shewy.co.uk

In the early 2000′s I was at high school. It was during this time I discovered the world of instant messaging. No longer did I have to leave my bedroom to make contact with my friend(s). I recently found an old hard disk with some chat logs on. It was like a seeing my past brought to life in ASCII text. Here are just some of the highlights. In order to protect the identities of my friends in the conversations, I have changed their names to be random Japanese names.

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On 15th September 2001 at 12:22 – Aiko wrote: Hiya

On 15th September 2001 at 12:22 – Aiko wrote: I’m sooo bored

On 15th September 2001 at 12:24 – you wrote: do something then

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On 22nd September 2001 at 17:50 – you wrote: hi mate hows it goin?

On 22nd September 2001 at 17:52 – Hiroshi wrote:  soz mate i gtg

Hiroshi appears to be offline

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On 22nd September 2001 at 18:10 – you wrote: hi

On 22nd September 2001 at 18:10 – you wrote: what you doin?

On 22nd September 2001 at 18:11 – Jun wrote: talkin to ppl on here and listening to music, you?

On 22nd September 2001 at 18:13 – you wrote: i’m listenin to music 2. who u talkin 2?

On 22nd September 2001 at 18:15 – Jun wrote: Hiroshi, you, Aiko and Wang

On 22nd September 2001 at 18:19 – you wrote: Hiroshi said he had to go. is he online?

On 22nd September 2001 at 18:20 – Jun wrote: yeah

On 22nd September 2001 at 18:20 – Jun wrote: he must not like you lol

On 22nd September 2001 at 18:22 – you wrote: arsehole.

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On 3rd October 2001 at 19:01 – Momoko wrote:  hey baby

On 3rd October 2001 at 19:03 – you wrote: errr…hi

On 3rd October 2001 at 19:04 – you wrote: what’s with the baby?

On 3rd October 2001 at 19:05 – Momoko wrote: i can call you baby can’t i? you like that don’t you

On 3rd October 2001 at 19:06 – you wrote: mmm..ok

On 3rd October 2001 at 19:07 – Momoko wrote: what you doin 2nite baby

On 3rd October 2001 at 19:08 – you wrote: nothing much, you

On 3rd October 2001 at 19:10 – Momoko wrote: ive got a free house, im lonely, wanna come round and see me?

On 3rd October 2001 at 19:11 – you wrote:  er yeah sure

On 3rd October 2001 at 19:12 – Momoko wrote: i’ll make it worth your while..

On 3rd October 2001 at 19:12 – Momoko wrote:

On 3rd October 2001 at 19:13 – you wrote: what number house is yours again??

On 3rd October 2001 at 19:15 – you wrote: ???

On 3rd October 2001 at 19:17 – Momoko wrote: hi shewy it’s Momoko – sorry my i left my msn on, you were talking to my sister, she was winding you up.

On 3rd October 2001 at 19:17 – Momoko wrote: i gtg. sorry.

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These are hours I will never get back. This fact makes me die a little inside.

Have you ever been shopping on a Saturday morning, only to be held up by an elderly couple ambling around, seemingly unaware that there is football on at 12:45? If so, you may of thought to yourself – “you’ve had all bloody week to do your shopping, I’ve been at work, go away”. You may even have muttered it under your breath, it doesn’t matter if you have, they can’t hear you.

Well it seems some internet service provider bosses have had similar thoughts during the weekend shop.

One ISP, is writing to all customers over 65 requesting that they stay clear of the internet at weekends, to reduce the load and increase the speed. One customer was quite angry about this and gave us a copy of the letter. When asked what action he would take he said “this reminds me of a similar situation with the phone company in 1925, or was it 1983?”.

A letter to all customers over 65, which is not available in large type.

It remains to be seen what effect this will have on the internet, if any, as many customers won’t even be able to bend down to pick up the letter.

Anyone who has been scared by the threat of having a dodgy bloke in a detector van sitting outside their house will know how much a TV licence costs. Can you imagine paying playing a similar amount to use the internet? It could happen, the idea is being actively considered.

Much like the TV licence, where you can pay for black and white or colour, there would be two types of licence. These two types of internet licence would be “clean” or “full”. The full licence would permit access to adult content on the internet and would cost 175% more than the clean licence. This is because 80% of the internet consists of adult content.

Males living on there own would be forced to have a full licence by default.

Licence evaders would have there internet connections disabled completely, or restricted to a single wikipedia article on the “crazy frog”.

The need for a licence has come about due to increasing demands on the United Kingdom’s telecommunications infrastructure, as internet use has skyrocketed in recent years. Increased use of streaming video services like Youtube and BBC iPlayer have been singled out as the main cause of the increased demand for bandwidth. Well them and downloads of that Paris Hilton video.

