The Weekly Round-Up: 20.07.07

The life of the modern road warrior is fraught with peril and anxiety. Danger lurks around every corner, every corporate jolly is a journey along a razor's edge.

Business travellers have revealed their biggest worries while on the move. Losing passports, coming down with a dodgy stomach after drinking the local tap water or international terrorism don't make the cut.

Nope, the single greatest concern for the modern business traveller is missing vital emails. And the Round-Up's not talking about links to YouTube videos about monkeys fighting crocodiles.

Two-thirds of respondents to a recent survey listed missing emails as a major fear while out in the big room.

Other 'nightmares' for travelling execs include traffic problems (mercy!), drained mobile phone batteries (doom!), computer breakdowns (get a Mac?) and finding a stain on their tie when meeting clients (Aaaaarrrgh!!!).

It's a white-knuckle ride of terror and high jinks out there, that's for sure.

When our brave travellers could be coaxed down out of the trees they were also asked what their greatest concern would be when out of contact with the office. Forty-two per cent said it would be that they wouldn't be able to carry on working while on the move. Conscientious and stressed. Bless.

But it's not just about technical or sartorial glitches. Modern remote workers are also apoplectic with worry that Machiavellian colleagues will shine in their absence while they're frantically trying to scrub dried egg off their M&S tie five minutes before a presentation to the Munich team and the shouty woman from head office.

It's worse for techies - as always - with 13 per cent of IT managers (compared to the average of two per cent of more self-secure managers) admitting to being worried about being shown up in their absence by Dave from the database team. Which the Round-Up supposes is only slightly worse than being shown up when you're in the office.

It's enough to make any sensible person refuse to leave the safety of the office, except more than half of the nervous wrecks surveyed admitted that the amount of time they need to spend out 'in the wild' has increased in the last two years.

Meanwhile, one of the most beloved devices for travelling execs and remote workers - the precious, precious BlackBerry - is seen as a great tool for getting the job done remotely (take that Dave!) but having a potentially detrimental effect on the work/life balance (curse fickle Mistress Fate! She giveth then she taketh away… ).

BlackBerrys and smart phones are a tremendous productivity tool, according to silicon.com's CIO Jury, but without judicious use of the OFF switch they could set the unwary worker on the road to misery, woe and destruction. Or something like that. Anyway you can get the low-down here.

If you have to leave the safety of your office, with its warm, familiar vibe and worn but comfy chair, you can find out how to make business travel more bearable by checking out the top business travel tips from silicon.com staffers and our favourite frequent fliers.

It could just help preserve your job and your sanity...

Competition news! No, not the caption competition (but do keep reading for this week's chance to impress us with your rapier wit or, more probably, toilet humour). No, the Round-Up has called in every debt, favour and out-and-out blag to net this tasty treat to dangle before your eager eyes, dear readers, so get ready to sit up and beg… (Strictly speaking, the Round-Up can't take all the credit - and should really mention the good and kind folk at Vodafone UK: what nice people!)…

So here it is: your chance to spend a day with Formula 1 driver and current championship leader Lewis Hamilton - the frankly so-hot-he's-sizzling property of the McLaren Mercedes team. Wow! Follow this link for the full competition details. And don't hang about - you've got til noon on Tuesday 24 July. (The Round-Up will shortly be off to hand in that letter of resignation so it isn't disqualified from entering by conflict of interest terms and conditions. Yay!)

Moving on… Delirious Oxford University students are being hunted down like dogs by irate dons over their excessive post-exam celebrations. OK, that's something of an exaggeration… but a social networking website is playing a central role.

The absolute cream of the UK's young academic elite are finishing their exams, putting away their pens then covering themselves with whipped cream and causing no end of damage to local amenities and the university's peerless reputation. What larks!

However, the administrators at the venerable educational institution are turning to social networking phenomenon Facebook to identify troublemakers. They're handing out fines to students who post pictures of themselves covered in flour, eggs and other less savoury matter in so-called 'trashings' on the site.

It's just the latest example of how a social networking tool can be used to exploit its users. The Student Union is naturally appalled. It's now emailed advice to students on how to ensure dons aren't able to view pictures of them wearing the ingredients of a half-decent sponge cake.

Other students confess to being baffled as to how academic administrators in the city of the dreaming spires could have circumnavigated the privacy settings of some profiles to access the images.

