My view on the world

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 ...