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It finally arrived! My Mum's very own Mac Mini has now been delivered after what seemed a very long wait, either waiting for the order to be fulfilled or for my Mum to finally get the computer she deserves and wean herself from the Microsoft milk I can't be sure, but it's now proudly sitting in her living room purring like a contented Kitten. I built her last machine five years ago, as a thank you for getting me into programming and computers, and even then it was out of date: a little 450MHz Pentium 2 box with Windows 98. It's served her well but after five years, of which the last three have been filled with hard drive and CD-ROM drive failures, it's finally been consigned to live out it's days either as a paper-weight or a doorstop.

I set my Mum up with an ADSL router last Christmas so installation of the Mac was painless as all she needed to do was unplug the network cable from the old computer and plug it into the Mac and away she went. After a couple of days of using the Mac I think my Mum is extremely impressed, she's already ripped her CD collection to iTunes, put her contacts into Address Book, put her motorbike lesson in iCal and downloaded both MSN and Yahoo messenger. I'm looking forward to visiting her and showing her all the extra nifty bits and bobs that I've come to expect and enjoy from owning a Mac.

I absolutely love my Mac; I bought it this July after having to enviously look over my shoulder at my partners Mac and wishing I wasn't still tied to using Microsoft. I've always had a latent fascination with using Apple machines from the first day I started High school and used the suite of Apple Mac Classics; cool little machines that boasted a little monochrome screen and all networked together with no fuss. I used to look at Macs and think seriously about buying one for myself but it wasn't until a client wanted us to build a Mac screensaver that we finally bought one. We were determined to not like it as our old landlord and friend used to bang on about how good they were and how crap Windows was, but it wasn't long until we fell into the Mac spell. I now find myself staying up late into the night and watching the Apple keynotes and product launches hosted by the high priest himself, Steve Jobs.

I say high priest and I mean just that, owning an Apple for us lucky enough to have one isn't just about a computer, it's so much more than that, it's more like a religious statement. Visiting the Apple store in London for me is akin to walking into a church if you are a devout Christian being surrounded by everything Apple and being able to try everything out as you would if you owned it.

I'm glad my Mum found using a Mac easy to use, when we first got one I thought she wouldn't be interested in using it but I was proven wrong, she can't get enough! So as I continue my journey to convert others to using a Mac and all things Apple I call on all Mac users to keep the momentum going as the masses need to know what they're missing.

It's just as well we have telephones and e-mail these days; I sent a couple of letters on Tuesday last week, both first class stamps, and neither of them have been received. Today I got a phone call from one of the affected parties asking if I had sent a reply to their original letter and after some thought I decided to call the other party and they too have not received anything either. I am now going to have to rewrite the original letters and send them back and probably even pay for the privilege of Registered Post as you can't trust the postal service in the UK anymore.

Time was that if you felt you couldn't depend on anything in the world, the one thing you could depend on is the postal service; it didn't matter what country you lived in, all postal employees had a sense of pride for the service they provided. Now no one cares anymore.

...Is no doubt the glib little headline we'll be hearing from our over hyped media around Tuesday, January 19th 2038. I know this may seem a little bit premature but I was sitting on a train a couple of weeks back, and I was able to catch a glimpse of the hype already starting to bubble-up on the front page of a well known free morning newspaper that shall remain nameless.

After a little bit of thought of what doom may be waiting for us in 2038 I came to the conclusion that it would a) have something to do with computers and b) have something to do with the way computers store dates (not the fruit kind, you understand). I've taken a look around the Internet and found with this website; [2038bug.com] explains what our impending doom is all about and if it is likely to make much difference to our daily lives. The website is a little technical for most and, without trying to sound elitist and super-intelligent, I will try to explain as best I can. Most Unix based machines i.e. Mac OS X, Linux etc. tend to store dates as seconds from the unix epoch, so at the point of me writing this 1132497969 seconds have gone past since 00:00:00 on January 1st 1970. These dates are stored in what we call integers; these integers have a maximum size and at 03:14:07 on Tuesday January 19th 2038 the number of seconds will change from 2147483647 to 2147483648, not much to worry about you may think, but what will happen is the latter figure will be too large for an integer to store. The figure will in fact change to -2147483648 and thus giving us the time of 20:45:52 on Friday December 13th 1901, as that date is exactly -2147483648 seconds from 00:00:00 on January 1st 1970.

This bug is really not something to worry about as it is very easy to fix and as most home and office computers will probably be 64bit machines in the year 2038 which won't be susceptible in the bug. The media however will no doubt have other plans and decide to hype up the problem and give it the name the Friday 13th Bug; that will, if you don't buy some extremely expensive software or pay vast quantities of cash for an inept consultant, come round and rape your wife, corrupt your sons and drive off to sell your daughters into slavery. So please take this post as a head's up of what is due to be coming, we have 33 years to wait for the bug to make itself known and the only reason the media hype stuff like this up is because a) they're lazy and b) they will try anything to sell newspapers.

Well what a week it's been; it's been a strange muddle of broadband downtime, disagreements, good news, self-examination and worse of all no work done! Monday for me was a bit of a non-entity as I can't really remember what I did, Tuesday and Wednesday was filled with no broadband, frantic phone calls to BT and disagreements, Thursday was a good day for good news and finally Friday was the day of self-examination. I won't go into all the details, as I neither want to bore you or indeed bore myself.

On the plus side; this week I've managed to find out quite a lot more about the Roman Empire as I continue my indulgent fascination with the ancient culture we have so much to be thankful for and I've come to the conclusion that saving all your spare change is also very useful for getting you between pay cheques.

