Toms View of the World

CNET is reporting that Shoppers are favouring online shopping in the run up to Christmas…

Another no-brainer really - let’s compare shall we…

Offline Shopping

• Pick the only available day in the run up to Christmas when you’re not working and there’s not a major sporting event on at the Millennium Stadium.
• Drive into Town and Park’n'Ride (£3), or pay to park in an extortionate carpark (if there’s any spaces left)
• Battle crowds of rude people, all annoyed and stressed by having to shop in a crowded busy centre on a Saturday.
• Battle crowds of carol singers and brass bands, fairground rides and phone cover/hotdog/scarf/flag sales carts etc which are blocking the already limited pedestrian areas.
• Walk into a shop, fight you way through hordes of people who for some reason have brought small children with them, who are screaming
• Queue for 15 minutes to get the tills
• Finally pay
• Repeat several times
• Try to find somewhere to buy something to eat or drink which doesn’t have a line out of the door
• Struggle back through the crowds with your shopping to your car
• Pay nearly £2 an hour for the time spent in town
• Get home exhausted, fed up and miserable

OnLine Shopping

• Sit at home with a nice warm drink
• Browse websites at leisure
• Select gifts, pay for and arrange delivery (often directly to the recipient’s home address)
• Turn off computer and go do something relaxing

Why would anyone who has the choice do their Christmas shopping off-line.

You’d expect this to be a no-brainer really, a Smart ForTwo vs a Ferrari in a straight-line drag race

Except the Smart has been “tweaked” a little…

180bhp tweaked…

Well, it’s approaching the time of year when the powers-that-be increase the toll to get into Wales over the Severn Bridge. For 2006 the toll has been £4.90 - so naturally I expected the toll to increase to a nice round £5 for 2007.

But that would be far too obvious… there I was hoping for a year when the toll was a nice round number…

No, they’re putting it up to £5.10.

Why? Why £5.10, not £5.

Well, according the website, the 20p increase is “in line with Retail Price Inflation”…

Yes, here in the UK, some short-range FM tranmitters are now legal but only those with a CE mark - so many cheap imported ones found on a certain well know auction site, probaby still aren’t…

(nod to BBC News)

Well, after the last incarnation of Bond, with it's invisible cars and gadgets, gadges, gadgets galore, the latest incarnation of the bond franchise is much much much (much?) better.

The gadgets are few and far between, the technology much more believable (even if the film is quite clearly sponsored by Sony… they've been very careful to make sure you can see the Sony or SonyEricsson logo on most of the technology that's showcased in the film)

However, put that aside, and you have a much more character driven action movie, with twists and turns galore (and that's not just Bond in his Aston) - they've done away with the gimmicks, and a lot of the innuendo, to leave a much more modern, gritty action movie - yes, the set pieces are very well done, yes, there's some amazing chases sequences (including one fairly early on set on a building site) and yes, it's definitely Bond, but it's a Bond for the new millennium.  Daniel Craig very much does the character justice with a solid performance.

A simply fantastic action movie. 

Dave dug out this little gem - yes, it's an advert for chocolate, but it's also a very fun little game…

Simply look at the picture and find the 50 films - some are much harder than others (it took me 93 minutes, and that was with Dave feeding me clues over IM for some of the harder ones!)

James, I think this one might be right up your street - the challenge is laid down! 

Yes, today the web itself is 16.  Now, I don't mean the Internet, that's a lot older, I mean the web - pages viewed in a "browser" over the http protocol.

Born in 1990 it was there to make sharing of research material easy - who could have guessed that some 16 years later it would be the behemoth it is today! 

In December 1992 there were some 26 "reliable" servers on the web, and it was the release of Mosaic in September 1993 when I got my first view of the Web.  My first website wasn't far behind, by the end of 1994 I had a single page to call my own on the Swansea University Computer Society server (which was then moved to KFS.org when I graduated)  I was there pretty early on in the scheme of things! 

The earlies entry in the wayback machine I can find for any of my sites is this one from 1996: http://web.archive.org/web/19980417222558/kfs.org/~tom/ when the site moved again to my ISP's web hosting page - back when Demon Internet first gave customers web space with their dial-up accounts.  14400 bps seemed so quick back then!

The first actual archived version of my page is from 1997 - http://web.archive.org/web/19980519122151/www.coasternut.demon.co.uk/ the site then evolved into Coaster Country, Adrenaline Rush (quite a few different designs of that one) and now TVOTW.

(Thanks to Slashdot for the link to The History Of the WWW)