I haven’t looked at Ask Jeeves for a while, but it’s looking better than ever, with some intelligence in its parsing. Just like if you type ‘three uk tablespoons in cubic feet’ into Google it does more than just search.

Shame its geography isn’t very good.

I know I’ll need these again at some point. They’re sites containing hundreds of free stock photos. Very handy.

http://www.morguefile.com/archive/index.php

http://www.imageafter.com/

http://www.openphoto.net/

http://sxc.hu/

http://www.pixelperfectdigital.com/

http://www.bigfoto.com/

At work we are all mobile employees. I often work from home near Portsmouth, and stay in contact with colleagues and customers via the Internet. Skype is bloody brilliant, frankly. I know the technology isn’t new, but it’s the simplest Voice over IP tool I’ve used so far, and the quality is great.

We also use MSN Messenger, but very recently I’ve noticed an appalling drop in its reliability. Lines of chat are regularly lost, and its only when one of the participants repeats a question (looking for an answer) or when the conversation seems disjointed that a loss is apparant. I reckon a few lines per session are lost. Maybe 3-5% in total.

That’s enough to cause confusion and demand tedious re-interation of conversation, and is likely to result in our using another IM service if this continues. I don’t quite understand why lines of text appear to be lost, nor why it has only started happening recently. Is anybody else getting this?