Happy Birthday for Yesterday

Believe it or not, the Internet is now 40 years old.  The very first part of it was set up at UCLA for a collaboration between 4 universities.

It is hard to imagine a world without t’interweb as these days, pretty much everybody in developed (or even semi developed) society has a basic grasp of the internet.  They will at least know what it is.  I use it for pretty much everything.  I keep in contact with friends, I look for mucic, I watch TV, I read a newspaper, I would get my weekly shopping on there if you didn’t have to pay for delivery.

Over the last 40 years, what was first used as a tool for shifting nuclear data between researchers has grown into not just a business tool, but a whokle industry.  Hundreds of thousands of people are employed doing stuff with the internet.  Most of which I don’t understand.

So cheers to the internet and all of its brilliance, without you I wouldn’t have wasted weeks on Facebook.

Black And White

Take a while…sit back, and just think about how good photocopiers are. At the moment I am doing a lot of photocopying in my job, and yes it is annoying and possibly giving me cancer, but I can’t help but admire the way that photocopiers go about doing their jobs.

Taking whatever you can throw at them, paper, cats, arses at office parties and making a 2D impression on either A4 or A3. You can change the colour of the paper if you want, or have it duplex…Stapled! No problem there.

Your standard Xerography (dry heat) photocopier was introduced by guess who?….Xerox in the 1960’s and works via a complicated procedure of making the toner positively charged and sticking it to the negatively charged area to make the black bits.

Anyway, now you can whack in 50 sheets of paper and get 500 back in no great time. Think how difficult that would have been years ago.

Here’s to the photocopier. Cheers for making my life easier.

So Much to Talk About, So little Time

For the last few weeks I have had nothing really to say.  Now I have loads, and don’t have the opportunity to write about it.  So I will do it in bite size chunks here.

1)Lance Armstrongs comeback-Why?  I am a massive fan, but why come out of retirement to try and win Tour number 8.  If you lose it will sully the memory of a great champion.

2)Glasvegas-What an amazing album, I love it.  It makes songs about social workers and dead dads sound anthemic and uplifting.  Next years Mercury music prize please.  Really annoyed that I didn’t get tickets for their Wedgewood Rooms show.

3)The Mercury Music Prize- Well done Elbow, I am really pleased, they don’t get the credit they deserve and are thourghly nice chaps to boot.  Plus I am really glad Adele didn’t win.

4)Flobots- Their album Fights with Tools brings a socially conscious dimension to the Bling and ‘ho world of hip hop.  You wouldn’t see Fiddy rapping about the CIA killing Salvador Ayende would you!

5)The Large Hadron Collider-  I don’t really understand what it does, something to do with Boson’s that don’t exist I believe, but it does have a touch of the Dr Evils about it.  Pay me One Hundred Billion Dollars or I will unleash a “Black Hole”.  Mwah ha ha, Mw ha ha ha ha ha ha.

6)The End of The Road-Not because of Black Holes, but because its the festival that I am going to this weekend.  In the Rain.  Conor Oberst & the Mystic Valley Band, Mercury Rev and Calexico headline the 3 days.  Really looking forward to Micah P Hinson British Sea Power, Bon Iver, The Pictish Trail and The Mountain Goats.

7)Stickboy-After hearing a track on Marc Riley on 6 Music I bought the album.  Its great.  I don’t know much about the fella but its one worth getting.

8)The new job is going well.  Not my ideal career choice, but the people that I work with are nice and the benefits are good.

There you go, short but informative, a bit like me. 

Later.