The trouble is the for some reason, when you have a Word document open, it reports a different MIME type than when it is closed, which will scupper your upload routine.  Since the type reported makes it look like an executable file (and therefore potentially dangerous) your code probably won’t allow it, and rightly so.

The solution, therefore, is for your user to close the document before they try to upload it.

I’m not sure whether this is specific to Windows/IE (I wouldn’t be surprised) but if you have trouble uploading Word docs, this could provide to solution.  (When I have time I’ll test how other document types behave…)

And you may have read this.  But did you spot this?

Williams then alerted the emergency services on her mobile phone. “I wasn’t on hands-free, but I figured I wasn’t really driving the car,” she said.

Now I know why she didn’t come forward immediately; probably getting legal advice…

Check out my tasty simulation after the jump.

I say ‘apparently’ unnecessary because I can’t quite bring myself to believe that Google would add something so frivolous, that slows down the browsing experience, for no reason.

I know it doesn’t seem like a big deal – They added a fade effect?  My god, man; these power-mad fools must be stopped! – but it is.  The great thing about Google is that it is one of the purest examples of simple and effective functionality around.  Almost everything they do is simultaneously very powerful and absurdly easy to use.  Google Maps, Analytics and Docs spring instantly to mind, and that leaves aside Google’s core mind-blowing ability to search through tens of billions of documents in sub-second times.

It just seems kind of erratic.  Like your dad ditching his U2 CD collection, buying an iPod and downloading Jay-Z’s back catalogue, you sort of stand to one side looking bemused, wondering when normal service will be resumed.  Perhaps it an elaborate joke, or the first step in a hitherto unforeseen master plan that will soon become clear.  I hope so, because the other possibility is that it’s the start of a longer downward trend that ends with a red convertible and regrets all round.

Russel McPhee, a stroke victim paralysed for 20 years, has been able to walk again after injections of Botox. Apparently, Botox is comonly used to treat the muscle stiffness experienced after a stroke, but usually shortly after the episode, not two decades later.  The difficulty is that Botox relaxes the stiffness, but also the muscle tone, which makes controlling the newly relaxed muscles very difficult.

But here’s the bit that really grabbed me:

Crucially, Mr McPhee had repeatedly, over the years, attempted to get out of his wheelchair and stand on his own.

He was not successful, managing at most a few seconds on his feet before he collapsed.

“Often I would lie on the floor for hours, just hoping that someone might drop by so they could pick me up again,” he said.

Those repeated, heart-breaking attempts to stand built up a core muscle strength on which his doctors and physiotherapists were able to work.

This is a guy who simply refused to give up.  Even though bitter experience, built up over 20 years, must have told him that attempting to stand unaided would lead to failure, that walking was impossible, he never stopped trying. This immense willpower, sheer bloody-mindedness really, meant that when modern medicine came up with the tools to unlock his body, he had the core strength to make the most of it, and finally walk again.

In a nutshell: for the past 72 years, a sample of 268 men have been followed and their entire history - medical, familial, physical, emotional, mental - recorded in great depth.  The study is coming to end, mainly because only half of the original group are still alive, and they are in their late eighties.  It has a huge amount to teach us about how our lives shape our personalities, and vice versa.

The Grant Study, as it was called, took its sample from Harvard, and ended up including politicians, best-selling novelists and even one president (you’ll have to read the article to find out who).  However, not everyone was a success; far from it.  The study, then, was able to reveal some insights into what makes for a happy, healthy life, and how those things may vary at different stages.

What allows people to work, and love, as they grow old? By the time the Grant Study men had entered retirement, Vaillant, who had then been following them for a quarter century, had identified seven major factors that predict healthy aging, both physically and psychologically.

Employing mature adaptations was one. The others were education, stable marriage, not smoking, not abusing alcohol, some exercise, and healthy weight. Of the 106 Harvard men who had five or six of these factors in their favor at age 50, half ended up at 80 as what Vaillant called “happy-well” and only 7.5 percent as “sad-sick.” Meanwhile, of the men who had three or fewer of the health factors at age 50, none ended up “happy-well” at 80.

What factors don’t matter? Vaillant identified some surprises. Cholesterol levels at age 50 have nothing to do with health in old age. While social ease correlates highly with good psychosocial adjustment in college and early adulthood, its significance diminishes over time. The predictive importance of childhood temperament also diminishes over time: shy, anxious kids tend to do poorly in young adulthood, but by age 70, are just as likely as the outgoing kids to be “happy-well.” Vaillant sums up: “If you follow lives long enough, the risk factors for healthy life adjustment change. There is an age to watch your cholesterol and an age to ignore it.”

There’s much more to it than simple ‘healthy living’ advice though (even the “happy-well” subjects were not uniformly content).  It is ultimately a meditation on the distance between the life you want and the life you get, and the success – or otherwise – of this group of men in dealing with that gap.

In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

At a time of unprecedented challenge for all print media, many publications have rushed to embrace social networking technologies. Most now offer Twitter feeds of major breaking news headlines, while the Daily Mail recently pioneered an iPhone application providing users with a one-click facility for reporting suspicious behaviour by migrants or gays.

Sadly, it’s all downhill from there; The Telegraph have a story about migrating salmon being used to generate electrivity, while The Times can only manage this tame effort.  They are joking, right?

UPDATE: The Guardian’s efforts just keep getting better and better…