As I have said before on more than one occasion, I have spent a lot of the last  20 years or so setting up/designing/maintaining and being involved in a series of online projects themed around my boarding school and the young gentlemen, such as myself, who went there. A labour of love it may have been but a labour it was nonetheless. I don’t regret any of it but as some of you reading this may know, setting up things for others to use or enjoy online can be an empty business.

Inspiration & The Reality Gap

Pondering...

Firstly, you can’t do it quickly. You many have a brilliant idea, one you may visualize with crystal clarity in your head but if you ask any sort of creative person – say an author (ahem) – they will all agree that at this stage, you project is approximately 2% complete. This is often completely at odds with your own perceptions but I would have to throw my hat into the ring and agree with them. Many is the time I have been sitting at work or driving home in the car, when an absolute corker of an idea has filled my head, just above the nose. At this point, shamefully, my gas pedal hits the floor and speedbumps become a thing of skant concern. By the time I reach the end of my gravel driveway, bound up the front steps and allow my manservant to welcome me into the foyer of the family pile, the fire of inspiration is still burning fiercely. Hives removes my coat, the cat drops my slippers at my feet and I power up the PC. The harsh white glow of the screen then slaps some sense into me and most of the enthusiasm  fades like…well, like a sentence without an end.

For a lot of the time, that’s exactly what happens. During the year long gap in which I didn’t blog, that happened about 3 times a week. Now and again, it still happens. You just have to live with it. Now that the blog is up and running again, all I have to do is type and as you will have hopefully have seen, I manage it much more often. Thanks to Evernote, I don’t tend to drive home like a lunatic anymore either. If anyone ever solves the problems or fat fingers and a small touch screem, it will indeed be a perfect world.

If it ever becomes possible to forget that GTA Vice City and it’s tempting streets exist, then that will also be of great help to me.

I’ve drifted again haven’t I?

Well, what I am trying to say is that the first hurdle to creating online wonderment is that its a f**k of a lot of work, even to do it slightly well. To do it very well, you have to be 9 people or 1 genius.  I fit into neither camp. I take my time, get frustrated, Google a lot and copy other people. Don’t look so shocked. I suspect I am not alone.

The one hurdle I sometimes find it hardest to get over, is that some things are beyond me. This usually presents itself when I have spent an afternoon looking for inspiration. Common places for this are…actually going to stay secret, suffice to say there are sights and technical achievements to boggle the mind. Now, I can use Photoshop but its a huge oil-burning pig of a program. The manual for version 5 (the last one I read) might as well have been written in Latin. What the online help file for Photoshop CS5 must be like, I can only imagine. I usually use Fireworks to create my graphics, but even that is largely a closed book to me. I  do what I can and mostly what I need to do. It’s partly why I have never done this sort of thing professionally. I couldn’t stand the idea of being asked to do something I didn’t know how to do. Also, I use about 10% of Dreamweaver when coding HTML. I suspect I am not alone in this either.

Finally, you have to keep it alive. I know this to my cost and you ignore this key ingredient in your online project at your peril. It’s hard to be specific about anything other than my own stuff, but take this blog entry for example; once posted and I have Tweeted a notice of it’s newness to about 100 followers and put it on my Facebook page for 400 friends to see, I will get about 20 hits. Tomorrow, when people get to work, I’ll get about the same amount again. This week, I might make 100 hits. This is unique visitors and doesn’t include return visits. If I make no post next week, I might get another 10 hits and after that, maybe 5 a week until I post again. I can promise you one thing. No one is looking to advertise on my site. Unless you have invented iPlayer or iTunes (I think I see a pattern), a lot of people are not going to give a monkeys about what you have done. You could be really, really lucky like me and have a target audience, some of you whom like what you have done but mostly, you will be ignored. It’s a tough lesson, but all the hit counters and spinning visitor globes will not bring people to your site in droves.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. I once mentioned Gillian Anderson, Clint Eastwood and Pamela Anderson in a blog post (as a test) and got almost 300 hits in a week. This sort of experiment is frowned upon and the Google bots will soon find you out, so don’t try it (unless you are blogging about famous celebrities of the 80s or course). Quite what would happen if I mention Justin Bieber, Dancing On Ice, Lindsey Lohan or Red Nose Day,  I can only imagine. Oops.

