A series of fact-finding tours had kept him away from his readers for too long but now he was back and ready, as his American friends had taught him to say, 'kick some ass'. "Bottom line is my friends at AMD are in the sushi," he mulled as he considered the likelihood of a late ship for K6-3D. Still, we shouldn't be surprised. That's a company that probably holds its Christmas party the following Easter if its chip release history is anything to go by. Howzabout HP shipping its super-thin notebook before the company that made the darn thing - Mitsubishi. Seems the sometime Apricot-ers ain't too fussed. They'll produce units within weeks of Messrs. Hewlett and Packard. Still, if you had the world's slimmest lump of A4 computing power wouldn't you want to grease it with some PR glitz? And what mountie be going on at Corel. Seems we'll all be the wiser next week when tennis-mad, Sussex-born boss Mike Cowpland gives the gen at CeBIT. You just hope he'll do a better job than his last big outing with press and analysts when many of the assembled got the impression that the Canadians had quit developing Java products. That's just not so but if you want a Corel NC, don't hold your breath. That project is firmly on the back burner given the company's problems with pushing out a plain old NC desktop and a dribbling away of cash. At least the Corel channel looks a lot cleaner after new UK head honcho Peter Harborow recently completed a process of extracting excess software. Maybe he'll last longer than the previous incumbents then