey like this one - "The use of satellite navigation gets you to your destination the majority of the time."

Constantly checking a Sat Nav device on the dashboard must detract from your awareness of what's going down on the road - doesn't it? What's wrong with letting your partner navigate using a roadmap ... ermm ... but then again.