The one thing I find hard to babble on about is…well, babbling on. You have to be able to write a bit; I can – write a bit that is – but I don’t do it very well, not on paper or screen at least. Most of us know what to say but either because we haven’t done very much of it since the age of 15 or perhaps because we never could in the first place, we can’t put into words. This is not a huge worry but it’s something you should be aware of. Most of your readers’ brains will work out what you want to say and very few will feel the need to tell you where you have gone wrong. In any case, you will be understood.

So, after struggle, torment, plagerism, manual reading, googing, relaxing, typing, patience, calmness, panic, frustration, desperation, defining your own creative limitation and often going for walk to clear you head, you are done.

Shouting At The World

There's only one really...

In a word, don’t bother. I pondered for a while before writing this paragraph and while the first sentence seems a little harsh, it rings true. Perhaps it didn’t 15 years ago when there were dozens of search engines, all eager for your content. Now there is just Google and to a lesser extent, Bing. Google is really the only one that matters and it’s bots will eventually index your online world and show it to the world. Well, they will show it to the world if they enter the right search terms. If they don’t, you webby work might as well be in a bin bag in the shed. Again, harsh but true.

But remember, you have friends – both Facebook and real, tell them and tell everyone on Twitter. That process alone will grab the attention of those who know and love you and who are eager to click a link whilst slurping the Kenco.

Of course, as I said before, I am lucky. My stuff was and is for a largely captive, ready made audience of old school friends. They are brilliant, receptive and sometimes embarrassingly grateful. I feel guilty sometimes because I get frustrated when they don’t use my site exactly the way I intended or because I wish they would contribute more but a swift kick up my own backside soon rids me of this. This swift kick is usually in the form of someone I haven’t spoken to in 20 years suddenly popping up or like this week when a well respected author of online content and the printed page finds the time to join my new forum and enters into a short correspondence.

So, don’t bother shouting. Do it because you want to and because a few other people might like to see what you do. Don’t worry if you don’t work on it for a while and don’t worry that your audience is getting frustrated or thinking less of you for not spending your Sunday afternoon banging away at your PC keyboard. They will still love you when you do come back, no matter how long that is. Go for a walk, go to Vice City or go and sit on someone else’s sofa watching X-Factor, eating chocolate muffins and trying to convince them they will be a great mother.

The more you do, the more you will have to think about and write about and the more likely you will be able to spend an hour typing 1600 words about yourself to no one in particular.

A bit like I have just done.

The Most Expensive Car In The World

Marooned

..and so I dribble to the end of one of the most full, stressfull, penniless and dismal months of my short young life. With no irony whatsover (considering the medium on which you are reading this), I won’t bore you with the minute details. A lot of you with whom I speak on regular basis will know about most of it. The maroon metal monstrosity pictured above played it’s part in no small measure. So far this year, I must have spent the best part of £1000 on it, despite only paying £595 about 3 years ago. The world is full of people willing to dish out advice when this happens but the answer is never so simple as most believe. “Get rid of it!” they yell. But you can’t “get rid” of a car that is broken can you? Who will take it? So, you fix it and then you don’t need to “get rid of it” at all. In fact, the thing you have just fixed is one more thing on it that is less likely to go wrong again. I use this dubious logic to convince myself that after this year’s repairs – the thermostat, clutch, exhaust and alternator will not go wrong again for ages. I know…I know…

Anyway, it’s booked in tomorrow at the garage next to work (I know…I know) that I have often spoken about. Yes, I always feel stupid in there but you have to understand that it’s very convenient and thanks to my kind friends, I won’t have to spend £25 on taxis. By this time tomorrow, I will be able to stop disconnecting the battery every time I park up at home, at work and anywhere else where I am going to be more than about 10 minutes. It’s amazing what you can put up with sometimes isn’t it? If it does have one downside, it’s that I  have to wait around at work so that all my colleagues have driven off before I lift the bonnet to fiddle with the battery. They are all really kind but you do get a bit fed up of “are you ok?” or “do you need a hand?”. It’s my fault really. I shouldn’t know so many nice people.

I shouldn’t knock it too much though. As is always the case in the middle of diversity like this, I have learnt so much. I can now disable and re-enable the immobiliser with consumate ease. I know where the fuse for the horn is, I know how to change the battery, I know how to tell if the battery is charged just by looking at it and I even finally got round to putting new batteries in my key fobs.

But you are right. I should get rid of it. But look at it..it’s 13 years old and it’s still so shiny. It still has new car smell. Still!

