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There are few lengths I won’t go to in order to mess things up for myself. Nothing really spectacular, of course. Not heroin. Not gambling. Just little things that make my life less interesting (and possibly less lucrative) than it could be.

I blame Perfect Documentary Syndrome. PDS is something I first noticed in my schooldays and it still applies as much today as it did in the 1980s.

What is PDS? PDS is the strange feeling that over-takes you when you see listed in the TV guide a documentary on a subject you are REALLY interested in. A subject you know a great deal about. Perhaps a subject that you’re slightly obsessed with. You feel queasy. You feel weird. And you don’t watch the programme.

I haven’t really stopped to analyse the reasons why, but I guess it’s a pretty obvious mixture of envy and ennui. After all, it should be you making the programme, or at least you who’s one of the talking heads explaining why exactly this thing means so much.

PDS isn’t just about TV shows, though. It applies in many spheres of life. Mil Millington has a really nice piece in the Guardian magazine this weekend about his uneasiness when his girlfriend started getting into gadgets. I think there’s a bit of PDS going on here, as there is when I’m luke-warm about the idea of buying a new G5 iMac, when my wife’s quite keen on me spending �800 on a shiny new computer.

I can trace a couple of times when PDS has had an effect, possibly on the entire course of my life. I run a fan-site for an obscure album called Consequences by Peter Cook and Godley and Creme, and once I got an email not only from a big cheese at Polygram records, but it was sent from – of all people – Tony Wilson’s email address. I think I emailed him back, but I never phoned. Consequences hadn’t been re-issued on CD then, but who knows what would have happened had I made the call. But PDS struck…

Another, potentially more disastous, occasion happened… well, I can remember it clearly. Studio C22 at Bush House. I was working on a World Service programme called East Asia Today, and one of the RPAs (I think it stood for Recorded Programme Assistants) got wind of the fact that what I really wanted to do was not wibble faders up and down on a mixing desk, but write TV drama. She mentioned this to the presenter who had similar ambitions. He bounded into the studio and said ‘Hey, I hear you’re interested in writing TV drama, do you know of any good software? What have you written?’. ‘Nothing, really’ I mumbled. ‘Oh. Okay then’ he said and walked out.

That presenter was Mike Bullen who went on to write something called Cold Feet, which you may have heard of.

I have been wibbling faders ever since.

No, this isn’t a rant about Macdonalds – this is my recipe for beef burgers, which I’m only putting here as it’s been in my head for a week or two, and I don’t want to forget it.

I’ve made burgers before, but they’ve always been a mess. Mother-in-law gave us a burger press from Lakeland – the diameter of the patties is a bit too small for the buns I had, but still a very useful gadget, and the firmer, better-shaped burgers were a hit with my children.

Ingredients
- 500g pack of minced beef (I’d normally go organic, but this time I used Waitrose Aberdeen Angus Mince which was inexpensive and tasted good).
- 1 or 2 eggs
- handful of breadcrumbs (I whizz slightly stale bread up in the magimix and freeze it)
- 1 very finely chopped onion
- 1 finely chopped garlic clove
- large teaspoon of mustard (I used French wholegrain)
- small sprinkling of fine mixed herbs (I used dried French ones from a stall in Borough Market)
- few drops of Tabasco sauce
- burger buns
- lashings of Heinz Tomato Ketchup

Put the mince in a bowl and break it up with a fork – you could use your hands but with small children clutching at your apron strings, I get a bit paranoid about handling raw meat. Also, if you use a fork, your children can help.
Crack in the egg (2 if 1 isn’t enough), add 2 or more drops of Tabasco sauce and the mustard. Sprinkle the herbs in. Stir in the onion and garlic. Then gradually add breadcrumbs until the mixture is nice and thick. Scoop into your burger machine, cook for as long or as short a time as you like.

They were a big hit – my Toy Story-obsessed two year-old loved them, the first time I can remember him tucking into anything that contained protein rather than sugar…

I finally upgraded to Panther (Apple MacOS 10.3) on my 500 mHz iBook, and aside from the disappointment of not getting the funky Quantel-esque graphic show in Fast User Switching, all seemed well.

That was until I turned WEP encryption back on on my WiFi router – an Alcatel SpeedTouch 570. Now my iBook lost its WiFi settings every time it went to sleep, which was deeply tedious. Having to type in a random 128 bit hex WEP key is tedious. And frustrating, as the Internet Connect panel won’t allow you to cut and paste hex keys.

My router does not broadcast its SSID by default, which seems to be part of the problem. Panther, it appears, likes its SSIDs sent in the clear for all to see. There’s some debate about whether this is a security risk or not – apparently it’s quite easy to gather non-broadcast SSIDs and even 128-bit WEP encryption can be broken relatively easily, but I figure that some basic precautions are a good idea to deter casual snoopers.

Anyhoo, it looks like good old MacIntouch has the answer – ignore Internet Connect, ignore the Airport control icon in the menu bar – go straight to System Preferences > Network, highlight ‘Airport’ and press the ‘Configure’ button. Under ‘By default join…’ enter your SSID and password – as I was using 128bit hex, I typed a dollar sign in before the password (which I was allowed to paste!) and orf we jolly well go.

Well so far, so good. It’s survived a few quick snoozes… but this is a pretty shoddy bit of user-interface design from Apple. Why do they seem to have three different places you can enter a WEP password? In fact there are four if you count keychains, which I didn’t even look into. And the password only seems to stick if you enter it in one of them (System Preferences > Network > Airport > Configure), which just plain daft. C’mon, Apple, I thought you were all about making technology easy to use?!

Bogdan burst into our office yesterday and asked if we’d got Skype yet.

It’s VoIP telephony, but Jon and I were dismissive, mainly because we thought it was a Windows-only thing. (Bogdan was a Mac user years ago, but strayed from the true path…)

Later, much later, that night I was watching Newsnight, and guess what – they did a whole bit on Skype. So I had a peek at their web site, and was pleased to see that they do their software for Mac OS X, Linux and Pocket PC. It offers free peer-to-peer voice calls to other Skype-users, and cheap (depending on where you are and where you’re calling) calls to real, ordinary telephones.

So, I downloaded Skype for OS X – er, then, who do I call?

I managed to find someone that looked like it might be Bogdan, and called. No answer.

Then half an hour later, I was upstairs – an unfamiliar phone rang! Or rather, my laptop rang. It was Bogdan, a perfectly audible, clear voice call on my iBook over WiFi just using the built-in mic and speakers.

Jon’s resisting Skype though – even though we can’t get iChatAV to do voice calls between us, although that might be due to latency in his rather amazing wireless set-up. Jon prefers to type (Skype does instant messaging too , you know), but it’s got me thinking it might almost be worth getting a Pocket PC to use as a phone…

In other news… Cringely thinks Kerry’s in with a chance. I’d like to think he’s right, but I refuse to misunderstimate Bush’s people’s ability to lie and cheat their way to victory. Four years ago, Gore got more votes than Bush and he still lost.

I found myself thinking about James Morgan, former economics correspondent for the BBC World Service.

A highly amusing and idiosyncratic individual, he gave me and my wife a large meat cleaver as a wedding present. Knives are supposed to be bad luck as wedding presents, but the marriage and the cleaver are still going strong. Sadly James died a couple of years ago, but rarely does a crushed clove of garlic go by without thinking of him.

He was once preparing for a live interview, and the presenter asked him if he could think of any good questions. James duly fed him one, and when he asked it, live, on air, James said “Well, that’s a particularly naive question, if you don’t mind me saying…”