While the exact planned cost of the Internet licence is unknown, anything more than £0 will likely go down badly with many. One randomly selected man said of it “I ain’t payin’ to look at that shit, I’ve already downloaded the Paris Hilton video and burnt it to DVD anyway, it’s shit, it looks like a David Attenborough documentary rather than a porno”. Another said “I’ve told you before you prick, get out of my house and stop asking me questions about the f**king internet”.

Whatever happens, as long as things continue to happen, life will be ongoing.

Web users around the world have started to receive shocking pop up messages, in what could be the most crucial few months in the history of the internet.

Time to get rid of some crap, but not shewy.co.uk.

It’s official, the internet is starting to run out of storage space. It is expected to be completely full in 2 months time, unless action is taken to reduce the amount of garbage clogging up cyperspace.

An extraordinary general meeting of several key figures from leading internet service providers took place on Thursday to discuss the issue. It was supposed to be Wednesday, however several ISPs turned up late after not travelling as fast as promised. After hours of heated discussion, it was decided that they would go for the cold buffet lunch and a new task force should be set up to deal with the problem of the untidy internet.

Internet Tidy Up Team

The new task force – ITUT, will spend hours constantly surfing the internet and deleting items deemed not important, pointless, stupid, not in the public interest or to do with Lady Gaga.

In fact, the team have been given a hitlist of top priority junk to target first. It was leaked to shewy.co.uk, by an angry Italian librarian. It has been reproduced below -

1. Irrelevant Facebook Groups, including those “can this spoon get more fans that Trevor McDonald” and “If 76,000 people join this group I will stick a chopstick up my arse” ones.
2. Fake ex girlfriend sites, set up with the pretence “my ex girlfriend sent me all these dirty pictures, now I have taken the time and effort to register a domain name, get a company number, set up a Payment System and a semi complex SQL back office system in order to elaborately reveal them to the world. That ought to teach her. Bitch.”
3. Myspace.com.
4. All the copies of “Two Girls, One Cup”. We’ve all seen it now. Burnt it to DVD. Upscaled it to 1080i. Watched it frame by frame.
5. Any Google search result for “Paris Hilton”. Unless its to do with the hotel.
6. Any information on the release date of Gran Tursimo 5. Most people have stopped caring now.
7. Internet Explorer 6 security updates. Talk about trying to put out an inferno with tears.
8. Information on “Soda Stream” gas cylinder replacement.
9. The contents of Tiger Woods Gmail account, in all this is estimated to be around 12 petabytes in size.
10. All 6 million variants of “Dramatic Chipmunk”.

ITUT have commenced operations and hope to have freed up several billion billion megabytes of space by the end of March. I was going to look up the exact unit that represents a billion billion megabytes, but the buggers have already deleted the Wikipedia article.

These are tricky times for most large organisations, always trying to think up new and clever ideas to stay one step ahead of the competition. With so many distractions for an increasingly media savvy population, such as social networking and the Nintendo Wii, it can be hard to stand out from the crowd.

International terror group Al Qaeda are no exception and are planning on leaping straight into the 21st century, launching there own podcast – The Al-Qaedacast.

It is set to replace the somewhat old fashioned C90 cassette tape and VHS broadcasts currently in use by the group.

The weekly podcast will feature interviews with leading members of the group, including elusive leader Osama Bin Laden. It has a run time of approximately 20 minutes each week, 17.5 minutes of which is spent denouncing the ways of the western world, before, somewhat ironically, asking for donations to be sent via PayPal.

The Al-Qaedacast idea was first brought forward at a meeting of the Al-Qaeda Trust, a group which looks after the interests of donors. The group also suggested they should approach big name stars, such as the recently available Jonathan Ross, to help present some of there programming to make it more appealing.

A number of the Trust’s members have iPods and have been impressed with the Podcast concept.

It is not known if Osama himself is an Apple user, it had been thought that someone with as much built up hatred and resentment of western society was most likely a Windows ME user.

A US source said “they can do what they like, hopefully they’ll accidentally geo-tag uploads, that’ll make our lives much easier.”

Google Streetview, the tool that has divided many, is being expanded once again. This time to cover the Moon. Using their own rocket, Googlenauts left a top secret spaceport on Wednesday. The whole project had been kept quiet, so as not to annoy privacy campaigners, many of whom had been planning on moving to the moon, to avoid been caught on Streetview.

An insider revealed, “we chose Wednesday to launch our rocket because everyone was distracted with the iPad launch”. When asked how long Google have had the ability to go into space and if it was really necessary, the insider stated “we have had our own space section for a while, and yes of course we need it, how else would we update Google Earth?”

