Those that know me, know that I’m a programmer (amongst other things!), and I love automation, I have this vast frustration when people are repeating the same manual steps hundreds and hundreds of times.

Bloggers tend to “get” the whole process of automation, they’re used to having plugins that go away and do all their bidding for them, eBayers have started getting into this with bid sniping tools that bid frantically in the dying seconds of their auction.

I’ve done a couple of pieces of work over the years automating fetching content from websites and displaying it in a different format or fetching it and providing a large amount of mathematical calculations, recently these jobs have centred around gamblings sites and odds. All very interesting stuff and occasionally tempts me to have a dabble with the dogs or the horses!

The Descent trailer

If there was one thing on your computer that you do every single day, and could automate – what would it be?

My next project I think will be an email (that might sound really bad), but what I’m talking about is an email that is sent to me at 6am every morning, detailing all the information I want to know for the day. The headlines, the contents of my inbox, anything I’m bidding on eBay on (and whether I’m likely to win it), the weather etc. That would be kind of useful I think!

(As a side note if there is something you want coding up like this – you can always give me a shout and I can see if I can fit it in).