My view on the world

Well, at last I feel settled again. You never realise how much junk stuff you have until you have to pack it into boxes, transport it and unpack it again at the other end. Sheesh, from now on I'm going to make more of an effort to ditch the stuff I can live without and aim for a more Zen-minimalist approach to life :) Broadband is now connected, although it's only a 1 meg connection instead of the 2 we enjoyed before. Hmmm... we're living in a built-up area in York, not out in the sticks... I don't see why the speed is so low. I think we might have to go back to NTL when the Wanadoo contract expires in September. The only problem for me at the mo is the wireless router we bought is absolute merde. It's a Dlink we bought from PC World on a whim, and it's a complete waste of money. It's supposed to be a 54mbps connection but it drops to 5mbps when it's at the other side of the room. Trying to use it in another room is a frustrating experience to say the l

I know, I haven't updated my blog in weeks now... moving house has got in the way. All moved in now but Wanadoo are tossers and won't connect broadband up for a few more weeks. Will post some new updates shortly, even if I have to compose them offline and post them from work :)

I recently stumbled across this short story written by Isaac Asimov. I remember reading it a few years back and... I won't spoil it for you. Put 15 minutes to one side and give it a read. The man was a true genius.

Unless you've had a pretty nasty computer crash and lost a lot of irreplaceable data then you don't really appreciate the value of backups. I had this happen to me a few years ago... I stupidly let a neighbour-from-hell near my computer and he fried one of my hard-drives (literally - the circuit-board on my drive partially melted as a result of him switching the 110/240volt setting on my power supply). The hardware is replaceable; I hand over some money to a shop and they will hand back a new computer. But that's not the problem. The data on my hard-drive was NOT replaceable and none of it was backed up. I lost hundreds of digital photos which had never been printed out or written to a CD: photos of cats now dead, of birthday parties, candid shots of friends and families. There were documents on there, emails, you name it... all gone forever. Since then I've been especially careful to backup my data at semi regular intervals. Nowadays, storage is cheap - what people lac

I've been using the internet now for over a decade. My first experiences of it were with Windows 3.1 and a 14.4k modem. Back then you had to install some third-party software to allow you to actually dial up and connect as Windows didn't come with it built in until Windows 95 was released. It was cool to refer to it as the "information superhighway" and "cyberspace", and you were considered quite a geek if you had an email address and surfed the web regularly. So, fastforward a moment to 2006. The world and her dog are online, everyone from young kids to the so-called "silver-surfers" (who presumably book their Saga holidays online while surfing from their web-enabled Stanner stairlifts). I don't fear the internet. I can't remember the last time my computer had a virus, or was infected with advertising or spyware, I never get a popup window unless I request it and I do all my online banking (and an awful lot of shopping) online. I can spot

Last week my desktop PC finally gave up the ghost so I decided to order a shiny new laptop to replace it. After spending hours trawling round the net comparing deals I finally settled on an Acer laptop from AcerNotebooks.co.uk . It wasn't delivered on the day they promised but after a phone call to a nice lady in the customer services department I had it by 8am the next morning. I'm VERY impressed with the machine itself; the screen is gorgeous, the hard-drive is large for a laptop, there's wireless networking built-in, as well as dual format DVD burner. It's easily as fast as my old desktop machine, but it's MUCH quieter (almost silent - my desktop sounded like a vacuum cleaner) and it's slim and lightweight too (that reminds me, about that diet...) I hope that I haven't lost any data on the hard-drives which are still sitting in the desktop PC. I'm going to buy an IDE-to-USB adaptor which will allow me to connect the hard-drives to the laptop and hopef