On-the-spot fines have been introduced for students considered to be bringing the university into disrepute, according to a report in The Times, and thanks to Facebook the number of convictions could be on the up.

If the guilty parties don't pay up they don't get their degrees. It's a harsh lesson from the University of Life.

Meanwhile, the standards of modern university education in England's most hallowed institution have clearly taken a turn for a worse.

The Times also reports that one student who set up a Facebook event inviting fellows to come and trash him once his exams were over was fined £40 before he'd even sat his finals.

Stupid boy. Go to the back of the class.

Speaking of hallowed institutions, you may fall into one of two camps on the subject of Harry Potter.

You may believe that the adventures of Harry and his Hogwarts chums are the best thing since the Nimbus 2000 came out. Alternatively, you could fail to see what all the fuss is about, in which case you should thank your lucky Hufflepuffs that the whole nonsense comes to an end this Friday. For the record, the Round-Up belongs to the latter camp.

Either way, this Friday represents the end of the road for Harry, Hermione and Ron (other than another few films and branded lunchboxes etc) with the publication of the seventh and final book in the franchise, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

Security around the book has been tighter than a griffon's chuff. When the sixth in the series came out a few missing copies led to a major police operation and blanket media coverage. Security couldn't be breached again could it? You bet your Whomping Willow it could.

Just a month ago, a hacker claimed he'd wormed his way into the computers of Bloomsbury offices and revealed the dramatic ending online, the spoil sport.

This week it appears that the griffon's chuff has been breached again and the book has appeared online in the form of hundreds and hundreds of images of photographed pages. Which means there's a physical copy, in the wild. Just think, Potter fans, you could find out now what happens in the end. The pages have found their way onto a number of websites in China, via the mystical medium of peer-to-peer.

The Round-Up's had a peek - everything from chapter 3 of the first book to the end of book seven was just Harry's dream and he wakes up to find Dudley Dursley in the shower. Harry does Dallas, so to speak.

Seriously, the Round-Up has no idea. It would be great though wouldn't it? No? OK, back to the bit.

Just what sort of madman would photograph more than 700 pages of a book and post them on the internet a few days before it goes on general release is a question that only an experienced and hardened psychiatrist could answer - and even then only under extreme provocation.

The 'book' is now available from all good BitTorrent sites now and in slightly friendlier reading format in bookshops at midnight tonight.

Either way, sales of the book will no doubt give JK Rowling enough money to purchase a new country pad. Say, Durham. And hopefully, it will finally give Potter-weary Muggles a little peace and quiet...

(For a little less peace and quiet, check out the Weekly Round-Up podcast - which this week features a rabble-rousing discussion of those twin vices of the modern age: broadband and BlackBerrys. Oh and news of a rampaging tank. Listen here. You can even subscribe in iTunes, right here)

Like a wibbly-wobbly tooth, the Round-Up just can't leave the iPhone alone.

The most astounding, arousing device in the history of human communications has barely been out of the headlines for the last decade or so and the Round-Up freely admits its role in that.

The device's features have been discussed ad nauseam, its interface drooled over, its feature-set applauded and its price and EDGE coverage mocked and ridiculed.

One feature that came to light this week is its habit of taking out wireless networks. Oops, didn't see that in the keynote.

Network administrators at Duke University, North Carolina, have reported severe fluctuating signals with the institution's WLAN since the iPhone was released in late June.

They allege the device has been hammering the wireless infrastructure by flooding access points with as many as 18,000 MAC address requests every second.

The periodical surge in address requests put access points out of service for 10 to 15 minutes. Initial investigation has shown the requests to be for invalid router addresses, suggesting that the iPhone's wi-fi software is repeatedly trying to connect to its user's home network. Well, people do get homesick on campus.

If that isn't bad enough, the deeply frustrated network admins are terrified at the prospect of what will happen when the students return en masse. At the moment there are an estimated 150 iPhones on campus. Goodness knows what will happen to the network when there are thousands. Run away!

Grab a Blackberry and head for an overseas conference. Bahrain would do. Or maybe Bangkok. Just a long way from Duke University, failing access points and iPhones...

And finally it's caption compo time again folks so get your eyeballs all over this picture - and if you manage to make us roll on the floor clutching our sides like we're dying of dengue fever then you could just win a bottle of bubbly. Hooray!

Check out the winning caption for last week's competition here.