Cucking Fookies

Been on the Internet for years, me. I can't claim to have been "one of the first" to hit the wires, but I wasn't far behind. About twenty years ago I think it was when I first read a newsgroup. Roughly 18 months later when I became a permanent rider of the electric surf.

So I know about cookies. I know what they are, and what they aren't, and what they can and can't do. And I appreciate the fact that they get on with what it is they do quietly, in the background, with a minimum of fuss. Hardly any fuss, in fact, beyond having to clear them out occasionally when things get in a bit of a tangle. Or should I say I appreciated that fact. Because recently, it stopped being true.

Recently, legislators got involved and decided that our human rights were being infringed or something by these quiet, unassuming little blobs of text. Our personal data was being kept!! OH NOES!! Without our knowledge!! Well, without our knowledge if we were the kind of surfer who didn't bother to learn how things work. So, 98% of surfers then.

So now every time I visit a new site I get some sort of annoying little pop-up.

	Our site uses cookies! Please do not continue unless you agree to our use of cookies! By continuing you are confirming that you understand you will probably not die as a direct or indirect result of our use of COOKIES!	x

Jeez. What I really need now is a browser with a "silently accept all cookie prompts" option!

But it's worse than that. The commercial use of cookies is becoming even more annoying than the warnings. I sell stuff on eBay, so I regularly search for that stuff to see if it's saleable, and for how much. And then, every bloody site I visit for the next month is plastered with adverts for whatever I'm trying to sell. Even something as innocuous as the Hunger Site (which even after 12 years I still click on every day) - and, you know, fair enough, they want to raise as much money as they can for their good causes - but crikey I went there the other day and TWO of its panels AND the top banner were all offering me the same aerial signal booster that I've got listed on eBay right now. Gimme a break!

(I've sold it, by the way)

In a life I more nice

I'm a lucky man. There can't be many men as sought after by hordes of Russian beauties as I. They write to me all the time.

Some of them, of course, take themselves out of the game with their first line. I could never be attracted to anyone stupid enough to ask, in their opening sentence, "What is your name?" when they've sent their email to my primary address, embodying as it does both my first and last names.

In her latest email, Olga assured me: "In a life I more nice." I could only wonder which life she was talking about. Still, I was reassured that she will be more nice when she eventually reaches it.

Recently, Svetlana was also moved to write to me, declaring: "I am 25 years, growth 178." Is this some arcane tumour denomination they use in your country, Svetlana? If so you can hardly expect me to hop the next plane with your life span already so badly compromised.

She went on earnestly: "I hope, our dreams will come true also we probably we shall embody them in the validity."

I'm sure I could aspire to hope for the same thing dear, if only I understood what it meant.

The eRoute to eSuccess

When I first started writing War of Nutrition (so long ago it even had a different title), self-publishing was frowned upon by "real" authors. It was a route for amateurs and, more importantly, it was the route that once taken could never lead you back to "proper" publishing. Real publishers and agents, it was said, would never touch anyone tarnished with the shame of self-publishing.

What a difference twelve years makes. So what happened? Lots of things:

Computers and the Internet.

Of course the Internet existed in 2000, but there were far fewer of us on it, and outside of the US most of us accessed it over dial-up. Slow and clunky, yes, but even back then it was starting to connect us in exciting and previously unimaginable ways. One of those burgeoning ways was a new route for authors to reach their readers, but much more than that the Internet provided a faster, easier and more accessible research tool. I can't begin to think of how I'd have learned enough protein science, or geography, or helicopter piloting (all of which are essential to the plot of WoN) before the Internet, but it would certainly have involved hours and hours in public libraries and in my case would probably have prevented the book ever being written.

The Recession

While traditional publishers were at first bemoaning, then begrudgingly accepting and then (almost but not quite) embracing the self-publishing revolution, the world plunged into recession. There was no longer as much money to risk on unheard of new authors (there never had been much), and scarce agent and publisher resources were focused on known quantities and guaranteed profit-makers. If you're an Ian Rankin or a Stephen King, no problem. Otherwise getting published became an even less likely proposition (and the odds never were that good).

