New Toys - Where Will It End ?

sic transit gloria mundi

which might describe me. I'm writing this as the first piece of English (or anything else, for that matter) that I've composed on my new Acer 9300 laptop. A birthday / Christmas / New Year's present to the Man of the House from Himself (via TigerDirect and UPS), of course, as nobody else would dare do such a thing :)

I'll only bore you a moment with stats (2 GHz 64-bit AMD cpu, 2 GB DDE2 DRAM, 17" screen) before going on to complain that the keyboard is, of course, one of those chiclet types with about 2mm travel but so what ? It's quiet, no heavier that the one it replaces (a Sony Vaio from 2000) and easier to type on. It has a built-in wireless network card, which is convenient for scribbling in one places, like standing one-legged in airports (I'm lousy as a stork, so I never do that), but it'll be too big for the tables in Starbucks (I hope), giving me an excuse to find somewhere else !

I can see that sitting in aeroplanes is going to be fun, as the thing is only about 2" narrower than my hips, and that's got to be too wide for the little fold-down tablettes. Still, maybe I'll ust fly Virgin from now on and play all their in-flight games instead.

I've been wandering the internet in search of tidbits, as is my wont, and landed on Bill Thompson's article today in the Telegraph. When, in what seems not to have been a previous lifetime, I worked in a web company help produce a tool to make web pages, the problem of finding out just how many people were visiting the sites was quite a problem.Revenue comes from advertising the cost of advertising space is determined by "eyeballs", the estimated number of individuals who would look at the space. Many of our customers built sites that got you to identify yourself in some way (at least once) so that subsequent visits could be discounted (or not, depending on many things).

However, Bill points out that many of the younger generation discard identities with reckless abandon - sometimes because they're forgotten the password and can't be bothered to really think to remember it, and other times because they really deliberately want many identities (to trade amongst, for instance). This is probably going on in large amount - now that he mentions it I realise that I've seen it myself, and not taken any notice, but Bill is a more astute watcher of humans than I - and it rather makes a mockery of all the executives counting heads and asking for money based on that !

Have a fun weekend everyone. I've some programming to do.

Happy New Year !

Happy New Year to the others who led me into Blogging - at which I've been somewhat of a failure, but I promise to try harder !

Sarah Hague (St Bloggie de Riviérè). Sarah - you're the best !!
Colin Randall (salut). The most entertaining journalistic refugee.
Diane Rauscher-Kennedy (Art). I swear I'll save up enough for a stunning objét of yours soon !
Tola (FaeryKnits) (a.k.a. YesGirl). Also a good rep for the SCA.

There's a lot of others around who were a Good Influence on me this last year, I'm sure, and there were lots of good events to celebrate. Things like the successful launch of the Corot orbital telescope to hunt for planets around other stars. Things like the Powers The Be finally recognising that Global Warming in real (it would have been so nice if they'd actually started doing something about it 20 years ago, instead of waiting for the water to start lapping around their ankles !).

Best wishes to all who read this.