Skip to main content

My quiet backwater of the net

CAVEAT EMPTOR: Coastalblog would like to point out that he's about to discuss something of which his knowledge is scanty, but that's largely the point.

As I age the one thing which is a source of constant surprise to me is the Internet. Not in and of itself, I've been a fan and avid consumer of its manifold treasures for many a long year now. But I'm struggling to adjust to its pervasiveness now. I'm part of the last generation who can remember a pre-internet age. A childhood without messenger, christmases having to write multiple thankyou letters rather than one standard thank-you email.

I was, at the time, reasonably ahead of the game in understanding the net, its potential and its usefulness. But now I have to hold my hand up and admit that I am woefully off the pace. I feel like I felt several years ago when I realised that I didn't care as much about music as I used to, that I wasn't keeping remotely up to date with anything remotely resembling the bleeding edge. I was mildly surprised to discover that I wasn't arsed; that I was thinking to myself y'know, maybe I'd be better off actually listening to the (admittedly terrifying) amount of CDs I already have (I'm about six years behind as currently stands, I say, that Magnetic Fields album is awfully good isn't it?). I am officially behind the times. Coastalblog, bless it, is the Triumph Herald of the blog world, but it'll do for me. The whole idea of MySpace baffles me (why not go to the pub?), whilst I understand the appeal of YouTube and Flickr I simply don't have the time to really immerse myself in them to find the good stuff. Second Life strikes me as just plain weird.

The point of this post I suppose is simply that the web has moved on from its cosy beginnings and is now a point of reference for a large proportion of the world, and it seems oddly all-enveloping too me. I always saw it as a tool rather than an extension of life, and this outlook puts me firmly on the old side of the technological fence (not that I'm unhappy to be there). I don't mind knocking around on ILX for a couple of hours if there's something interesting to discuss. It's nice to keep up with people's blogs, but the majority of my friends will be in the pub in a couple of hours. I can talk to them there (this may tie in to the fact that I'm not much of a texter, either). I feel guilty about not reading all the professionally relevant journals out there but there's only so much information you can take in. I barely have enough time to lead a life in the actual world, let alone the virtual one. Frankly, I don't know how kids today do it. God I'm getting old.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

To all intents and purposes, a bloody great weed.

I absolutely love trees, and I get quite irate when they get cut down. One of the aspects of life with which I most often find myself most at odds with my fellow man is that I'm not really a fan of the tidy garden. I like to see a bit of biodiversity knocking about the gaff, and to that end I welcome the somewhat overgrown hedge, am pro the bit of lawn left to run riot, and, most of all, very anti cutting down trees. I love the things, habitat, provider of shade, easy on the eye, home to the songbirds that delight the ear at dawn, the best alarm clock of all. To me, cutting a naturally growing tree down is an act of errant vandalism, as well as monumental entitlement, it's been around longer than you. So, this being the case, let me say this. The public outcry over the felling of the tree at Sycamore Gap is sentimental, overblown nonsense, and the fact that the two men found guilty of it have been given a custodial sentence is completely insane. Prison? For cutting down a Sycam...
Post a Comment
Read more

Oh! Are you on the jabs?

I have never been a slender man. No one has ever looked at me and thought "oh, he needs feeding up". It's a good job for me that I was already in a relationship by the early noughties as I was never going to carry off the wasted rock star in skinny jeans look. No one has ever mistaken me for Noel Fielding. This is not to say that I'm entirely a corpulent mess. I have, at various times in my life, been in pretty good shape, but it takes a lot of hard work, and a lot of vigilance, particularly in my line of work, where temptation is never far away. Also, I reason, I have only one life to live, so have the cheese, ffs. I have often wondered what it would be like to be effortlessly in good nick, to not have to stop and think how much I really want that pie (quite a lot, obviously, pie is great), but I've long since come to terms with the fact that my default form is "lived-in". I do try to keep things under control, but I also put weight on at the mere menti...
Post a Comment
Read more

Inedible

"He says it's inedible" said my front of house manager, as she laid the half-eaten fish and chips in front of me, and instantly I relaxed.  Clearly, I observed, it was edible to some degree. I comped it, because I can't be arsed arguing the toss, and I want to make my front of house's lives as simple as possible. The haddock had been delivered that morning. The fryers had been cleaned that morning. The batter had been made that morning (and it's very good batter, ask me nicely and I'll give you the recipe some time). The fish and chips was identical to the other 27 portions I'd sent out on that lunch service, all of which had come back more or less hoovered up, we have have a (justified, if I do say so myself) very good reputation for our chips. But it was, apparently, "inedible". When it comes to complaints, less is more. If you use a hyperbolic word like that, I'll switch off, you've marked yourself as a rube, a chump, I'm not g...
Post a Comment
Read more