No blogging yesterday, went out for a quick drink organised by Richard Steel to celebrate winning CIO of the year…what with Richard Stubbs and Michael Mulqueen being present there were four of the original founding members of Newham Online gathered together for the first time in…? As Richards Stubbs pointed out, it was 10 years ago that the famous ‘Wired Communities’ conference was held in West Ham Town Hall, including the much talked about debate with the title of something like ‘The internet - will it ever catch on’? It is totally absorbing to be involved a burgeoning and ever changing technical phenomena. How things change, not just technically but also culturally .

Technically I’m now sitting on a train using a train to access the ‘train wi-fi’ (although *why* does it default to the Swedish Google ???

Culturally there are new technical developments that I’m fairly much out of the loop of - text messaging on phones for example. I’ve never been a phone person. This may seem extraordinary to the wired western world of 2005 but when I was growing up we never had a phone in our house ( and fact of life still shared by the majority of the world’s population - let’s not even go there as regards a medicine cupboard and clear drinking water…). I’m not sure I’ve got the time or the inclination to get into text messaging. I say this, but I’ve recently had some really good text messages - unexpected ones from people who are making an effort to be friendly, and some very funny ones from my youngest son - who like me is always reluctant to talk on the phone. So whether I want to or not, social relations between myself and others are encouraging me to adopt to a new technology even though I see no immediate need for it.

Oh, and the other thing that we did yesterday was to go and see Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’. Do people who blog on a daily basis ever have the time to go and see three hour films?

And I’ve just double checked; here on the train, not only does my browser setting default to www.google.se, but if I try to type www.google.com in the browser, guess what….?

Will the internet ever catch on? Only if there’s free wi-fi…