I have a policy. It's not very specific and it's sporadically applied, but it's a policy. If the advertisements irritate me, I don't buy the product.

Dettol, for example. Even if it wasn't just an overpriced (fact) weak (fact) chloroxylenol (fact) solution, I still wouldn't buy it because of the adverts. Fact. And isn't that voice-over the annoying Mariella Fostrup? I don't drink much tea, and hardly ever the black stuff, but if I did, Johnny Vegas and the "mun-keh" wouldn't make me want to buy PG Tips. Danon seem to have a real talent for the annoying, as well as sailing close to the wind when it comes to making unjustified (and hence illegal) health claims about their food products. Who is that muppet promoting Activia, and why is her face made of plastic?

My car insurance is about to expire, and the quote for renewal is 50% higher than last year's price. With the "excess" which they deduct from any payout increased by £150. Yes. Or no, rather. But no problem, I can go to one of those comparison sites and find a better deal. Of course, I should apply my policy when it comes to shopping for a policy: boycott the sites who have advertising that annoys.

So that would rule out annoying meerkat puppets, extraordinarily annoying opera singers, and that cockney Iranian, Omid Djalili. He's not as funny as Shappi Khorsandi anyway. Confused didn't even bother to hire annoying actors. They just use annoying members of the public. Shot through a webcam.

And don't talk to me about the companies who tell us that they "aren't on the comparison sites". I'm a bit of a fan of Paul Whitehouse, and his ability to play several very different characters in the series of insurance ads is impressive. But kind of irritating at the same time. Merton and Fry. Words fail. Iggy -- stick to the singing, OK? And that fucking smug dog, Churchill. You can't even do car insurance for Northern Ireland. You're a bit shit, aren't you? "Ohhh, yes!"

OK, back to comparison sites, where the real deals are to be found. Although when you think about it, how are they paying for their television advertising? Profits, right? By getting commission on the insurance they help sell. And who pays for that? Yes, we do. Maybe that means I should use confused.com, who clearly aren't spending much on actors, equipment, filming and editing.

In fact, I've just done a search on a UK advertising industry website, and all insurance aggregation sites have annoying television advertising, and all individual company motor insurance advertising is annoying too. Is there something I'm missing? Is it a legal requirement? If the advert isn't annoying enough, will the ASA ban it?

I don't know. Maybe I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and go visit the fecking meerkats or something.

I've had a "bug" over the weekend. Streaming nose, muscle pains, fatigue: all that stuff. Just a case of the common cold, or, if you'd rather, acute viral rhinopharyngitis. Rhinoviruses are very diverse, which is why we never build up full immunity, although the older you get, the less often you become infected. I can't remember the last time I had a cold, which is probably why I was so grumpy about it.

Given that I spent the early part of the week locked in mortal combat with the audio hardware on a VIA motherboard (retired, injured) I wasn't out at all, apart from an expedition to the Centra store at Ballinderry for supplies, and I haven't been in contact with other human beings since the Sunday. So, given the typical two to five day incubation period, I must have been infected from touching something, somewhere that had viral particles on it. The annoying Dettol ads are actually true. (Except that expensive brand-name products aren't any better than generic ones.)

The virus must have thought that it was in the Promised Land. A whole body; completely unprotected. And certainly, it had billions of offspring. But round about now, it must be realizing that it was a false dawn. As my body's immune system rounds up and executes all survivors, the final solution to the rhinovirus problem, the viruses have nowhere to go. It's germicide.

The interesting this is that it was the virus's own fault. Normally, I'd have been out, breathing on people, at least once in the week, but being made sore and lethargic, I wasn't interested this time. When an organism leave no offspring, it disappears from the gene pool, and the descendants of better breeders spread instead. If a rhinovirus mutated to do less damage, then you'd think that it would spread better and become dominant, while the severe ones would become extinct.

So why haven't they? Well, I can think of two reasons. First, the pains and other symptoms are actually a side effect of the immune system dealing with the infection. For the virus to avoid that, it would have to greatly reduce its reproduction, meaning that it would be less likely to be present in large enough quantities to infect others. The second possibility is that there is indeed a process happening of rhinoviruses becoming less virulent, but there hasn't been time yet for any effect to emerge.

Because living alone in your own house is a very modern development, and very much restricted to the rich parts of the world. But from the census statistics, it's already about a quarter of homes in Western Europe and the USA which are single occupancy. Of course, in the future, we'll all live permanently in our own podules, interacting only by the 3-D, aroma-enhanced Internet. And what will the viruses do then?

On Wednesday, the Giacometti sculpture L'Homme qui marche 1 (Walking Man 1) sold for £58 million. Including commission to Sotheby's, the anonymous buyer would have had to pay £65 million. The statue isn't unique. Actually it's one of six casts (called "editions") which the artist made from his original mould.