Kindle

(Other e-readers are available) Obviously ePublishing could never have taken off in the absence of a platform to ePublish to. In the vanguard, Kindle offered not only a device but also a (fairly) simple route for authors to go it alone. Its success has been well documented, followed up in short order by other variants by the same and other suppliers, and eBooks recently overtook hardcopy sales in at least one marketplace. Although there still are, and will continue to be for many years, some dyed-in-the-wool lovers of paper, it's inevitable that these will decline as the generations turn and in a decade or two will be looked upon with the same gentle forbearance currently reserved for lovers of vinyl, 8-track, Betamax or more recently HD-DVD.

Naturally, it's not all good news. Easy access to self-publishing has removed many of the gatekeepers, and there are easily as many deluded authors as there are deluded auditionees on The X Factor. All their friends and family have told them what a good writer they are, they've had this cracking idea for a story which they've knocked up in a few weeks. No, they don't know how to spell- or grammar-check and have no idea what a copy editor is, but why does that matter when they're only a few clicks away from seeing their name on Amazon's bestseller list? With several thousand new works being published every day for e-reader platforms, consumers of fiction have to plough through mountains of dubious quality output to find something worth reading. So ironically, now that it's easier to publish, it's harder to find something that was worth publishing, let alone is worth reading. Not surprising readers tend to stick with what (and who) they know. Unless you're prepared to spend hours online on Facebook and Twatter or in Amazon forums and the like, the chances of you drumming up a readership beyond your list of Facebook friends are slim to none. And even interesting THEM in your creation is hard work half the time.

Not that having those gatekeepers in place was necessarily all that much better. What? You've never read a bad book? Never reached the final page and thought "God. That was *crap* - how did it ever get published"? Lucky you. During my 100-Theme Writing Challenge last year, I had the opportunity to explore reasons why in this post. It's depressing. But like so much in life if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. In the end it's probably better to write your book because you want to write it, not because you're expecting to get rich off the back of it. Very few people get that lucky.

(Originally started writing this in Feb 2012 shortly after War of Nutrition was published for Kindle. Hard to believe almost a year has passed.)

Happy Birthday!

It was my birthday last week, and I was amused to receive two greetings emails from forums I've signed up to in the past which have stored the date and programmatically fired off happy birthday wishes to me at the appointed hour.

One is from a writers' forum I've used extensively in the past (although shockingly I haven't been back there much at all this year, since writing - even blogging - has taken a seat at the back of the bus while we've been on our magical mystery tour of home improvements, illness, death and... er... no. No famine. Yet.

The other made me laugh out loud. Because although I recognised the *name* of the forum in the email, I absolutely couldn't remember the subject. Until I checked it out. It's an online home for various distributed computing projects (like protein folding and SETI@home) that I hooked up with back in the day when Nikki's Dad was recruiting spare CPU cycles to his protein folding team. An unexpected, but not altogether unwelcome, blast from the past for my birthday.

Put it on eBay

That's a phrase that has echoed around our house - both houses actually - for almost ten years. Whenever we inherit or find something, or for one reason or another it becomes surplus to requirements, but it's "just too good" to throw out. Like it still works, or it was originally quite expensive. We have some sort of investment in it still - emotional, financial, psychological - that prevents us from driving it to the tip.

I'm not pretending we never chuck stuff out. We do. But there's always more. And increasingly (it seems) the stuff is still OK. Still serviceable, usable, whatever. Just not by us.

So "the eBay pile" has been growing for many years. That old hi-fi stack I never use. It was all wired up in our previous house. Played occasionally. But that was in the B.I. years. The time Before iPod. When listening to music entailed physically inserting a CD or a cassette tape (a WHAT? Google it) into a device and pressing a real, solid, play button. Not clicking an icon that just *looks* like a play button. Anyhow when we moved, this lovely old stereo stack in its smoked-glass-and-mahogany cabinet came with us and lived under the stairs - well, the loft ladder - for three years. Then the loft ladder was replaced with stairs and the cabinet had to move into the study. Then into the dining room. Still never connected. Never played. Listen, I spent over £2,000 on in it 1984! I can't just throw it out!

The Christmas tree stand that we don't need since we started using an artificial tree that has its own feet. An old telephoto lens for a camera long since crushed under the boot heel of digital technology. The camera that it fits. The aluminium flight case I carried them both around in. The socket set I used to use to service my car, in the days when I did my own car servicing (OK, this item has been kicking around for a lot longer than ten years. It sat in the garage of my old house in Yorkshire quietly rusting away for most of the 12 years I lived in that house, and I hadn't used it much in the ten years before THAT).

You get the picture.