So one final thank you to the RAC men who have helped me these past few weeks. Most of you were friendly, kind and helpful. One of you wasn’t but in his defence, it was very early, very cold and I did jibber like an idiot in an effort to pretend I knew the first thing about motor vehicles. To say I have got my money’s worth out of an annual RAC membership this year would be something of an understatement.

So that’s what’s been happening. It is certainly the only part of it entertaining enough or amusing to post here.

Progress

Long time pals will have been watching this blog on an almost daily basis for signs that it is going to be a going concern anytime soon. Well, I have now finished putting the last seven years of blog posts in and like most such jobs, it was a drag. This is mostly my fault as I re-read most of them before putting them in. Some I left out as a result of sheer tediousness or irrelevance. Some of them were too short to bother and after reading and disregarding the third of forth such dribble, I remembered that my first blog template was a skinny, single-columned affair where such tiny snippets would have filled half a page. Most of them would barely fill a Tweet these days.

Some of the entries reflected how much has changed since in the last 5 years. I had few friends at work who read my blog and it was very much a school friends blog. This is by no means a bad thing but nowadays, many of my work friends read this and would be a bit bored and/or mystefied by talk of things boarding school. I did (unwisely) bitch about work on occasion too. Why I thought this was appropriate is a bit of a mystery.

There is no mention of my dad passing away although there is of his funeral a week later. Likewise, there is little mention of my being diagnosed of Diabetes but there is of my memorable visit to a medical “workshop” a few weeks later. On reflection, I probably didn’t feel like blogging about dad at the time. I suppose the same could be said of my medical bombshell too.

So I guess I am “back” now.  My next blog post will be the first concerning the writing of my book. If you didn’t know I was doing such a thing then you will no doubt be fascinated by what I have to share with you over the coming weeks. If you did know, then once again I promise that I will actually get on with it.

You know, sometimes it’s really hard to blog. The most annoying times are when seemingly nothing is happening in your life and then you have a really good idea at work. Then you forget it on the way home.

I was thinking just yesterday that I should do something crazy and unpredictable and blog on a Thursday night. But what would I share with the 9 slavering dogs that hang on my every (or at the very least alternate) word? I was having this particular thought on the way to work in that rarities of rarities (for a shift worker at least) – a traffic jam.

Staring me right in the face was something that I had wanted to blog for ages but had forgotten about on the way home so many times…

A transit van in front of me. Clean, shiny & with a very smart logo on the back. The guy or gal who owned the business obviously knew a thing or six about professionalism and had employed a competent ‘logo person’ to bedeck his fleet of vans.

(I have invented the company name in the paragraph that follows for obvious reasons. Take note spambots)

What neither the owner or ‘the logo man’ had realised was how stupid and unprofessional the EMail appeared to people driving behind. Maybe I am in a geeky minority here but you would expect a loft insulating company called xxLoftStak to have an Email address like .. info@xxloftstak.co.uk and a website at www.xxloftstak.co.uk. But no…not one person had seen fit to ponder a moment and suggest that.. a.lftsk@tier1/~freewebb.homeserf.uk.ltd might be quite hard to write down and remember when you doing 40mph. The amount of people in Plymouth who know where the ~ key is on their keyboard would probably all fit in the lift where I work and still leave room for the cleaner and her smelly mop bucket.

and then…as I drove home around 10pm through Plymouth’s leafy Devonport, I stopped at a set of traffic lights just in time to see a naked bloke run across the road wearing nothing but a big red crash helmet.

Picture of the day almost. Sadly, it was too dark and he ran too fast. The other downside is the person who had just got out of my car would have enjoyed it even more than me and I would have a witness.

Bugger.

Boom

Here we are in the autumn of the year. Wait, that doesn’t quite work. It is actually Autumn in a totally non-metaphoric way and as always a time for multiple grumbles of a miserable old man type.

As October dribbles away to nothing, Halloween and Bonfire Night are jostling for the soul of the honest shopper in that indecent way they enjoy. Strangely enough Christmas seems to have taken a back seat this year. I am fairly sure that by this time last year, Santas were abound and decorations (albeit unlit) spanned the thoroughfares of my fine city. Perhaps I am wrong. Certainly when I was a poor little Dukie returning to school after half-term in the early 80s, Christmas was a far-off and concept that didn’t seem to bother us until late November.