The object that sold last week isn't a piece of art. Well, it is. It's a great piece of art by a man with an exceptional talent. It speaks to us. But consider: if the mould still existed and someone else made a cast, one that was absolutely indistinguishable from the six others - or if someone made a perfect copy by another means, such as taking a cast of one of the six - what would that be worth?

Almost nothing? Not a real Giacometti? But say there's no way to distinguish the copy from one of the "originals". Sotheby's could sell the copy and nobody would ever know. So where does the value of the statue come from?

The answer is that it is the actual one that Giacometti himself made. Somehow, despite being identical, the six originals have high value and our hypothetical copy has not. That's what I meant by saying that the object sold isn't art. It's celebrity memorabilia. Its only value is that it has some kind of association with a famous person.  Here, for example, imagine I have two identical silver lamé catsuits, except one was the actual suit that Elvis Presley wore for his last Vegas performance. Worth tens of thousands, probably, while the other one is just a silly bit of seventies tat.

So what the buyer purchased on Wenesday was not art. It was Giacometti memorabilia. The art was in the conception and production of the statues, which was in 1961. And it's something that we all own, because we can go and look at the other five copies in their museums, or just look at the photos.

I wrote previously about how I converted (road to Damascus) to low-powered computing. I retired my "server" PC and bought a laptop. Second-hand: recycling is good.

I'd had another conventional PC which I used for "recording studio" purposes. I also had a spare low-power motherboard which had been my first attempt at a media PC, about as fast, but burning only sixty or seventy watts as opposed to three hundred and fifty. Heart transplant surgery resulted in a functioning computer with the low-power brain. OK, that would be brain transplant surgery then. I also made a warranty-breaking modification to the power supply: I took the fan out. I reckoned that since it would only be supplying about a sixth of its maximum load, it wouldn't get too hot. Obviously, a studio PC has to be quiet.

I'd originally bought the motherboard in 2005, and a suitable case for it, but hadn't been happy with the result. Although, to be honest, I can't really remember what I didn't like. But the other components went into "storage", and I bought a ready-made silent PC instead. I loaded up forty gigabytes of music from my CD collection and listened happily for a couple of years.

Then, just recently, the modified power supply in the studio computer died. Heatstroke. I had another. (You tend to gather up bits and pieces over the years when you're a computer nerd. That's why I put "storage" in quotes above.) This time, I left it unmolested, but the noise of the fan was a problem.

So I decided it was time for all change. I took my media computer and put the studio audio card and the studio hard drive in it; carried it upstairs to my "studio" (spare bedroom). Works fine. Totally silent. The thing is, it doesn't know it's a different computer. Everything it ever remembered is on that hard drive, and it's still all there. All the software works exactly the same. (I don't think that would work with Windows.)

Then I took the much-travelled motherboard and put it back in the original small case, unused for several years. I realised that my original purchases in 2005 hadn't been so good. The case is just too small. Ten percent bigger and it would be easy to fit everything in, but as it is, everything is a contortionist job. The motherboard also has a problem in that it lacks back panel connectors. The usual "mini"-sized boards, 17cm square, have all the normal connectors along the back edge: video, sound, network, and so on; and they are exposed at the back of the case. But mine just has internal connectors, and you need to use additional leads to the back panel.

I checked to see how much a set of leads would cost. £25. Too much. I hacked some together. The hard drive with all the music and a DVD drive went in, just. Because the case is so small, only laptop drives will fit. And it booted up and seemed to be running properly. But: no sound. OK, I'd made the lead for the audio connector myself, so maybe it was wired up wrong. Racked my brains; checked on the Internet; tested with a meter; tried directly touching the loose wires to the pins. Nothing.

Well, maybe it was a software problem, even though the music player believed that it was sending sound to the output. I spent more hours trying different things, but there was no difference. I even connected up a spare hard drive and installed Windows XP on it, added the approved latest drivers... and nothing. Incidentally, Windows Media Player sucks.

In the end, I gave up. As you do. I plugged in a USB audio device (from "storage") and it worked straight away. It's a slightly ugly solution, since it's an extra box, about the size of a cigarette pack, hanging out of the back of the computer, but it's working. It's in position, under the television set, plugged into the hi-fi amp. Nice and loud. It's even sending my listening stats to last.fm.

That's it for now. Although I see that Intel has some fanless boards using their newest dual-core Atom chips. You could build a silent, fast and low-power computer from one of those.

I read something today which I didn't know (it happens occasionally): the large-scale science project known as "ITER" had originally been named from initials, but now, officially, it isn't. "ITER" doesn't stand for anything. Nothing to see here. Move along now.

