Back from holiday, I found my inbox overflowing with what seemed like thousands of new emails. Oh, the joys of being "connected".

Although most of the messages were about work, there was a large number of World Cup-related emails, the kind your friends can't help but forward again and again.

I have purged more anti-Argentinian material than I ever thought could exist, from an interactive voodoo doll of Gabriel Batistuta to jokes about Argentinians and some heavily-doctored images, my favourite being the line of Argentinian players holding handbags.

I'm not the only one being bombarded and internet search engine Lycos is providing a World Cup Viral Chart to track the funniest and weirdest football emails, most of which I had received.

The ones I hadn't already seen were forwarded to my list of usual suspects, who were probably cursing my name as they forwarded them to everyone else.

Early morning kick-offs mean the usual pre-match and post-match discussions in the pub have been replaced with email and internet abuse, which is good news for internet service providers but bad news for everyone else's productivity.

Not that much work was done last week at the Norwegian Ivar Aasen Centre of Language and Culture last week after an archivist Reidar Djupedal died, taking the password to the museum's electronic library to his grave.

The centre made an emergency call for assistance on the internet, offering a reward of a round-trip flight to a festival of literature and music to the first person to supply them with the password, which was needed to access a database of 11,000 titles compiled by Mr Djupedal.

Luckily, hackers are pretty good at working out this kind of thing and, within five hours, a 25-year-old Swede, Joakim Eriksson, discovered it was ladepujd, the researcher's name spelt backwards.

This freed the database but an additional password, reidar, the researcher's first name, was needed to access the material.

Talking to a Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten, the centre's director said: "It sounds simple now we have the answer but the database was created in an old programme few have now and the public institutions we asked for help didn't manage to crack the code."

viral.lycos.co.uk
www.aasentunet.no
www.aftenposten.no/english/