Three months ago something snapped. "Put in on eBay" became something more than just one of those things we say that doesn't really mean what the words imply. I actually listed some things on eBay. What? Yes, you read that right. I started small. A couple of things on the Saturday, and a couple more on Sunday. Just to ease myself into it. And you know what? It was easy. I said I started small, but one of the first things I listed was that stereo. I figured hey, if I'm going to dump my emotional baggage let's start with the biggest bag. It had 11 watchers within 12 hours. It sold easily, and for more than twice the starting price. The guy drove up from Northampton for it.

There's no stopping me now. Well, not quite. I still wait for those "zero listing fee" weekends. eBay gets enough money out of me when I sell the stuff. I'm not giving them anything up front. But gradually, all that tat that's been hanging around for years is disappearing. And the bank balance is rising!

I picked a good time to get into this, when you remember that we just inherited the contents of an entire second house. And 95% of the stuff in it is both stuff we don't want, AND stuff that is "too good to throw out." Only one answer to that. Put it on eBay.

A long, hard slog

Anyone who has been around the Internet for even a short while will be familiar with spam. Even after the well-publicised fall in spam in December of last year from its historic highs of around 80 billion emails daily, it still accounts for almost 80% of all email traffic, and signs are that it's on its way back up again, as new botnets compete to fill the gap opened up by those that have been shut down.

But this is all going on in your Inbox, right? And in the hidden wars over at your ISP, with ever more sophisticated spam filters that can get rid of 99% of the crap before you ever see anything?

That's what I thought, until I received a letter recently offering me longer harder erections. Yep - POSTAL spam. Incredible.

Predictions of the non-cephalopod variety

Around this time of year it's traditional to publish predictions of various kinds. Although nowhere near as accurate as those of Paul the Predicting Octopus, most of them stretch beyond the limits of football match results, so I find them considerably more interesting.

Take, for example, these "20 predictions for the next 25 years" from yesterday's Observer. Lose yourself in the plethora of "experts" from twenty different industries, groups, or spheres of human endeavour. Erudite and influential though they no doubt are, commenters have already pointed out that few if any of them take account of the full impact of climate change over that period. At least one of them alludes briefly to the likely effect of oil shortages in terms of protectionism and conflict, but there's an even more precious liquid resource that we'll be fighting over sooner or later: water.

But my main issue with predictions like this is not that they go too far with their postulations, nor indeed that they don't go far enough. Extrapolating likely outcomes from current conditions takes a certain degree of understanding the subject in question, but beyond that there's no magic to it. The real question - and the most fascinating area of prediction - is not what will happen to the stuff we know about. It's what will be the next Facebook or Twitter? Or come to that, the next World Wide Web. Things which, before they were invented, no-one could have predicted. Things which, shortly after they were invented, no-one (or at least very few people) really understood how ubiquitous they would become. But things which, now they're established, large sections of the populace wouldn't know how to live without.

Another area I find fascinating might be called "Inventions whose time is past almost before it starts." When first developed, DAB radio (for instance) was widely predicted to replace traditional analogue broadcasting within a similar time frame to the 20 predictions above. Lack of available bandwidth, technical problems with mobile receivers (in-car DAB, etc), high price of early models and a general distrust of the product or a perception that it delivered limited benefit all contributed to appallingly low initial take-up. Now that many of the teething problems have been fixed, and the price has reached a sensible level, the need for DAB has evaporated. Replaced by Internet radio. Vastly more choice for anyone with a PC, equal or better quality, and with the increasing prevalence of home wireless networks, dedicated Internet radio devices are springing up to first supplement and soon no doubt supplant DAB in the home.

Bloody Hell

I've had a gmail.com email address for almost exactly two months. Two months and two days, to be precise. I've never, so far, used it for anything. No subscriptions, no web forms, no purchases. I've only even disclosed what it is to very close family and friends, none of whom has ever used it.

I was spammed on it just now.

How does that work then? I only created the bloody thing as insurance against the day (rapidly approaching) when I'd have to abandon my main addresses at johnberesford.com.

It's about time something sensible, serious, and technologically impregnable was done to sort out flippin' spammers once and for all.

Faster than a speeding email

It never fails to amaze me how fast email is.

Nat's sat here with me in the study today, and we're both surfin' and browsin' and generally being good netizens when a writing opportunity pops up that I think she might be interested in.

"You know that site I was telling you about before?"
"Yeah?"
"Well they're recruiting new writers, I'll send you the link"
"Okay, thanks!"
*copies link into email and sends*
"Thank you!"

