Forbidden love and Alan Titchmarsh

Nothing sets the heart racing or the loins aflame like the love that cannot or should not be.

We find a rich vein of examples in western literature: consider Romeo and Juliet or Catherine and Heathcliff or Lady Chatterley and that gardener bloke (Alan Titchmarch? - Ed).

But none are so dark, terrible and seductive as the love that dare not speak its name: the love between a virus writer and a security consultant.

Seventeen-year old female virus writer Gigabyte hit the headlines this week by releasing Sharpei - the first malware written using Microsoft's new C# language.

Most news reports focussed on the fact that Gigabyte was female - the vast majority are male.

But what caught the Round-Up's eye was Gigabyte's apparent fixation with Sophos virus expert Graham Cluely.

Gigabyte has launched a tirade against Graham on her website (http://www.coderz.net/gigabyte ) where she claims he's sexist, frustrated and lacks a sense of humour. She also cruelly suggests he might want to spend a few spare moments on a treadmill.

What's more, she's included him in the Parrot.scr virus she authored - if it infects your PC a lengthy MP3 starts up which states: "You'd better not f!@# on the table Graham Cluely, you son of a bitch..." each time you run a .exe file.

But as we all know there's a very fine line between love and hate and Cluely suggested a different reason for her interest in him to our reporter: "I think she may have a crush on me..."

What do readers think? Do you think a guy like Graham and a girl like Gigabyte have a chance? She's made the first move Graham, take a deep breath and leap the chasm.

Try a little poetry for starters:

Shall I compare thee to a .vbs script virus?
Thou art more infectious and more polymorphic:
Your destructive payload doth shake the darling buds of May, And Sharpei's lease hath all too short a date...

Or maybe a song:

"When the worm hits your drive like a Word macro file - that's amore... "

Go for it, Graham. Because maybe - just maybe - in this crazy, mixed-up world of ours love has a chance to thrive, to grow and to reign eternal.

Do we sense a conspiracy at Big Blue? In the same short period of time as a new IBM CEO takes over the reins from Lou Gerstner the company dumps its Palm-OS-powered WorkPad PDA.

Nothing too suspicious until you consider the new CEO's name: Sam Palmisano. Palm Is A No? Is there a link? We think we should be told...

It's not unreasonable to expect to be able to leave for work in the cold, early morning light, toil all day in a busy office, battle through traffic at rush hour and not come home late at night to discover that BT has planted a telegraph pole in your garden.

What's more, when you finally get BT to agree to move it, it is neither unreasonable to get home from work on another night to find that everyone's favourite telco has uprooted its telegraph pole from your garden and planted it in the middle of your drive instead - two feet from a neighbour's window.

So pity Ann Baker who had to endure this trial over the space of four months.

She writes: "It should have actually have been placed in the access road at the side of my house, but as this was reinforced concrete & too much work they decided to put it on my parking area!"

BT agreed to move the pole to a mutually convenient position but managed to totally decimate the pavement outside Ann's house in the process.

Ann adds: "The situation is still continuing as they appear to be refusing to do any more work on the concreted parking space to reinstate it to its original condition."

We feel a campaign coming on...

Wily owners of Apple's iPod MP3 player have found an innovative way to get their hands on free software.

The 5GB device can also be used as a portable hard drive and iPod users have been wandering into stores and plugging them in to Macs to get their hands on software, the Daily Mirror reports.

If you witness this happen inform the store manager and don't try to intervene, cornered data thieves have been known to brandish their devices and shout: "Get back! I've got a Firewire-enabled MP3 player and I'm not afraid to use it..."

And finally this week: a rant.

Researchers and marketeers who conduct polls that add nothing to the sum of human wisdom: stop, please.

The latest: apparently Britons spend around 3.5 million hours a year waiting to use the family computer and PC rage - the irrepressible anger we feel while waiting to check our mail - has overtaken remote control rage as the biggest cause of techno-stress in our homes.

(Surely if one person is using the PC then the other can use the TV remote control? Everyone's happy.)

However, to combat the rising tide of daft surveys the Round-Up has commissioned its own and was not entirely surprised to discover that 98 per cent of sane Britons hate pointless surveys, while the other two per cent commission and carry them out.

Of those two per cent, 99 per cent have problems sleeping at night with the full unrelenting horror of what they do, while the other one per cent are undead leeches sucking the marrow out of life and probably Manchester United supporters to boot.

Come on people: the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the view. Find something worthwhile to do like nursing, teaching or blacksmithing.

(45 per cent of blacksmiths have less than seven fingers...) Stop that!

Malebolge the eighth circle of hell, normally reserved for betrayers, falsifiers and simonists (whatever they are) awaits you all.

(95 per cent of Italian politicians don't pick up on obscure references to Dante in IT columns...) No more, OK?

Accept our infinite variations we don't need to quantify and index every aspect of human life, leave us our few solitary mysteries.

As US poet Walt Whitman once (more or less) wrote: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes... now get thee gone you pesky pollster..."

Abandon hope all ye who poll 100 ordinary members of the public, the Round-Up will return next Friday...