The Guardian devotes half a column each day to corrections. I will limit mine to once a fortnight. As the World Cup is in Germany this year Florian & Vasco can kick off with my first apology of the year because my upgraded deal from http://blog.co.uk gives me a hundred blogs so my Friday calculations are null and void.

Yahoo! were sadly maligned on Monday for their failure to respond to my 'Get Code!' text message. When I tried again yesterday it worked like a dream. So I am now hot-wired and get bleeped at by my mobile phone every time an e-mail comes in from Rye, Stockholm, Tucson, Morlaix, Purton or Llangolman.

I mentioned on Monday that I had e-mailed Private Post to find out if the software advertised in Private Eye was only available for PC users. Gareth replied by return with these glad tidings: ‘Hi, we are planning to develop Private Post for Mac OS X by Summer 2006. At the moment Private Post is only available to PC users with Outlook/Outlook Express. To help our development further, what email client are you using? (Entourage, Tiger Mail, Eudora etc...). Regards, Gareth Hall, Technical Support Engineer, Private Post.’

This was real friendly so I e-mailed back: ‘Hi Gareth, Thanks for your prompt response...but I expected no less since you're in Bristol just an hour's drive away from me here in Pembrokeshire on the other side of the Severn Estuary. If you had been in New Zealand it would have been different...more satellites to bounce off...’ I went on to give him chapter and verse about me and my cyber-alter-egos (CAEs).

‘...My main window onto the cyberworld is my Yahoo! e-mail account. I increasingly run my business out of my Yahoo! inbox and find that more and more of my colleagues operate this way too. My principal telcom decision last year was to shift platforms away from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs heading for Linux and Open Source. I spent quite a bit of time with eBay last year where I have a couple of accounts...Holobolo Canterbury and Holobolo Uppsala...and by the end of 2006 expect to be running an online bookshop with them...and Google is an extension of my right arm.

My main holding company is William Franklin & Sons Limited - a UK private limited company. I do all my domain name dealing through Easily where I have several websites and quite a few e-mail accounts. Easily run on Linux servers with Apache software. I sell the Good Yacht Guide online and payments come via Visa credit cards...I never see anything else...via my William Franklin & Sons PayPal Business Account.

I have business dealings with Sweden where I have an e-mail account with Spray...owned by Lycos. I also run a William Shepherd website on Passagen owned by the Swedish post office. You can find out more from my daily weblog...looked after from Berlin. You are mentioned in dispatches. Hope this helps. Anecdotes are often more useful than statistics.

The storage heater problem was all my fault. It trips out when it gets too hot...and it gets too hot when people use it to quick-dry jeans and sweaters. Mea Very Culpa. The plumber-cum-electrician was here fixing a pump today and sorted it. The trip switch is hidden inside the outer casing...and several screws must be removed to access it which seems pretty silly. But at least now I can fix it myself. ‘Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he can feed himself for ever.’ Tell that one to the Scottish fishermen. Nonetheless Gandhi, Fritz Schumacher, Lao Tzu and anybody with two brain cells who has given any thought to real development...as opposed to rip-off and pillage...can’t all be wrong. Anyone want their storage heater fixed?

My day got off to a slow start when I got up late. The rain had stopped. The sky was blue. And I thought about a run. You can do these things when you work for yourself. I had picked a book off my daughter’s bookshelf last night...The War Against Chaos by Anita Mason...and couldn’t put it down. Anita turns out to be a local lass from just across the water in Bristol. My daughter is reading a lot of futuristic stuff at the moment.

Otherwise my day consisted of e-mails about Good Yacht Guide orders and access details to the Franklin PayPal account, a message to my daughter about her new Chip ‘n Pin and an e-mail to let Alan know that I had not abandoned Cultura and would be on his case at crack of dawn.

In the middle of the afternoon I sloped off to my nearest cafe...Caffi Beca up on the Cardigan to Tenby road... and used the time to write a journal entry. In the evening it was Sirens with Sam Neill and Hugh Grant.

I had my Coleridge moment in mid-morning. While in full flow at the keyboard there was a knock at the door. ‘Go Away!’ I yelled. Emerging from my hermit mode half an hour later I discovered that the phantom rapper had been my landlady, anxious to let me know that my water was about to be turned off. She had visions of a washing machine melt-down. All I lost was a couple of weblog sentences. Coleridge lost most of Kubla Khan.