Guest Blog #3 - Marco talks IT type stuff

This is by my latest guest blogger. This entry is by Marco, a crazy (and very tall) guy who finds humour in everything and was a pleasure to work with. His blog is a surprising mix of IT and cuisine! Thanks Mr S!


So here I am, guest blogging! I used to have my own blog, but gave up after half a year or so - what's the point? I mean who's seriously interested in my online ramblings... and I should spend a lot less time in front of a screen anyways (unless I'm playing Wii that is :-P).

Now, what can I guest blog about? Maybe that I told Stephen that he would give up blogging after half a year as well? Nah, he enjoys ranting, so his blog shall live forever :-)

I think I've become rather cynical about the whole online "thing" over the years. Believe it or not but in the old WWW days (that's Wild Wild West!) of illegal music downloads I met my love via the almighty Napster music exchange (that was long before they got shot down and were reborn as a paid service), about 9 years ago.

Turn the time reel back further and I remember the first time using e-mail on a Uni mainframe (that's a very, very big computer - in terms of dimensions, not really in computing power compared to what we have available these days at least!) in 1992. The darn computer was so big that it had it's own 9m3 (300ft3) pool to keep cool in the basement of our computing centre! Those were the days of green (or amber) screens and keyboards that were clicking very loudly. Looking back I'm not 100% sure if I would go for another 6 years of studying Computer Science, it was a bit long but at the same time I met some interesting people there (for technical minded people, I had a chance to chat with the folks that completely overhauled the first version of the JAVA compiler for example!).

Looking at stuff like Facebook makes me shake my head. What is it good for other than wasting time?!? I really don't get it. Even worse, I had to re-activate my account because of two friends asking me "Are you okay? I couldn't find you on Facebook...?!?" - if you're not on Facebook, then you must be dead it seems... SIGH!

I think it's quite sad that it's cheaper these days to buy my light bulbs on eBay (I am not kidding, including shipping they were 50% cheaper than in any shop that I've got around my house in N1!), but maybe this is all just leading to the final materialisation of my online-fridge idea. It's extremely simple, but will revolutionise life in the kitchen! All you need is a barcode scanner so that the fridge knows what it contains at the moment and a nice database of yummy recipes and then you can "ask" your fridge things like "What can I cook tonight that contains meat and tomato sauce?" or "What's missing in order to make lasagne for two?". If you want to go all out, then you connect the fridge to an online order system and you'll be never out of milk again and the ingredients for your lasagne will magically be delivered by TESCO about an hour after you told your fridge that you want to eat lasagne tonight... yes, I love technology and don't get too bored most days doing my IT job :-)
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There will be another guest blog soon. If you are new to my blog due to Marco's blog entry - please add a comment, subscribe (on the right of the page) and bookmark (see icons below)!