Day-to-day IT challenges are the biggest headache for small businesses, according to a UK studies. Sound familiar?

A survey by Connect, which polled 200 IT managers and directors, found that 37 per cent of small businesses in the country said that regular IT hassles were their biggest problems.

I can attest to that frustration. Nothing can beat continually coming into work in the morning and finding a glitch, say in the network connection or in the e-mail system.

The second biggest worry, IT security, was cited by 32 per cent of the survey group as a major problem.

Security was more of a problem for smaller businesses, those with less than 50 employees, compared to their better staffed larger brethren.

The survey serves as a good lesson to IT and to management. You might be concentrating on the big projects to improve your IT network.

Yet those pan out over the course of months, while your workers sit there swearing at the little bugs that make them work overtime.

"Much of the IT debate currently revolves around what we'd call 'big ticket' items - concepts like mobile working, Web 2.0 or open source software dominate the news agenda for IT," stated Connect.

"While we're certainly not dismissing those concepts, the reality is that for the entrepreneurs and owner-managers that drive much of the innovation and growth in our economy, the issues are really much simpler. They just want robust, cost-effective IT systems that actually work."

Amen to that statement.

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The Computer Society of Bermuda (CSB) has released an analysis of the 2Mb speed offer by local internet providers and comes up with the conclusion that everyone who steps up the higher level will benefit.

The six-page document is easy to read, is full of details and is excellent reading for anyone befuddled by the pricing systems available on the island.

This is truly a public service document. To read some of the conclusions, including an allegation that the local prices are being massaged by the providers, go to www.csb.bm and click on "The 2 Meg Effect".

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Spam levels reached a new record in August, accounting for about 92 per cent of all monitored e-mails, according to SoftScan.

Think about it, you have to delete or stop 92 e-mails to get to the eight good ones. SoftScan predicts that spam will rise by 40 per cent this month, and reported that it was already seeing a significant increase.

Yesterday I came into the office and had an addition 500 e-mails in my office inbox.

Our spam stopper does not quite work. Mass deletions got this number down to about 15. Help!

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The search for the missing Steve Fossett, the adventuring entrepreneur who went missing on September 3 during a private flight over Nevada, has moved on to the internet.

Google Earth has released up-to-date images of Nevada, while Amazon has created a collaborative search scheme run via its Mechanical Turk online service (www.mturk.com).

Hundreds of volunteers are now scouring satellite photos of 85 metre square areas of the state in a bid to spot a plane with a wingspan of about 21 pixels long and 30 pixels.

Once you make a possible sighting on one of the photos, you mark it for checking.

If organisers determine a photo contains information on the whereabouts of Fossett, a search team will fly over the designated area.

The search for Fossett covers 44,000 square kilometres (17,000 square miles) of Nevada's wilderness and parts of California.

There are 51,094 images left to review as of yesterday.

If you have any comments sent them to me by email at elamin.ahmed@gmail.com.