Today I've again been satisfying my indulgence for car shopping and spent a good hour looking around BMW, Volkswagen and Mercedes dealerships for what is going to be my next car. My last trip to Audi was enough to put me off the A3 and I'll never touch a TT so I decided to leave them out completely this time around. The BMW dealership was very good, their staff were attentive and all the cars they had on display were of a very high spec, so I'll certainly be returning. I only visited VW as I was interested in the Touareg however, after sitting in a couple of very well built cars before, I came to the conclusion that VW just isn't as nice as BMW. The Mercedes dealership was useless, they expect all customers to park amongst the dinged cars that customers have returned to be repaired which makes you wonder if buying a Merc is such a good idea, and their staff looked down their noses at you and can't even be bothered to ask you if you would like any help. So BMW it is!

I've just watched a show called "Alien Worlds" on Channel 4, a documentary about what life could be like on other planets, but after watching it I think it should be called "Look what Shit we've been smoking". I like to think I have a relatively open mind but I'm sorry to say that not even I can keep an open mind when faced with the prospect of a psychedelic forest of pink Fans that look like trees but happen to be animals, interspersed with Ostrich like animals with no wings or arms. The icing on the cake however is the microbe like organism called 'Hysteria' that lives in water but apparently after consuming a victim on land some how turns to spores, I really couldn't get my head around that.

I have a firm belief that if we do discover life on other planets it'll be quite similar to our own, after all we don't look like we do for no reason, the animals and plants living on earth today have developed after millions of years of evolution. Correct me if I'm wrong but I would expect life on other planets to follow our model quite closely as it seems that the ecosystem needed to support life needs to be so finely balanced and if it isn't right you get a dead ball of rock instead of a living-breathing planet.

I think the program makers of "Alien Worlds" should perhaps put down the cheap sci-fi books they've been reading and look at the model they have around them in order to get a plausible idea of what life on other planets really will look like.

I've been watching the new series on BBC called "Rome"; it's very interesting to see what Rome was like two thousand years ago on a more personal level. We've all been forced to read the boring textbooks at school, which told us about the Emperors and Roman armies, but they never got down and dirty and showed all the little nuances of Roman life. There was a scene last night that showed a chap having cranial surgery complete with the surgical tools of the time, now while the subject of surgery isn't the most palatable subject for the squeamish amongst us, it was fascinating how they went about it and surprising that the patient survived.

Since learning about the Romans when I was at school I've always wondered what life would be like for us nowadays if the Roman Empire hadn't fallen. The Roman people were very much ahead of their time and if they were able to perform surgery on patients with a relatively high success rate how advanced would we be today? Watching "Rome" has allowed me to make some comparisons between their way of life and a comparable time in our Anglo-Saxon history where we met their level of social and technological achievement; after a bit of thought I came to the conclusion that it took almost 1500 years for us to catch up!

You have to admire the Romans for their ingenuity and their ability to build such a large empire that covered most of Europe and the Mediterranean coast of Africa. Perhaps if they had taken things a little more slowly and embraced what we would term 'modern democracy' we may still be living under the Roman flag now, but would we have the same way of life or would we be able to go to different planets and travel aboard starships? A lot can happen in a millennium.

I was in Borders, trying to kill time before going to a meeting yesterday evening, and saw this book "Xenophobe's guide to the English". After taking a little time to leaf through the book and read a few pages, with an amused grin on my face, I found myself nodding in agreement with it's frank and accurate assessment of daily English life such as: us Anglophiles prefer our dogs rather than our own children and physical contact between strangers never extends further than a simple handshake. Then I got thinking; it's interesting how the English people are different to every other nationality. It's with a certain sense of pride when I hear authors such as Bill Bryson say how the English take great delight in something as simple as a cup of Tea and a chocolate biscuit or how we can go to the seaside in a howling gale and driving rain yet still say we've had a good day out.

Perhaps our 'unique' sensibility comes from island living, or maybe it comes from the fact that we're a mongrel nation being the original free country where the persecuted and downtrodden could make a home for themselves and their families. I'm certainly extremely proud to be English and have often thought how lucky I am not to have been born in a country like... France, let's say. It also described how the English love the French country and found it's climate to be very agreeable but stopped short of saying the English loved the French. Which, is where we also have another unique quality that's lacking in the rest of the world - Many people other than the French look upon France as a lovely country but are disdainful of the French people themselves, often describing them as Arrogant and Xenophobic, while the English share this opinion our relationship with our cross-channel neighbour has moved on to a more cordial one where we tend to agree to disagree with many things; thus our relationship is more one of squabbling siblings more than bitter rivals.

However, to be fair to the French we aren't angels either and usually look upon the rest of the world with not so much distrust but more pity for not being as great as we are; after all we are the only country in the world to form a union with three other countries and put the word 'Great" in the name. Well OK, not form a union, more conquer three other countries and make them pledge allegiance to our Monarch, but when all said and done history is written by the victors. For many years we've seen the rest of the world as a place to visit for holiday, where the locals should all speak English and if they don't understand they're merely not trying hard enough so you should simply shout at them until they understand because everyone should understand English.

It is truly a special country in which we live and if you, like me, have been reading this post and nodding I suggest you get yourself a copy of this fantastic book and be amused by it's appraisal of our 'unique' little island.

Well... it's not really my first blog, I did keep a blog some years back but it was rubbish - I had far too many smily faces on it. So this is my attempt to write an adult blog, let's see how it goes!

Now I know my website aint much to look at, but I've decided to launch the blog first and add bits to it as I go along; every time I tried to redevelop my website I'd get so far into it then have to stop because more important work came up, so I'm hoping this approach will allow me to develop my site along the way and give everyone who stumbles across it something to read whilst it grows.

I'm still trying to decide whether I should put my old blogs online, as I said they were a bit crap and made me sound very camp, something which I hope people don't think I am! So here it is, I hope to add new content as soon as I can and I promise to write journal posts as frequently as I can too!