Time and a word

Does anybody know whether there exists a way of timing the writing/sending of a text message? Ideally it'd be some kind of stopwatch that you could set with a keypress and unset once you'd finished (so in fact you'd be able to use it to time other things on your phone as well, but call timing is already built-in for most phones and I'm not sure what else would be useful). Basically I'm interested to know how long it takes people to write and send (without using a template) short messages like "Yes", "No", "Thanks", and "Busy, will reply later". Obviously everybody's typing speed differs, so I guess I'd want to collect data from as many people as possible to get an average speed.

Holidays in the sun

I will be spending much of this Christmas period in Communicado. I hear it's nice at this time of year.

In other words, I'm going home on Wednesday morning (and will be busy for most of tomorrow). At home I'm stuck behind excruciatingly slow and not particularly cheap dialup, so I'm unlikely to be around much.

I'm afraid I haven't really done much in the way of Christmas cards this year, because I've been too crap and disorganised to get the relevant combinations of me + money cards + address + stamps + postbox + time all in one place at once. THANK YOU to the people who have already sent me presents in the post (I haven't opened them yet, obviously!) -- I hope your gifts get there in time.

Happy Whatsits to all of you: may the winter festival of your choice bring you everything that you desire and nothing that you despise.