Still, we are now well into the “arseholes with legal explosives” season. Sam, the largest and wussiest of my two is already camped in his “safe place” behind my computer desk. He prefers this despite the fact that it means he must curl up on the intestinal pile of cables that I stuff out of sight and out of mind in the hidden dusty recesses. He emerged yesterday at about midnight sporting a cobweb veil of Miss Haversham proportions (I threw that one in for you Pip) and headed downstairs for a snack. Unfortunately, at least one drunken chav had one last rocket in his arsenal and sent it skyward just as Sam hit the third step from the bottom. On the plus side, the slipstream caused by his speedy return did at least leave the cobweb half-way up the stairs. You can always tell when there are fireworks about. You pick up Sam and he shows no intention of ever being put down again. Usually he humours you with a few minutes of contact, possibly licking the nose of sniffing the face then he starts to struggle and you know the hug is not to be. At this time of year, he tucks his feet up before you put your arm under him for support. The chin flattens on your shoulder and purrs loud enough to drown out Meatloaf. Of course, every time a firework explodes, his mighty claws dig into you like a sabretooth but you have to live with that. Rest easy Sam, only a few weeks to go.

Blog

MySpace, Facebook, Beebo. They all have a lot to answer for. Once upon a time, only nerdy types such as myself had blogs or anything at all online. Now ‘with a few clicks’ (don’t you just love that pathetic phrase) anybody can share their wisdom and lives with anyone who cares to read it (usually about 9 people). On the face of it, this has to be a good thing and I am sure that it’s only jealously and righteous indignation (you mean you can do it without wrting HTML code by hand?!?!?) that makes me blow hot and cold on such things. I think I can express it best in the following way.

Neil’s Guide To Facebook & MySpace

Pros

• Everyone gets online and finally has something to do online

Cons

• Everyone gets online and finally has something to do online

At last count, something like 7.75 trillion trillion people are now on either Facebook or MySpace. Each of them has uploaded a total of 29 quadrillion billion photos. For 99.999999% of those people, their only regular visitor is the Google searchbot. I am ashamed to say that I know what a searchbot is and you should count yourself lucky if you don’t. Hi Scott.

Funnily enough, the thing I like most about MySpace is the the surveys. I really must do some more.

I just remembered where I am going with all this.

Blogs..

There is a line. A great big red one. You can toe it or you can step over it. Someone of whom I am aware has seemingly taken a long run up and lept over it. It’s a few weeks later and this person has yet to land.

Now MySpace has let anyone write one. You simple “log on” (another f**king phrase I hate) and type away. Unfortunately, if you happen to mention anywhere on the page where you live or where you work, the problems start. If you compound this by mentioning people by name and the snowball grows. Before you know it, 100s of people find out about it and a personal rant is big news. This rant in case you are wondering is fine but for a few choice phrases. Everyone should rant. I do and it feels good. Just watch out, you never know who is in spitting distance.

Heavy Loads

I broke some news today to some people that was not terribly good but at least I did it and can move on a little. They are friends and I should have know they would take it the way they did.

Must dash now. I have more stuff in my head, so I may come back later.

The casserole is almost done and it’s almost time for the dancing. Saturday night is indeed alright.

No, really…

Apart from Messers Turnbull and Mansfield, very few of you will sympathise with today’s scribbly ramble. This is part of the reason I chose the subject. For over 15 years, I was employed in a few jobs that required me on a regular basis to assist others with their Computer and IT problems.

In 1987 this was a far different beast than it was in 2001 when I formerly stopped taking the IT shilling. In 1987, PC’s were a stange oddity in the corner and mainframes (actually called minis for some reason) sat in large offices sucking life from the national grid with alarming ferocity and using diskettes the size of an opened Financial Times. In the early days of my IT employment, we just got on with it. As long as we provided reams and reams of green and white reports for middle management, we were generally left alone. We were kept busy printing and they were kept busy reading – a symbiotic relationship if ever there was one. Our abilities and opinions were rarely challenged and even I enjoyed fairly high regard amongst my colleagues as I wandered the building with a wheelbarrow full of reports dressed like Don Johnson from Miami Vice (rolled up suit sleeves never go out of style).

At home around this time, most of the nerdly persons owned Commodore Amiga’s, Atart ST’s and ageing Sinclair Spectrums. Home computers were so far removed from workplace computers that the two never came into conflict. You couldn’t even nick any useful consumables from work – apart from the odd mousemat or diskette of course. Music on a computer? The internet? Movies on a computer? Not a chance. ‘Twas the age of the blocky pixel, the chunky graphics and the whiny chip music.