The time that elapsed between me clicking 'send' and her saying 'thank you' could only have been measured by the kind of chronometer you might find in a physics lab. It appeared to be instantaneous. Certainly an order of magnitude faster than I could have walked over and handed it to her, and she's sitting less that six feet away.

In't t'Internet brilliant?

This guy doesn't need my help, but...

...even so, I'm going to point you at him.

About a week ago Nikki found Stuff No-One Told Me (But I Learned Anyway) - a new blog by Spanish artist Alex Noriega.

I don't read many blogs, and I can't remember ever having recommended one before, but Alex has lit a small fire on the Internet with his witty, perceptive and well-drawn cartoons about life and I wanted to share. In the 7 days since I've been reading it, his followers have jumped from about 150 to 1573 and in the way of Internet phenomena I'm certain that number will continue to explode as word gets around.

Today's cartoon is one of his best yet:

but my personal favourite is still number 15. Number 09 is pretty cool too. I'm sure you'll have your own.

Yours for only £12.99

Along with most of the (Internet enabled) planet, I'm guessing, I get spammed regularly by Universal Online Retailers Inc. (aka Play.com, Amazon, etc) with offers of stuff their "clever" algorithms have decided I'll be interested in.

I say spammed, but I'll admit in this case it's partly my own fault for, you know, shopping there. I do take exception to the notion that if you've ever, even once, bought a vampire movie then you're bound to be interested in every other vampire, near-vampire, or teen-vampire movie, or anything with characters similar to "vamp" or "pire" in the title, genre, plot description, crew or cast.

Partly because I'm lazy, partly because it's easier to just delete them, and partly because I'm an eternal optimist who believes that in among the dross will one day sparkle an irresistible gem, I remain subscribed to these emails and occasionally, when the morning crop is a bit thin on the ground in the Inbox, I read one.

Today was one such day. And what I saw was more frightening than the goriest schlock horror film ever produced.

A 3-disc boxed set of... the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest.

I mean, come on. It's bad enough watching the crap the first time through. Who the hell would PAY to watch it again? To be able to watch it again whenever they want? Weird.

Google and Pac-Man

Google's "doodles" - the changes to their logo they make every so often to celebrate some national or international event, holiday, or hot news topic - have quickly become legendary. In fact one of the only complaints I have with the iGoogle home page is that we never see any indication that there's a new doodle to enjoy.

Last weekend, two legends collided. It was the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man, widely regarded as "the game that started it all" (even though, being first released in 1980, it trailed Space Invaders by two years), and in celebration Google installed its first fully interactive doodle - a working copy of Pac-Man with the maze spelling out "Google" and whose gameplay faithfully reproduced the original, including ghost behaviours, fruits, and even the original bug that corrupts the screen on the 256th level.

Media coverage suggests that the game didn't start playing unless you pressed the Insert Coin button (which temporarily replaced the usual "I'm Feeling Lucky"), but this certainly wasn't true for me. Maybe it's different on Chrome, but the game started right up after a short delay and I reached instinctively for the arrow keys (I was a huge Pac-Man fan) and began playing immediately. I reached the fifth level, which I was pretty pleased about given that I haven't played for, like, 20 years. Some things never leave you.

But celebrating Pac-Man's 30th birthday, and Google's inventiveness and sense of fun, is only part of the reason for this post. And it's the "sense of fun" angle that I'd like to concentrate on first, because to me that's what it was all about. It was a weekend, Google's doodles are a fine tradition that always raise a smile in our house, and this particular doodle gave Google's users the chance - briefly - to relive a much-loved time in their youth when it was OK to while away a few hours chasing an animated cartoon mouth around a maze.

So it was with a dawning sense of OMG that I read some of the 571 comments posted on the news article I found on the subject. Many of them mirrored my own reaction ("wow" "cool" "brings back memories" etc) but fully half of them were complaints about the noise, about the intrusion into their browser space, about the waste of time and money, and any other possible thing you could think of to complain about and even some that would never occur to most people I know. Incredible.

These comments drew stinging reactions from the supporters of Google's efforts, as you'd expect, with people pointing out variously that Google (and all its services) is free, that doodles are only ever up for a day (or two at most), that all computers are equipped with a "mute" function, and that in the end if they weren't happy, why didn't these people just close their browsers or navigate to another page? But all of that common sense couldn't hide the fact that there are vast numbers of people out there who have utterly lost their sense of humour, of fun, and of celebration. And what's worse, they're not even prepared to sit quietly while those of us who haven't lost those things get on with it.

