?

A gloriously crisp start to the day, turning surprisingly warm later on. I have a sneaking suspicion that this may be the last gasp of the Indian summer before the descent into autumnal chill.

I had the most gnomic email from our project manager this morning which consisted simply of the character '?' followed by a forwarded conversation. I was tempted to reply '!' but I resisted and tried to make sense of the thread of emails before giving up and simply ringing the person concerned which resolved the situation neatly.

On that subject, there was an interesting feature on the Guardian Tech Weekly podcast this morning about the future of email and how groaning inboxes are not helped by the poor design of Microsoft Outlook which makes following threaded conversations a nightmare. There are now heuristic tools available to distinguish between emails which are simply records of transactions, social networking notifications and those from real, live people that you might want to respond to. The problem is that all of these different things get dumped into the same inbox with no mechanisms for treating them differently unless you spend time setting up rules and filters (and monitoring them in case something important gets routed to a junk folder).

I forgot to top up my phone to qualify for my free internet allowance yesterday and the first I knew about it was at lunch time when my phone started bleeping that it needed at least 17p in credit to access WAP services. My usual email and twittering had drained all of my credit without warning me. Bah. Lesson learned, I suppose.