My online life

My wife complained at me the other day that I spend too much time on the computer. I suppose I do, but then I thought about it. What are my hobbies?

Go back a decade or two and these were my hobbies:

• Listening to music, making compilation tapes, etc.
• Playing guitar
• Photography
• Playing with computers
• Watching TV / movies
  
• Canoeing
• Reading news, etc.
  

Only one of those actually involved a computer. But what happened? Well, computers seem to have infiltrated most of my hobbies.

• OK, so I don't use a computer to listen to music, I use an iPod. But I have to use the computer to get the music onto the iPod. I use the computer to buy the music. I use the computer to make compilation CDs or 'iMixes'.
• Computers still aren't involved in playing guitar (except for the internet being a source of guitar TAB music), but I'm sure its only a matter of time.
• All my photography these days is digital. So I use a computer to look at, play with and print out my photos.
• Obviously, playing with computers still involves a computer.
• I now rent DVDs via the internet and increasingly more TV programmes are available online, its only a matter of time before computers and TV become fused. Indeed, have a look at the newly upgraded Apple TV system - able to download 'rental' movies directly to your TV, this is the future, and its a computer (again).
• You know, I can't think of any way a computer can become involved in canoeing...
• And, of course, the greatest source of news is online.
• Oh, and at work, I spend most of my time doing things on a computer. Even in the lab, everything is recorded and monitored using computers.
  

So there you have it, my life is increasingly online.

I wonder when we'll get to the stage that the computer is so ubiquitous that we won't actually use the word anymore?

Panic!

I am frantically backing everything on my computer up in a state of panic. I logged into my (work) laptop (while at home) a wee while ago using all the usual settings and everything was different to normal. When I did CTRL-ALT-DEL it said "J Mike Davidson is logged in as rcarvel" which worried me. I hastily logged out and logged back in again. Same again. So I logged out and am now logged in as a different user. And am backing everything up to an external disc just in case.

---

It turned out that "J Mike Davidson" was an old member of our IT team and I had managed to log in or out of the system at precisely the wrong time, during an update, and my computer had got a garbled file as a result. Or something. Everything actually works fine now. And I am assured that I wasn't hacked. Whew!

Burning the candle at both ends

Yawn. Impending deadlines mean I was up and working until well after midnight last night. When I finally got to bed I found that my head was so full of stuff that I couldn't actually get to sleep, even though I was shattered.

And then I woke just before 6am, head still full of stuff, and couldn't get back to sleep. So here I am sitting at the computer again.

"Life? Don't talk to me about life!"