It gets worse.

Someone who must recently have had a humourectomy has now calculated the world-wide LOSS OF PRODUCTIVITY that the Pac-Man doodle caused. Yep. Five million man hours, apparently, giving a total monetary value - based on a low-to-average U.S. salary - of $120 million. A figure arrived at using some broadly-drawn assumptions on the amount of time usually spent on the Google home page versus the amount of time spent there when the Pac-Man doodle was active.

Oh dear. Oh woe is me. For a few extra seconds, all over the world, people weren't making money. Strike us all down with a bolt of lightning. Good grief. One of the saddest aspects of "this modern world" which has crept up on us during those thirty years since Pac-Man arrived, is that too many people have forgotten there is more to life than making money. Lift your heads up from those desks, people. Take your noses from the grindstone for a few precious minutes and have some fun ffs.

Redeeming features

I couldn't tell you how long I've been a member of YouGov, but I was definitely filling in their little surveys before we moved to this house, so it's more than three-and-a-half years.

 Being the sort of person who likes to share his opinion (*cough* - well, come on, no-one writes a blog if they don't have something to share), I couldn't resist the opportunity to register my thoughts on brands (good and bad), product likes and dislikes, exactly which areas of society I think are going to the dogs, and suchlike.

The fact that most of the surveys accrue points, and these points can be exchanged for financial recompense, was never forefront either in my mind, or in my incentives to register these many-faceted and firmly held opinions. But even so, the knowledge that I would be on the receiving end of a cheque for fifty quid once I'd racked up a tally of 5,000 points was, shall we say, ever-present. Even if progress, at 50 points per survey (except those "prize draw" surveys which offered immediate cash, but only for the lucky few), did verge on the glacial.

Well, even glaciers reach the sea eventually, and today my tally rolled over the 5,000 point mark, and the "redeem your points" button was finally enabled. Suitable spending suggestions for the £50 which will shortly arrive on the mat may be made in the usual way. The proprietor reserves the right to ignore any or all of them, and blow the lot on a romantic meal for two :o)

Doodle Do

Breakfast table conversations can have the strangest consequences. A couple of weeks ago we were discussing the old DoodleArt posters of the 70s and 80s, and how I used to have one tacked up on the wall of my flat. I spent many a happy evening totally focussed on colouring in my alien landscape in those simple days.

Cue Nikki's razor-sharp Internet search skills, and the uncovering of the wonderful world of Wildergorn. I was enthused! I ordered three posters. One (Watergorn - of which this is a small detail) for myself and one each for the girls.

I couldn't find their recommended pens for colouring - Stabilo 68 fibre tips - at anything like a decent discount from any online retailer, so I bid on a full set from eBay and won, at a saving of almost fifteen quid.

Once all the breakfasting and household chores were out of the way today, I rolled the 27" x 40" poster out on the dining table and set to. Pretty soon I was just as immersed in the detailed world of harpies, water and stone as I had been all those years ago on Planet Zog. A perfect way to relax on a drab winter Saturday, when there's no colour at all in the world outside, but 40 vibrant colours to choose from in my little tin box.

*sigh*

My email has been spammed.

Nowt so unusual in that, you might think, in a world where well over 80% of the entire email traffic is spam, but having learned my lesson with my very first (publicly accessible) email address back in 1997, I'd taken great pains to protect it and... until yesterday at least... been pretty successful.

I've owned my own domain for several years and, having never entered either of my main email addresses at that domain in any forums, online forms, or anywhere it might have been harvested, have managed to stay blissfully spam-free.

Indeed you may remember me mentioning back in September that the aforementioned original email address had bitten the electronic bullet, which reduced my spam count from the low teens per day to one or two per WEEK. It didn't half feel quiet around my Inbox I can tell you.

A few months ago I did get a hint that the honeymoon was over, as a small trickle of spam started to arrive. I was lulled into thinking it might be a passing phase, as numbers remained small and far between. I should have known better. Having made it onto one list - I have no idea how - it was only a matter of time before the list was sold on, and the heavy spammers started to hit me. That time came yesterday, with over a dozen invitations to visit an online drugstore in the space of five minutes. The pile has been increased today, to the point where I've had to create a new rule or two.

