The increase in drugs I'm taking seems to have worked quite well. I am feeling a lot less uptight during the day, and even managed an afternoon kip earlier.

I'm having a lot of fun playing LocoRoco. It is very cute with incredibly catchy music. This resulted in me dreaming about playing the game last night. Ah well.

I've got a new game for my PSP: Locoroco. It is a lot of fun. There is a review here. You control amorphous blobs who happily sing away as you bounce them around the place. It will keep me entertained for a while.

As I mentioned eleven days ago, I have a really rather sore throat. It had started about a week before that so has been hanging around for quite a while now. It seemed reasonable to disturb my GP and check that I did not have tonsillitis or anything that required treatment beyond swilling anti-septic fluids with reasonable frequency. I finally got to see him on Friday. Sadly, he is a bit scared of me; he knows I have a doctorate in epidemiology which, coupled with me being considerably taller than him, he views as cause to be terrified when I burst into his surgery.

I asked him about my throat, he peered down there and said what must be the most moronic statement from a member of the medical profession to someone with reasonable insight into the nature of diseases: "Well, it is probably just a cold. Colds last a lot longer these days because they have evolved to be better than they were a few years ago." Perhaps he was just so scared he said the first load of drivel that popped into his mind in order to get me out, but perhaps he thinks that within a year or two rhinovirus will have evolved even more and so will wiping out huge swathes of the world's population because our immune systems, despite fighting these viruses for a very long time, can no-longer hold them back. "That is a very interesting story", was about as polite as I could manage after I'd gasped with incredulity.

So, there is the throbbing throat and also a late night out drinking cocktails yesterday. This morning I wanted to take things a bit easy and just play around in a soft, low-intensity sort of way.

Everyone with an email account has had someone try and steal money from them, be it phishing or emails from the daughter of the ex-king of Matabeleland, yet someone has just tried something really rather blatant with me.

In my quest for a game in English for my lovely new PSP I trawled through Ebay and found what seemed a vaguely reasonable deal for a game with very fast delivery. "It shall be mine", I thought. I put in my bid, won the item and attempted to pay immediately using the power of PayPal. It informed me that the seller was unable to accept payments; odd, I thought, as this person claimed to prefer PayPal and expected payment within three days. I contacted her and she claimed some minor problem with PayPal that would be sorted out within three days.

Four days later I get an email saying her PayPal account would not be working for many weeks, would I care to pay her "cousin's" PayPal account that is registered in a different country? No, I would not. A look back at her profile showed that many people had experienced much the same over the past several weeks, but only got around to placing feedback in the last couple of days, weeks after their auctions had ended. I was a little surprised by the lack of civic-responsibility these delays demonstrated. I was even more surprised when I contacted these people and found out that no one had bothered tell Ebay that that this person was breaking the terms and conditions of trading on Ebay, if not being an outright crook.

With a little prompting, several factual emails describing this person's trading style and the many PayPal accounts she into which she tried to siphon money were sent. Now there is one more thief removed from Ebay, and my game has arrived from another source for less money. I recognise that there will always be people out there who will try and take advantage of the hard of thinking, but if slightly more cognitively-enhanced people notice this it would seem a touch rude not to stop them, especially when it takes fabulously little effort.

Much excitement recently as a new toy has arrived, a Play Station Portable. The power of Ebay enabled me to get a hilariously good deal by ordering it from Hong Kong whilst the device is yet to be released in Europe. Not only was the price keen, but given the surprisingly small amount I paid for Fedex delivery I was terribly impressed that my package was delivered within thirty-one hours of being picked up at its destination. I am not sure I could make it from my flat to a novelty location in Hong Kong in less than thirty-one hours so well done that Fedex chaps.

It is quite a stylish little device, smaller than I expected and really quite well-designed The functionality seems pleasing and the quality of the only game I currently have for it is quite impressive for such a little device. Once again this shows the remarkable pace in the development of computers; considering Cray's first supercomputer had less processing power than an Intel 486DX2-100 (I seem to recall) and this has two Mips processors clocked at 333MHz it does show how we leap ahead in great bounds all the time. People surely are wonderful and clever old things.

However, there is one slight problem with my device. I ordered it from Hong Kong so it is a Japanese device. Completely unlocked so I can play any game and have menus in English, but the in-bx manual is in Japanese. As luck would have it, the seller put a CD in with it that has a woefully-badly scanned copy of the English manual on it. But this, alas, does not help me with understanding the Japanese menus on Ridge Racer....