BBC started airing a very good documentary about the internet a few weeks ago called The Virtual Revolution.  I finally watched the first episode just the other night.  It’s amazing how much has happened in such a small time.

Google was incorporated in 1998 (went public in 2004).  Youtube started in 2005.  Twitter in 2006.  The World Wide Web was created in 1990 with the first web server being created by Tim Berners-Lee in that year.

It was a fantastic documentary and it really makes you think. 

We are still very much in the beginning of all of this.  There are still things to be done that no one has thought of yet.  We still haven’t reaped much of the benefits that the improvements in communication channels will have lent to science and medicine and as much as the internet has changed all of our lives, I’m sure it’s nothing compared to what’s to come.

I routinely chat with people in China and India (and back home in the States) while visiting offices here in the UK. In high school, these places all seemed so far away.

This twenty years of the internet will one-day seem like just a blip to us.  One day years in the future, people will talk about how the newspapers and music industries cried foul before they found their own way.  We will talk about the quaint days of waiting for our favourite TV programs to be aired.  Soon, we will look back on Twitter and Facebook the same way we look back on the old newsgroups (it was all so crude!).

The other day I found myself falling into the trap of thinking that everything had been invented already.  Surely, there are no new opportunities out there because they’ve all been invented.  Or, someone is already working on them.  But the truth is that we’ve hardly scratched the surface. 

There are still things that aren’t quite right in technology.  Still loads to do.  For example, as much as webcam chat is fantastic and a nice novelty, it’s still too complicated to get “ordinary” people to use it. 

As much as things change, we still think in old terms.  Artists still come out with Albums, even though we can buy and download only the tracks we want.  Why do we need the album grouping?  We still have business people who think they need to fly thousands of miles to have a meeting in another office, because we haven’t found a method of communication that is better an 8 hour flight.  Too many of us still get up in the morning and drive or take a train to an office building to do work that could easily be done at home.  When we get to grips with some of these new realities, we will start thinking differently and even more innovation will come.

I was reading the xkcd comic strip (if you haven’t read it, you’re missing out—http://xkcd.com), and saw this this strip:

2003 wasn’t that long ago. Or maybe my age is just catching up with me.

I turn my desktop computer (running XP) off every day when I’m not using it.  It is a pain to wait for startup and shutdown times, but I’m concerned for the environment and all that.

I think most people leave it running 24 hours.  I can understand why.  Sometimes it take over 10 minutes to really get all services loaded.  I’ve tried hibernate, but the Dell 9150 I use comes back from Hibernate with the fan running at full speed and it’s very noisy.  Windows seems to be geared for 24 operation– with automated processes kicking off at different times of the day.  It’s like the fridge– but I’m not sure how it compares in terms of energy consumption.

I’ve actually set my bios to kick on at 4am so the computer has finished start-up before I get up there ten minutes later.  It does all my site backups at a specific time.

I’m trying to find more energy efficient uses of the pc.  If anyone has any ideas, I’d love to know.

I watched a video over the weekend that I’ve been thinking about continuously ever since.  It is all about where our stuff comes from, how it is consumed, and how it is disposed of.  It talks a lot about the crap we buy in Wal*Mart, etc.

http://www.storyofstuff.com/

It’s about 20 minutes long, but worth the time to watch it.

Time Magazine had an article about plastic bags and reusable designer plastic bags last week. The article included a graphic showing how much oil and resources are used in making all of the plastic bags used in the US. You can read the article here (but without the graphic online, unfortunately).

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

The trouble is that California is one of the few places to mandate that stores offer plastic-bag recycling, and the industry has been slow to volunteer elsewhere. Less than 1% of bags are recycled in the U.S., according to the Washington-based Worldwatch Institute. Major chains like Giant Foods are trying to improve that statistic by giving rebates to shoppers who return plastic bags for recycling, although few consumers take advantage of the policy. In March, Ikea began charging a nickel per plastic bag and selling a reusable tote for 59¢. While it’s still too soon to tell how this strategy has affected U.S. consumers, a similar program launched in the U.K. last year reduced plastic-bag consumption 95%. Ireland has reported a similar decline since the country instituted a roughly 20¢-per-bag “plastax” in 2002.