Around 1993, it all changed. The original home computers withered and died. Nearly everyone who bought a new computer bought a PC and my life changed. I too bought one and suddenly my desk at home looked like my desk at work. I had the same software and the internet wormed it’s way into my life. All of a sudden, TV adverts (mostly AOL to be fair) promised a world of technological entertainment where 100′s of “channels” (actually just web pages) would inform, entertain and educate you and your family well into the 21st century. This was bollocks of course, but the rot had set in. By the mid 90s, the whole world and his dog had a PC. To be honest, most owners knew little more about the PC and its operations than their dog did. It was nobody’s fault and I don’t want to user-bash but in a marketing victory unseen since the Rubik’s cube or the Hula Hoop, John Q Suburbia now wanted – no needed – a PC more than anything else on the planet. How else was he to educate his children, balance his bank account and delve into a world of virtual 3d entertainment?

Actually, I am still waiting for that last one myself.

So, where am I heading with all this?

Well, along with this new PC came an almost unbelievable transformation in the everyday home computer user. Overnight, those who previously popped out for a pint at lunchtime or read the paper, suddenly started to try and install Flight Sim 2 on the company mainframe (sorry..mini) and would wax lyrical about every IT related subject under the sun. At first this was just a little amusing. Then it got a little annoying. Then I was pissed off an a regular basis. This continues to this day and I am sad to say that in 2006 it’s even worse.

I work with people who regularly ask me things or tell me things that make me want to laugh like a bathing hippo. It is so, so hard not to laugh out loud. This is not arrogance, indeed I am not sure what it is. It’s hard not to slap them and it’s even harder to explain.

I take the car to the garage. It fails it’s MOT. They fix it. I pay money and I cry for a few hours. It happens once a year. I never lift the bonnett other than to put a bit of oil in or to fill up my windscreen washer reservoir. I NEVER try and tell the mechanic what to do or try and do it myself. If they give me a piece of advice, I usually follow it. I am clever enough to know that they probably know what they are talking about. OK, so garage mechanics are probably not the best example. Subsitute Doctor, Dentist or whatever if that helps.

Why oh why does everybody not do the same with computers? Day after day after day I am assaulted with at least one request or opinion that even after all this time I am at a loss to deal with. I am not talking about Helpdesk stuff. When I looked after 35 users on a network and helped them with Windows, Word, Excel and Access, I mostly had a great time. 9 times out of 10 they were very grateful with my help and I got a great deal of satisfaction. What I AM talking about are the endless questions, opinions and statements that spew forth during my working day.

Particular favourites in recent years.

1. “I am thinking of buying a PC to help my kids with their schoolwork.” This is decreasing in popularity as less homes these days are without a PC. It’s a strange statement as most of the people asking don’t really seem to know what they mean. If you ask for a few more details, they have seldom thought it through. If they just say something like “well, he/she uses Microsoft Office at work” or “his teacher says it will be a good idea because he/she is interested in them” then that’s fine. What usually happens is they get ratty with me and arrogantly stomp out the room. This same sort of person buys the cheapest PC they can find (usually Packard Bell from PC World) and immediately sets up Broadband Internet Access in their child’s bedroom. I used to warn about the dangers of internet porn but I stopped. They just assumed I was some sort of pervert for knowing about it in the first place. I long ago decided to let The Daily Mail rant about this vile topic in the hope that Britain will be cleansed over the next decade or so.

2. The person who buys a PC and then hardly uses it because the internet is broken. This is alarmingly common these days. “I switched it on and the internet broke. Telewest came out to fix it and told me that the internet is not broken but I know it is – my friend says.”

3. The banner ad-clicker or the free software downloader. Oh dear. Porn from nowhere. I now run. I run like the wind. I have NO chance of coming out of this one unscathed. It starts off many different ways but usually something like “I have an icon on the desktop I can’t get rid of”. You have to feel for them. They have had to make a difficult decision – talk to work colleague about embarrassing porn thing or have your family taken away by social services because your a vile perv. This person has no anti-virus software and no firewall and deserves to burn in hell for that alone as far as I am concerned. It is at this point that I run. I put one hand on my hat and run far and fast. Nothing you say from this point on will be acceptable to your colleague in any shape or form. You see, there is no way that they or any of their family has been anywhere near any porn site – ever. EVER!! No. You are wrong. It came in the window on its own or the milkman did it or something. How dare you suggest such a thing. The fact that, as I found out many years ago, their internet cache and history details a pornographic appetite worthy of one of the more perverse Roman Emperors, is just not relevant. Get a firewall, some anti-virus software and download some anti-spyware software you cretin. The best of them are all free. Get it or don’t, just don’t talk to me again EVER.

