"It's the end of the world as we know it (but I feel fine...)"

Blimey, I haven't posted on this blog for a while... Reading my first blog post again, I see that it is replete with the assurance that I will update this blog daily and become a regular contributor to the world of the internet. Sadly, my promises have turned out to be somewhat optimistic and a little naive: I have updated this blog a grand total of twice, both in the first week. It seems I underestimated the power of procrastination (I was going to write an entry about that, as a matter of fact, but I think I'll write it later...).

So imagine my shock when I read yesterday that the world was due to end at 6pm today; it would have been enough to spur even the most hopeless layabout into action. Fortunately the world seems to be very much intact at the moment: no-one I know has been 'raptured'; New Zealand says that their teatime passed without anybody being whisked away into the sky; and there seems to be a distinct lack of demons rising from the depths of hell. In a way I'm rather disappointed. All this shooting off to heaven sounded quite fun: like a bizarre cross between the National Lottery and a roller-coaster.


But it's the name that ruins it for me really. When I hear the word 'rapture', I instantly think of Bioshock or the Blondie song. Neither of them really conjure up too much of an image of biblical end times. Also, what about the 2012 thing? Does that mean the world ends again on 21st December  2012? On balance I think I'd rather go with the Mayan one. And why's that? Well we've already ordered our tickets for the Olympics. If the world ended tonight we wouldn't be able to go. What a terrible waste of money that would be...

"It looks like you're trying to get rid of an annoying, talking paperclip. Would you like some help?"

It's a fashionable thing to complain about Microsoft these days and, though I use it myself and have no major quibbles with it, I am prone to fits of ranting against Windows occasionally. But I think I have traced all of its foibles to a single source:

It's just too goddamn helpful.

Every time you try to do something which requires more than the intellectual capacity of a particularly dim-witted flea, Windows will thrust some ingenious wizard or help option upon you which ends up causing more trouble than if it had just left you alone. A good example of this was the 'office assistant' (AKA that bloody paperclip) with its immortal line, "looks like you're writing a letter". Sadly, getting rid of the thing was often actually more time consuming than writing the letter itself and so the object was thoroughly defeated there.

Fortunately, this has disappeared in Word 2007, to be replaced by Vista's User Account Control feature which presumes that all programs not made by Microsoft are riddled with viruses.

So I know you mean well Mr Gates, but next time, just don't bother. I'll do it myself...

Blogging- 'This way madness lies'

Blogging is one of those things which seems to have passed me by completely. It’s been plastered all over the media for several years now and yet I’ve never knowingly actually read a blog in my life, let alone written one. 

So when, whilst attempting to procrastinate wildly to avoid doing things I was meant to be doing, the thought occurred to me to start one, I realised that I needed to do some research on the topic. What exactly is a ‘blog’? Wikipedia (the website to which conciseness is an alien concept) was able to tell me the history of blogging, its political and cultural impact and a plethora of other interesting but equally useless facts. It failed however to tell me what I should actually write in a ‘blog’ (the word sounds to me like the name of some unsavoury creature you would expect to find lurking in the sewers), so I decided to do what comes naturally and just ramble on until I run out of things to say, whilst watching the last vestiges of my free time and sanity bid me farewell and slip quietly away, never to be seen again.

I’m therefore most likely to be doing this all wrong and I expect I have already broken thousands of blog conventions with this single post, but who cares? I'm actually almost enjoying writing this. It could even turn out to be fun: watch this space...