A few months ago, I heard of a UK company that produces a bag called Onya (the name meaning “you always have it on ya”) which makes bags that fold up very small and are made up of parachute material. They can carry something like 14 kilos and fold up into a little bag which will fit on your keychain.

I ordered one last week and am very pleased with it. My only problem is that I forget to tell the people at the till that I have my own bag before they start putting things in a plastic one. So I make them take everything out of the bag so they have a crumpled used bag they don’t know what to do with (they probably throw it away, defeating the point).

The bag I bought cost about £7. It does fit on my keychain, but is slightly too bulky to put it in my jeans pocket with my keys. Still, it’s a nice bag and I hope it catches on more.

You can look at the Onya bags on their website here. (BTW, from a web developer’s perspective, their site needs to lost the Comic Sans font.)

So we attended the Live Earth Concert all day on Saturday. It was a great show. I’ve never been to anything like it. The top acts, in my opinion, were the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Snow Patrol.

It was strange sitting in the crowd. I’m sure everyone in the crowd looked excited to the viewers watching at home. Sitting in the crowd, you get to see how varied everyone’s tastes are. The two middle-age ladies sitting next to us weren’t very interested in Metallica. The young early-twenties girls sitting in front of us leaped to their feet for the Black-eyed Peas and Pussycat Dolls.

I didn’t bring my camera. I didn’t want to travel all the way in and find that I couldn’t get in without it. But I did take some pictures with my camera phone and put them up on Flickr. The quality is pretty poor and there was no zoom, so you can see the stage and stadium, but no performers. The flickr link is here.

This is the first concert I’ve attended in over ten years. Later this summer, it will be Prince at the Millennium Dome (the O2). Can’t wait.

A thunder storm just swept through town and brought down the biggest hail that I have ever seen.

I’ve been so busy with my current contract and the damned commute that comes along with it that I haven’t posted an entry in nearly a month.

My big resolution this year is to become vegetarian. This was my resolution last year, but it only lasted 7 days. I’m on day 12 now, and doing well.

In the past year, I read too much about the meat industry and the health problems with eating meat that, although I still ate meat, I did so with a guilty conscience.

I’ve always felt that people who choose to be veggie must have strong will power and a little insanity. We are a country of meat-eaters (England and definitely America). I see this much more clearly now that I look at menu boards filled with things I’m not going to eat. That pasta looks good–but they put little chunks of chicken in it. That salad would be perfect if it didn’t have bacon on it. Vegetarians never have it easy.

Still, I could never figure out why someone would want to be vegetarian. I put them on a parr with those crazy people who break into science labs to free all the animals.

Anyone who knows me knows that I love burgers and chicken. As a teenager, I worked in McDonalds for 3 years and frequently ate all three meals there. My dad would refer to me as a carnivore. I was never much interested in vegetables on my plate and would often leave them there. I love meat and have always had fond associations of it. Some people rave about chocolate. I rave about chicken.

But now I’ve read more and seen more. I can’t do it anymore. Specifically, I know of two resources have had big effects on me. One is a book and the other an online video.

A very interesting book that has had a big impact on my way of thinking is The New Why You Don’t Need Meat by Peter Cox. This book explores our history of meat eating and looks at the way our consumption of meat has changed in the last 30 years or so. My big takeaway from this was the realisation that with such a huge growing population, the meat industry has had to resort to barbaric factory methods to give us the product we can now get whenever we want it. Despite the romantic vision that some farmer walks out onto his farm to butcher one of his animals (probably with a heavy heart) so non-farmers can guy it on the shelves, I know that animals are scientifically reared and butchered mostly by machines. I find it ironic that people who oppose cloning could support the meat industry. This book looks at a lot of the tactics used my meat lobbyists whenever a report on the current state of our meat comes out. It is an eye-opening book.

The second thing that had a real impact on me in the last year is a video created by PETA. It’s called Meet your Meat and is narrated by Alec Baldwin. If you can stomach watching this video and still support the meat industry, you’re a bigger man than I am. You can watch the video at www.petatv.com/tvpopup/Prefs.asp?video=meet_your_meat. You can watch it right now.

I’ve never been one for idealistic causes, but I really want to stick with this one. I want to be vegetarian. Not because I want to lose weight. Not because I want to be more healthy. I want to be vegetarian because I think it is right.

I wish you a belated Happy New Year.