I was pleased to see that the website is a popular as always. The weekly web-counter stats e-mail arrives and
the hits are frankly amazing.

Now, I guess the lonely Monday hit was me at work making sure that a Mac published site looked OK on
Internet explorer. And probably, the majority of the twenty-five Sunday hits were related to me messing
around at home. So, the question is who really reads this stuff? If you dig further into the statistics you
get some very pretty graphs which frankly mean nothing to me.



Now I am aware that some bugs in the way the code works on the counter means that every time I reviewed
a page inside Rapidweaver, the counter increases. Also, it increases every time I put a spoon of sugar in my
tea or coffee and finally increments every time I turn a page whist sitting on the toilet (but that’s another story).
I think I fixed the problem by firstly changing a setting in the counter code and then by cutting down on sugar
and finally by stopping reading on the toilet. Hopefully going forward the numbers will start to bear some
resemblance to reality and my ego can track its inflation proxy with some pretty little graphs.

However, is this really important? Well yes. What started as a personal challenge to be able to register a
domain and publish a few pictures is rabidly (sic) turning the owner into a James Bond style evil genius. I
can see a clear link between this site and world domination. I have already started looking for my lair and
hope a suitable hollowed-out volcano comes on the market soon. If only I could add audio to the page you
could hear me developing my evil laugh. Ha ha ha.

Which takes me on to other forms of mass communication. Yesterday, without any warning my wife asked me
if I twitter? Now after the shock of hearing the word whitter (to which I guess the answer is yes), it dawned on
me that the technology of communication is expanding faster than my middle-aged brain can cope with. I
thought I was down with my homies by having a facebook page. At work, I use Plaxo and Linkedin, which for
what I can see allow me to see when a lot of people I don’t call friends have their birthdays. Now someone
comes along and invents twittering and my wife understands it before me.

So, if your listening out there, stop it. Innovation is all well and good when it impacts someone else but frankly
I don’t want to be feeling my age in an area that I have been comfortable in since being a teenager. The world
needs amazon, the bbc, facebook and yours truly. When I finally take over the world and my evil laugh rings
round my volcano, those statistics will go through the roof. You see if they don’t....ha ha ha (repeat to fade).

Well, it seems the first rule of blogging is to blog with some regularity. With an incomplete entry made on the 24th of December and bugger all since this could qualify as the least bloggy blog of all time. Added to that, the fact that the only person likely to read these inane ramblings is myself and my spellchecker, it does beg the question why?

Ego my dears. When Bill Shakespeare first sat down to pen Romeo and Juliet, his target audience was a couple of thousand people who could read, wanted to read and could afford to read. Today, this rubbish (i.e this pointless trash and not Will’s classic if not indecipherable writings) can be accessed by an audience of Billions. Any Tom, Dick or Fanny with a computer and nothing better to do can connect to the web, access this page and feel their life enriched before the third use of the word blog in the first sentence. So the question is now, how come every week when I get the site hit statistics does it seem that nobody has taken the time to visit? Actually that is not strictly true. Of course, I access the site myself, even if its just to make sure the webcounter is still working. Then I am sure from time to time, automated webbots scan the site to pick up stray e-mail addresses to help some arschloch in Kiev fill my inbox with invites to help satisfy my wife or to help them embezzle tens of millions of Dollars via my bank account and some geezer in Nigeria. Well, I’ve got news for you. My wife is satisfied. Today she had a new brake cable fitted to the Fiat and has a brand, sparking new rear windscreen wiper on order. Life don’t get better than that. Does it?

And so to things more serious. TI is shedding people like my scalp sheds hairs. Although the full extent is not clear, friends and colleagues from the last twenty plus years will be impacted and that does not make for a fun work environment. I did have some fun recently at a Camera course in Munich. My lack of fluency in the language didn’t seem to hold me back too much although at one stage the tutor did seem to say that I was holding the camera upside down, whatever that means.

The course was on Macro photography (close-up for those who didn’t study Latin) and actually I did learn some cool stuff. Firstly, it doesn’t matter how much kit you have, some other dude always has something bigger. Vicki put it nicely before I left for the course by explaining that the first hour would be taken up by ten hormonal men all comparing the size of their lenses. I think she meant to say penises but was too polite. Once we had the size thing out of the way the second lesson you learn is no matter how much kit you have, there is always something more that you MUST buy if you really want to do this properly. Of course, I am no sucker and can see that this was just a cheap shot from Nikon trying to force you to spend money on stuff that you really don’t need. Mugs game. However, that Macro Flash unit is a snip at four hundred quid on Amazon....and it really does make a difference Vicki. Honest. Vicki, are you listening to me?

This is a great example of the complexity of the subject. Clearly this is a fairly normal ball-point pen. But the picture required three different flashes in different locations, each exposing at different amounts as well as a large piece of white silk to soften the light on the steel. So, next time I need to take a picture of a pen, I have the requisite skills. If anyone out there other than my spellchecker, the Viagrawebbot or my mum reads this and has an urgent need for pen pictures, you know who to call. Or, to help increase the spam in my inbox, mail me at david@lidontneedabiggercock.com.