You see "ITER" had been derived from "International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor", but the officials at the programme discovered that "thermonuclear" had negative connotations with the public, especially when in conjunction with "experimental".

ITER does indeed intend to produce thermonuclear fusion (by about 2018), which certainly is how H-bombs work, but more importantly, it's how the Sun works. They should have called it "The Sunshine Project".

I'm less sceptical about the potential for fusion energy than I am about the type of nuclear power in use today -- fission power. Fusion should be a lot, lot cleaner than fission for one thing (although the assertion that it produces NO radioactivity is untrue). And the fuel source is practicably inexhaustable, well, thousands of years worth at any rate.

The plan for ITER is to generate about five hundred megawatts of power, although it won't be turned into electricity or put to any other use. It is just an experiment, after all. One of the key things that needs to be investigated is how the materials of the reactor chamber hold up under intense neutron bombardment from the reaction. Ordinary steel, for example, becomes brittle under neutron radiation.

ITER will use the easiest fusion reaction, the combination of deuterium and tritium. Unfortunately, about 80% of the resulting energy is in the form of those high-speed neutrons, and for eventual commercial power production, they would have to be trapped in something and their kinetic energy turned into heat. The heat would then run steam turbines, just like a coal-fired power station. It's not very elegant. There are more advanced ideas, such as hydrogen-boron fusion, which potentially could generate electricity directly, but that's a long way in the future.

It's been a joke in scientific circles that commercial fusion power is about twenty years away, and always will be. That was partly a reaction to the failures to make any progress in the early days, the 1950s. The scientists of the time knew that the uncontrolled fusion in the H-bomb was pretty straightforward, so they expected controlled fusion to be easy too. It wasn't.

If ITER does pave the way for fusion power for commercial use, it's not going to be much earlier than about 2030 (yes, twenty years away). That's a full eighty years since work started. A long slog, but it will be worth it in the end.

..Before you'all get hyped up by the Oscars and the commercial success of 'Avatar' as the most gross, sorry, highest-grossing Hollywood movie ever, I thought I'd pass on this gem I found on the Internet. Hits the nail right on the head.

Just in case you missed it on the news, this morning there were demonstrations across the country where people took massive overdoses of pills. Homeopathic pills.

A campaign co-ordinated by an organisation called "10:23" (http://www.1023.org.uk/) seeks to stop the National Heath Service spending four million pounds a year on this pseudoscience; and to embarrass the Boots pharmacy chain into dropping homeopathic products. The title of the campaign, "There's Nothing In It" is about the facts that there's no substance to homeopathy and that the "remedies" are nothing but water. (The homeopathic pills are sugar pills which have been "anointed" with the water.)

Boots, incidentally, gave evidence to the Commons Science and Technology Committee in 2009 that they did not believe homeopathic products have any effect. But they sell them because of "customer demand".

A lot of people think that homeopathy is a "herbal" or "complimentary" or even "natural" system of medicine, but in fact, it's nothing but a scam, made up by a Samuel Hahnemann in 1796. The process he developed, of putting a small quantity of a chemical into solution, and then diluting and diluting and diluting, ends up with not a single molecule of the substance left behind in the water, but the water is supposed to "remember" the chemical that was in it. They never explain how the water knows not to remember silica from the glass bottles, or the odd bacterial spore, or anything else it was ever in contact with.

And the laugh is that you can make the water even more homeopathically powerful... by diluting it again! Just add water.

That, actually, highlights a flaw in 10:23's demonstration this morning. Swallowing a hundred sugar pills can't be a homeopathic overdose, because according to the system's crazy logic, the less you take the stronger the effect. So they should all have stood in front of Boots and taken just one sugar pill. Or for maximum effect: none at all.

I was reading the Guardian on-line yesterday, and one article began "If ever there was a sign of the moral bankruptcy of Silvio Berlusconi's government..."

So what have Silvio and Co. done this time? Sex with schoolgirls? (Again.) Mafia commerce? (Again.) Making laws to protect themselves from prosecution? (Again.) No, it's worse than that. They've betrayed Italian food by actively supporting McDonald's latest campaign.

Italy only has 290 of the establishments which McDonald's persist in calling "restaurants", compared with the UK's 1,115 so they must see scope for expansion, even though the fast food concept contradicts the image of Italian cuisine. In fact, it was the opening of the Spanish Steps branch of McDonald's which prompted Carlo Petrini and friends to found the Slow Food movement in 1989, now an international affair.

In that very branch, agriculture minister Luca Zaia donned a McDonald's "McItaly" apron and served up an unidentified grey-brown substance on a bun, asking "Vuoi le patatine?"