According to Technorati, a new Web log is created every second which is an amazing statistic and about 55% remain active which is even more staggering. The creation of my blog was actually a little experiment to see what all the fuss was about and, secondly, to see how long it would take for someone to wander along and be motivated enough to add a comment to the blog. I did not publicise the blog in any way (mainly because I haven’t got any friends) apart from adding it to blogger listing and I was curious to see if it would ever generate any traffic or interest. ...

Recently, I was watching my daughter doing some homework on the PC and noticed that she was listening to music from a radio stream over the Internet, talking to her friends in real-time using Instant Messenger, uploading photos of her holiday to her Web page, ripping music from a CD ready to copy on to an MP3 player and integrating an chart from Excel spreadsheet into a Word document. A couple of things struck me:- ...

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. ...