How to escape a desert

Today I learned something that might be useful, if I'm ever stuck in the desert with a broken down vehicle. If you want to signal to a rescue aircraft, one way is to shine a mirror at it. But it's hard to be sure that you're pointing the mirror at the right angle. So here's what you do: stretch one arm out, pointing towards the plane, with your index and middle fingers making a V. Then hold a mirror in your other hand and shine it so the reflected light shows on your fingers. Now you've got a pair of sights that you can use to aim the reflected light from the mirror at any spotter. Very handy, although I'm not planning on going wadi-bashing any time soon. (I do so hope that means driving a 4x4 over sand dunes, and not some sort of racist violence.)

Today I deleted around 250 emails, and now there are fewer than 20 in my inbox. This week I'm going to test new email behaviour: I'm only going to read emails twice per day, and work on my projects the rest of the time. I'm not sure if a week is long enough to educate the rest of the company to stop being so reliant on this imperfect means of communication, but it's a start.

I also turned on the Xbox and did half an hour's exercise withe the Kinect, for the first time in over a month. This was excruciatingly painful, and by the end I was sweating too much to do some of the exercises (the perils of sweat on a smooth, tiled floor) but it may have made me a better person. We'll see tomorrow when I go running. When my wife called me on the way home from work, I was incapable of speaking; this may, or may not, have been a good sign.

This evening I undid most of the good work by going to a party and eating lots of cupcakes. We met a very avuncular man, the host of the party, who was born in Balham. I'm always overjoyed to meet another South Londoner, even if my own status is a little quasi-, having been dragged up on the mean streets of Beckenham. "Straight Out Of The Borough Of Bromley" doesn't quite have that gangster cachet.