You see, dear friends, I know a thing or six about computers. That’s why you ask me in the first place. If you don’t like what I say, bugger off and ring a helpline. Better still, throw the PC in a skip, buy a Playstation 3 and keep your bank statements in a shoe box under the bed. With the money you save by not needing Broadband, buy your kid some encyclopedias (ok very cheap encyclopedias).

If you must have one – they do look quite cool after all and now only cost about £200 – remember this. Buying a paintbrush doesn’t make you an artist and buying a typewriter doesn’t make you an author. I don’t say this to be cruel or arrogant but I have been asked questions about buying PCs over and over again and I have seen how some of it works out. But of course, you all know that. You already have a PC and you read my blog. Achieving such a task probably puts you in the top 10% of PC user ability.

Monday and its cold. The car looks like a choc-ice and I know it’s going to be no match for my flimsy plastic scraper. Its been the first night without snow for about a week but mother nature is making up for it with inch-thick clear ice. Two choices:

1. Empty a whole can of de-icer all over the glass. 99p well spent.
2. The always scary jug of tepid water.

As I am a) Dukie & b) A Man, I have no idea of the value of money so it looks like the aerosol ammonia will be my weapon of choice.

I have wheeled the portable gas heater into my bedroom in the hope that I will warm up. The window is open, as directed in the helpful instructions, but I may still pass out before I finish this.

Yesterday’s nap didn’t do me any good as I woke up with a migraine. This is the worst kind of migraine as its very difficult to go back to sleep. Sleep, as any fellow migraine sufferer will tell you, is the best cure for a migraine.

Its my own fault really. I was web coding all yesterday from early morning until whenever it was I stopped to blog. At work when keying, we have to take 5 mins break every hour, something I should do at home I suppose. Still, its Monday now. Work is in 4 hours or so and I have Frank Skinner’s audio biography to listen too.

Happy 6th of March.

The Management

Jeremy Paxman once said that there are only 10 sorts of people in the world – those who understand binary and those who don’t.

Funny, clever and the only thing that has stayed stuck on my cork noticeboard since day one.

You can’t beat a day coding at the old PC. Some of you reading this can appreciate the raw excitement of this – the moment when you bring the damn electronic beast to its knees and it finally does what you bloody want it to.

The version 6 overhall of my web site is taking for ever but is going to be worth it from a purely personal level. Since redundancy 3 years ago, I have not been able to web code and get paid for it. I was a bit worried at the time that my coding prowess would depreciate over time as would by creative ability. Strangely enough, sitting at work doing the Royal Mail thing and listening to the greatest music in the world fills my head with ideas all the time. I once read that a lot of programmers and designers do their best work on the beach or on long train journeys with nothing more than a notepad and pencil. At last this makes sense.

Pinned to the aforementioned notice board (not in Microsoft Outlook’s To Do List) is a list of web site aims. There is nothing quite like crossing one of these off the list. Today it was – “Display the 5 latest topics from the forum in box on the website”. Not earth shattering by any means but I must admit to punching the air when it worked. Huzzah. And, yes Stan, I will let you have the code it you want. When its works properly that is. I never said it worked perfectly.

I fear my number one on the list – “Don’t use tables – only Cascading Style Sheets” will never be crossed off. More flexible and compatible my arse.

Oh and one more thing before I go.

An old Westboard chum of Heidi and Helen got in touch today and I dutifully forwarded the note to them. I love it when a plan comes together.

L8r Doods

Yes, I just updated the countdown on my website to count the days until Old Boys. 113 doesn’t sound very much. I will soon have to think about packing.

I started using a new hit counter from a company called Statcounter which, as well as being free, tells me all sorts of stuff about the visitors to my site and this blog. What continues to amaze me is amount of visitors that still find the site through search engines. I also need to be careful as several current Dukies have emailed me from home (they are now on holiday) to tell me how much they like the site and how many times people look at it in DYRMS IT Classes. I suppose I will have to be careful what I say from now on!