Sad, but inevitable I suppose. And yet a small part of me retains its heated indignation that, when the email servers of the world are kicking out their metric tonnes of CO2 by the second to no other purpose than sending reams and reams of shit flying around the planet so that yet more servers can apply carefully crafted algorithms to delete them again before anyone reads them, no-one has yet considered this to be a serious enough problem to actually do much about it.

The ecstacy

I love the Internet. It didn't take much more than a few minutes online research this morning to give me a clue why the PS3 wasn't talking to the telly. Armed with this information we took our second cups of coffee downstairs and I got busy with the various remotes (of which we now have FIVE - strewth!).

Along with its built-in digital (and now totally redundant analogue) tuner(s), the Pioneer's media box has four AV inputs. Four SEPARATELY CONFIGURABLE inputs. This is the key piece of information I'd forgotten. My excuse is that you only ever need to do this stuff once in a while (about once a year seems to be the average) so it's easy to let something slip the shackles of your mind. It may look like the box is configured correctly but if you hadn't first selected the correct input then you're actually looking at the wrong set of settings.

The HDMI interface (this box is so old that there is only one) is hard-wired to INPUT 3. So select INPUT 3 first, scroll down the options and what do you find? HDMI: DISABLED.

No real surprise then that the screen is blank! Flip that setting to HDMI: ENABLED (having first disconnected the other cabling options, and removed the XBox from INPUT 3 to avoid confusing the issue) and everything burst into life. Into glorious, technicolour, full HD life.

Well, not quite full HD. 1080i, in fact. Back when we bought this TV, 1080p was only available on really high-end gear costing more than twice as much. But easily good enough to blow yer socks off. We finished the rest of our coffee watching last week's Casualty on the iPlayer, streamed effortlessly and wirelessly to the PS3 and with a quality indistinguishable from a regular broadcast.

After that, it was off to the PlayStation online shop to download some game demos. The wireless connection held up brilliantly, despite the router being one floor up and on the other side of the house, and within minutes I was rattling a pinball around a high-def table in the demo version of Zen Pinball. Awesome.

The Twittering classes

Before you ask, I don't tweet. I mean, I like to think I'm considerably more net-savvy and "down with the kids" than yer average 52-year-old, but I really don't get Twitter. OK, there might be a slight buzz in knowing what someone like Stephen Fry - a famous twitterer (notice I avoided saying twit. Oh. Damn.) - is doing from moment to moment, but for most people it must be a constant stream of mundane trivia.

Maybe that's the point.

Someone recently wrote that updating your Facebook status (something else I've stopped doing more frequently than once every couple of weeks) is equivalent to stepping out into your street and shouting "I'm going to have bangers and mash for dinner tonight!" and then going back indoors.

A good analogy which, if true, must make tweeting the equivalent of
"Going to the toilet now"
"Oh - I think it's solids"
"Wiping my arse now"
"No, still leaving a mark"
"Still wiping"
"OK. Clean now"
"Washing my hands now"
etc.

I think people sign up because they're afraid they'll miss something. Trouble is, the more people that sign up, the more likely it is that you will miss something. It's like having a website. Not so long ago - maybe, what? Ten years? Fifteen? - you were bleeding edge if you had a website. Now URLs are everywhere and you're considered a bit weird and antiquated if you don't have a website. Businesses especially. Everyone expects to be able to type in "hoover.com" and immediately find product details, nearest dealers, latest news, history of the firm, returns policy, recent recalls, whatever. It's just part of the fabric of society. And with immense and frightening rapidity, Twitter is getting there too.

Now, I'm seeing "follow us on Twitter" on company websites. Imagine that. You can follow Hoover and get minute-by-minute updates about new vacuum cleaners. Sorry, what? I mean, seriously, WTF?

So last night, North West Tonight (for the benefit of non-UKers and, probably, most non-Northwesters, that's our local magazine news programme) Gordon Burns was making a big thing about His First Tweet. He's been sending out an email newsletter for ages, which is pretty net-savvy and down-with-the-kids in its own right. I mean the guy's 67 ffs, so all credit to him. But now he's caught the Twitter bug too.

And then bugger me but here's John Humphreys on the Radio 4 Today programme this morning - that bastion of British Correctness And Rectitude - and he's doing it too!

Christ on a bike.

An Internet era closes

About twelve years ago, having already spent 4-5 years reading and contributing to Usenet newsgroups from work and generally browsing the embryonic web, I decided the time had come to get myself online from home.

