Ah, the mid-80s. Such fond memories of bowling round the estates and thoroughfares of Dagenham with my hooky Volkswagen sign around my neck and Run-D.M.C. pumping out my ghetto blaster. Let me tell you - I cut quite a swathe, dear reader. The chicks went mental, believe.

As I got a little older and a little more considerate, I progressed to a Walkman. The same strut and the same banging choons, but a little less noise pollution. Mind you, my old Mum still told me that the damage I was doing to myself pumping monster riffs and block rockin' beats straight into my ear didn't bear thinking about.

I rolled my eyes at the time, but it turns out that she was right. A study published in the ever-riveting journal Injury Prevention has found that, between 2004 and 2011, the number of people killed or injured in the US each year because they had headphones on has leapt from 16 to 45. Young men are the most frequent victims, with the majority being hit by trains, having not heard the warnings issued moments before.

Crikey. The next time I go jogging, I think I'll be dusting off my boombox and my self-compiled Monster Mix Summer ‘88 tape.

I was recently offered the chance to have a tête-à-tête with the big boss man of storage vendor Coraid and was intrigued to see that his marketing bods attempted to lure me into a meeting by filling me in on his extracurricular activities.

They assured me that chief exec Kevin Brown could fill me in on "the secret behind his company's amazing growth and success in the UK and worldwide".

Sounds good - but here's the kicker. "Spearheading Coraid is Kevin's day job but in his spare time, he prefers to set the pace with a pair of drumsticks," said the marketing bumf. "A keen drummer for more than 30 years, he regularly plays with his rock band Cover My Six."

Makes sense. I guess if his nine-to-five is full of the mile-a-minute glamour and prestige of being a storage boss, it'd be nice to spend some time as that one at the back who never gets the girls.

As a career technologist and - as you can't have failed to notice - a big, burly, virile, thrusting bloke of a man, I stumbled across some research that worried me deeply this week.

Scientists from Argentina and the US have completed a study that suggests exposure
to Wi-Fi signals may harm a man's fertility. For reasons best known to themselves, the science bods convinced 29 chaps to provide, shall we say, samples.

Each of these offerings was divvied up into two pots (I imagine they drew lots for that job), with one half left for four hours next to a wirelessly connected laptop and the other half left in an internet-free environment.

The behaviour of each donor's little men was then analysed, and it was found that those that had been basking in Wi-Fi rays were less-capable swimmers.

All of which adds up to deeply pioneering work, I'm sure you'll agree. But you have to wonder which budding young biologist thought they'd get interesting results by depositing the substance in question next to a laptop. Or perhaps that little experiment wasn't planned.

You can't have failed to notice that this time last week was Cyber Monday, the
year's busiest web shopping day.

You can't have failed to notice, that is, unless you are the world's best-known internet retailer. My chums at CRN were penning an article about the phenomenon and contacted Amazon to see if the firm had anything to add on just how monumentally enormous they were expecting sales to be.

"Our biggest day will be next Monday - Cyber Monday," replied a press goon.

I don't think the hack had the heart to tell them. So, how about doing your old mate David a favour? Chuck a few quid Amazon's way by ordering that novelty secret Santa present for that accounts payable clerk you never liked. I think the poor e-tailer might need the business today.

I read this week that, according to research, habitual video gamers have different brains to the rest of us. Übergamers, who play more than nine hours a week, have a larger ventral striatum - the hub of the brain's reward system, closely linked to addiction.

Dr Simone Kuhn at Ghent University told the BBC the vertical sternum is "usually activated when people experience pleasure such as winning money, good food or sex".

Or, in this case, sitting in your PJs, gorging on funsize Milky Ways while totally wasting some 11-year-old kid on Call of Duty. Mega.

Researchers have stressed it is as yet unclear whether playing lots of video games makes your venereal sterilum bigger, or if having a massive reward centre is more likely to drive you to gaming overindulgence. The academics are now testing this by getting adults who have never touched a video game before to play lots of them to see if their vestigial sputum gets bigger.

I reckon I might sign up for this. Of course, as a career technologist, I've played the odd round of Tetris. But I wouldn't mind an all-expenses-paid trip to Belgium to sit on my harris and play Super Monkey Ball all day.

Regular reader(s) may have been disappointed at the lack of entertaining robot news recently. It's all well and good building androids that can go into space, perform keyhole surgery, teach kids to read or cook a three-course dinner. But, as a long-time robophile, I can't help but feel a misty-eyed yearning for the days of Johnny 5 and C-3PO, when automatons were just a bit more fun.

Take a bow, Teotronica! If you possessed the robo-invention skills of Italian brainiac Matteo Suzzi, what would you set your mind to? Automating production processes for cleaner fuels, perhaps? Or developing complex algorithms to immunise against stock market fluctuations?
That'd be alright, I guess. But how about a weird-looking robotic Billy Joel? Yeah, let's go with that one.

It took Suzzi some four years to bring Teotronica to life. I've had a wee look at the robo-pianist, and I can't help but like the fella. I always try and apply the same judging criteria to robots as I do to humans. And if I met a guy in the pub with 19 fingers, a little Mickey-Pearce-meets-the-Artful-Dodger hat and wildly oscillating eyebrows, I think I'd take a pretty instant shine to him.

Teotronica can also pay the drums and sing and does a mega version of We Are The Champions, which can be viewed here. Here's hoping he does a tour of the Barking and Dagenham area's classier nightspots in the not-too-distant future.

Working in IT you get used to tech-makers coming up with highfalutin analogies comparing their business or technology to something like, oh let's say, Borussia Dortmund, the city of Barcelona, or heroin. (What? No, of course those aren't genuine examples...)

But this week I encountered one of the more bizarre comparisons I've ever come across, when a vendor exec likened his firm to insufferable purple dinocretin Barney. Apparently, this manufacturer has sometimes fallen into the trap of having a "Barney relationship" with resellers.

He was suggesting the channel scheme was becoming far too redolent of the cuddly dinosaur's biggest chart-smasher.

"I love you, you love me, we're a happy family," says the song.

The exec stressed that, while he loves his VARs, he doesn't want to be as indiscriminately accepting as the anthropomorphous T-rex.

Come to think of it, I've often felt I have something of a Barney relationship with my suppliers. In that they treat me like a child and I often feel like I want to rip off their dopey-grinning head and play football with it.

As Dagenham's sixth most prestigious IT dealer, I've always found it nigh-on impossible to balance work with my home commitments - until now. A reseller friend of mine who was down the Dog and Duck told me he'd posed a question concerning that very conundrum to Michael Dell himself when the Texan PC baron was in London recently.

Just how did the eponymous computer maker manage to create a firm with a net worth of $20bn before the age of 40, while at the same time raising a young family? His answer was that he simply replied "yes, dear" to everything his wife asked of him. Ah, a simple recipe for matrimonial and professional bliss. Just say "yes".

So it seems Michael Dell is a bit like Jim Carrey in that film where a man decides to answer every question in the affirmative - a Yes Man, if you will. (I forget what the movie's called.) Only with rather more lucrative - although arguably less hilarious - consequences.