There was an interesting program on ITV last night called The Shot That Shook The World about photographs of historic moments. 9/11 Mesmeric, tragic, horrific and yet somehow those images are always compelling. I guess this was the JFK moment for my generation where everyone can remember exactly where they were and what they were doing. I was working for a small Internet company and a colleague was idly surfing and memorably announced ‘A plane has just hit the World Trade Centre’. The internet soon ground to a halt and we watched the tragedy unfold on portable TV in disbelief. ...

Just submitted my tax return online which was pretty painless and quick. On the final page, I entered some additional information with a minor query. When I submitted the form, there was a data validation error. When I read the error message more carefully, I realised that the carriage return character is not allowed in the free form text box so I removed all of them. However, the form was still rejected until I realised that the question mark character ‘?’ is also not permitted. ...

Well I was finally forced to join the masses and download Firefox and ditch Internet Explorer. Yes - my nickname is ‘Johnny Come Lately’. I had been aware of the Firefox browser for a while but my previous experience was with a very early version of Mozilla that had a few problems with a couple of the Web sites I was using at the time. The final straw came that pushed me over the edge was when my children downloaded some invasive spyware that commandeered the Web browser and implanted a ‘Web Search’ toolbar. As you can not de-configure this toolbar without completely removing the product, I found myself uninstalling it, my kids would reinstall it for some whizzy colourful cursors. Repeat ad-infinitum. Life is simply too short. ...

Returned from holiday to find correspondence lying on my doorstep from two internet companies. Both were big names and continually in the news during the internet boom in 1999. Firstly, two cheques resulting from travelocity’s takeover of lastminute.com. Back in 2000, I applied to buy shares in lastminute.com for me, my wife, my auntie and my dog. Thankfully, the share offering was massively oversubscribed and I only received the minimum allocation which reduced my subsequent losses five years later. In fact, the lastminute takeover was very timely as I had two separate, small shareholdings which I was stuck with as dealing costs would have swallowed up most of the proceeds. ...

Footnote demo The Org website1 now looks a lot better than it used to. The link is: https://orgmode.org ↩︎