Even back then AOL had an appalling reputation, but one of their freebie CDs stuck to the front cover of one of the glossy magazines gave me a bootstrap account with which to do a little investigation and sign up with an alternative ISP. The one I chose: FreeUK. Still a fairly new service back then, as evidenced by the fact that my preferred username - earthmover - was still available, it was simple to sign up, fast (a whole 28.8kbps for my first connection), and best of all as its name implied, free.

Sounds almost too sadly geeky now to be true, but I'll never forget the thrill as the modem popped, whistled and gurgled its way to establish its first connection and open up those worlds of possibility. FreeUK even offered a small amount of webspace too, allowing me to experiment with web design and start down a path that has kept me busy making sites for friends and family from that day to this.

But their business model, built as it was on taking a percentage of the charge for dialling up using a LoCall number, was doomed with the advent of ubiquitous ADSL. Sure, they developed other models. A broadband offering and a paid email service. But having these under the banner of FreeUK always struck me as a bit fail. With them not being free, and all.

A few years ago they introduced a requirement to dial up at least once every 120 days to keep the account alive, and for a short time I did: setting a reminder, listening once more to the modem's song, and leaving the connection up for a minute or so to reset the count. I wonder how many other subscribers with broadband access bothered to do that? When we moved here, in October 2006, it became very awkward to string a modem cable across the study 3 or 4 times a year, so I stopped bothering.

FreeUK emailed me today.

"According to our records you have not used your dial-up service in the last 120 days and as such the account has been flagged for deletion."

Either their records are woefully out of date, or they simply don't bother to check them very often, because by my reckoning it's been at least TEN TIMES that long since I dialled up. Still, they caught up with me. And having flagged the account, they tell me, any further dialling up won't save it. The only way to keep it is to pay for one of their email-only accounts, at a totally non-free price of £14.99 a year.

It gives me a nostalgic pang, but I'm going to have to say goodbye to earthmover@freeuk.com. I can happily render the address here, in full view of the spambots, because in a couple of weeks it will be gone. It has been grossly spammed over the years, as my 1997 self was not so Internet savvy as he thought, and built a personal website with the email address in plain sight. The spam count was small to begin with, but climbed rapidly until at one point I was labouring under a deluge numbering over 100 a day. It's a bit better now. I guess FreeUK spam filters are cleverer, and I haven't ever replied to a spam mail, even to "unsubscribe", so there's been no positive feedback on that address for years. But it was kinda useful as a registration address on the lame sites that require an email address but don't offer you the courtesy of protecting it with an encrypted connection.

I have a googlemail account for that purpose now, but I'll always have fond memories of earthmover@freeuk.com. My very first and, so far, longest-lasting personal email.

I've made $10!!

It's pretty quiet in my corner of the world. I have a few regular readers (that I'm very grateful for - thanks guys!) and a few others happen by from various parts of the world, but I'm not one of those blogs that is read avidly by millions. In fact I'm so not into that whole thing that I couldn't even quote you the name of one of "those" blogs. So it was very much with tongue in cheek that I installed Google AdSense almost two years ago, more out of curiosity than anything.

Imagine my surprise then when I received an automated email from them today saying that now my account had reached the dizzying heights of $10, I needed to verify a few details in case they ever need to actually pay me. I thought it was a phishing scam at first, especially when I logged into my AdSense account and saw the balance was, as always, $0. That was until I realised it was showing the earnings for the day. As soon as I clicked on "all time earnings" the balance shot wayyyyyyy up. To $10.27.

So yes, I've verified my phone number, and nominated a bank account, and I'm in the process of verifying my address. Nice to know, with all this verifying going on, that my ten bucks will be secure from fraudsters.

Unfortunately, since Google don't pay out until the balance reaches $100, I won't actually be seeing anything for a while. I signed up in April 2007. Call it two years ago. So on current form it'll be around 2027 when I collect my earnings. I can put it towards my retirement party! Still, I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, so thanks to all my visitors for all your clicking!

Just wordling along

Well I just had to didn't I? Seeing as my better half had one, my world(le) wouldn't be complete without one

You can click on that to see the words in all their glory, and if you'd like one of your own, pop along to those lovely people at Wordle and make one for yourself. It's ever so easy.

Friday's were made for this kind of thing. Let's face it, they're not much good for anything else!