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 ...

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...

I hate spiders. I mean seriously... I can't stand the little black 8-legged freaks. If they left me alone forever and didn't ever come near me then I'd be very happy. Not only that, I could guarantee I would never suck them up with a vacuum, drown them in the bath or batter them to death with a very long broom. I know where the phobia came from. When I was a child, we'd be sitting peacefully at home when suddenly my mother would erupt in an explosion of anger and swear words, all directed at the black blob on the wall. She would leap onto the sofa, throw whatever was near to hand at it, all the time shouting and cursing as if it was the devil incarnate. Naturally, this had a huge impact on my brother and me, and we would be scared witless, cowering on the sofa, terrified of the threat my mum had identified. I was chatting to Rachel tonight about spiders and she trotted out the old cliche about them being more afraid of us than we are of them. Where did this particular e...

For reasons I cannot yet fathom, there seems to be certain fundamental but cruel laws that govern this universe. For example: money is so hard to earn yet it's so easy to spend. Losing weight (and keeping it off) takes a lot of determination yet putting it on (and keeping it there) can be done with no great hardship. In fact, it's fun! The best medicines seem to taste the worst, you have to be cruel to be kind, and it hurts more to be cut by a blunt knife than a sharp one. I'm aiming to do two difficult things over the next few months: save money and lose weight. Now, why do I get this funny feeling it's going to be the other way round?