Modified Moon Buggy with Streetview Cameras

The team are expected to spend the next week or so mapping the moon. To survive they will have to make do with vacuum packed space food and Starbucks coffee, who now have three branches on the surface of the moon. They are using a modified space-buggy, which they borrowed from NASA, that has been equipped with the familiar Streetview panoramic cameras.

The team will then return to Earth, a tricky part of the mission – yet one they are well prepared for, having spent many hours practicing the procedure using the “zoom in” function of Google Earth.

ICANN have announced that the internet will be switched off for around two minutes at some point within the next month. This is to allow the net to undergo an electrical safety test.

This is the first time such a test has been required, and many fear the consequences will be disastrous. With so much vital data traversing the net, this interruption could cause major problems for businesses, financial markets, airlines, hospitals and Stephen Fry’s twitter feed. A senior manager at Ebay is reported as saying – “Just stick the green label on and be done with it. Chumps.”

The internet will be hoping for a new green sticker.

The need for a test has only recently been raised as an issue after ICANN appointed a new health and safety manager, who has been described by his colleagues as “meticulous and lonely”.

In a statement ICANN said – “The internet will be unplugged briefly in February 2010, to allow the PAT test to take place. The test should take no more than two minutes. We will have another pre-tested kettle lead on standby should the current one fail. We understand this is inconvenient – but it is vital, try to imagine how our staff feel, currently they can’t make tea or coffee at work. We all have to do our bit.”

It goes without saying that if search engines were Hindu gods, Google would be Ganesh.

Google Labs, the development arm of the aforementioned search god, are all set to reveal their latest service next week. Google, who currently offer services to search the internet, maps, images, news, books, blogs, academic papers and online shops, amongst many others, are set to expand there repertoire once again.

Google Soulmate, will allow its users to find their one true soulmate within seconds.

Google Soulmate may be banned in China.

Dr Graham Google, managing director of Google, explains – “It’s a well known fact that there is only one person out there who you are truly compatible with and destined to spend your life with. Until now, you had no way of knowing if you had found the right person, or if you would ever meet the right person. Ultimately this leads to expense, both emotionally and financially. Our new service will eliminate these problems.”

The service is powered by a MySQL database which contains details of everyone on the planet, the user fills in their name and a few details, then presses the “I’m feeling lucky” button. Some six billion records are analysed within seconds, before contact details of their soulmate are returned.

However, not everyone is happy about the launch of this service. Legal challenges are being prepared by a number of speed dating and online dating companies. A spokesman for Match.com said “this service eliminates the need for dating, therefore putting us out of business overnight”.

There have also been questions about the accuracy of the service. During Beta testing three Google developers were all found to be listed as soulmates for Paris Hilton, Megan Fox and Lady Gaga. When questioned about this Dr Graham Google dismissed the claims, stating “The service is one-hundred percent accurate. I would love to discuss this further, but I’m taking Jessica Simpson out for pizza in twenty minutes”.

It is now so difficult for me to remember life before the internet; that this post was only possible thanks to the hard work of a team of hypnotherapists I met in the pub.  They were able to unlock my repressed memories, so I can now recall the exact moment the internet entered my life. They also uncovered a whole heap of other stuff that is not for now.

I was ten years old when my teacher proudly announced the arrival of the internet at school to the class. At the time most of my classmates didn’t really seem all that excited about this development. They were already busy enough with the issues of the day. The Labour party had just ended eighteen years of Conservative rule in the UK, and the popular television programme “Wizadora” had been controversially axed. However, somewhere at the back of the classroom, this new and wonderful technology was slowly exciting me. I was an obese child so getting excited quickly gave me chest pains.

I had heard about this internet thing but didn’t fully understand it. We certainly didn’t have it at home, and it was inconceivable that we would ever need it. My understanding was that you brought a large box, plugged a computer in one end and a phone line on the other. You would then press a button on the computer, and the box would start to make a noise like a robot dying. Then about two minutes later you would be on the internet. Stuff would slowly appear on the computer screen that was happening in real life. Stuff like – the weather. With hindsight I can see that my technical understanding as a small child was far superior to that of many adults at the time, and even today.

Our internet connection at school was confined to a lone computer, a bulky old Apple Mac connected to a separate phone line. These days Mac’s are the ultimate symbol of sexy computing (apart from me of course). However back in the day, they just looked like any other household appliance. I remember thinking, the less computer literate members of staff must have been briefed not to try and warm up tinned soup using the Mac. At this point in time, the internet was not to be used to get information quickly. The latest news could be obtained faster via “Ceefax” or on some occasions waiting for the following day’s newspaper to arrive. You couldn’t really share files either. Well it was possible, but by the time you had finished downloading anything worth having, you would have probably gone on to middle school. The lack of speed was bad. However, it was much better than nothing at all – which is what we were used to.

Websites of the era contained little in the way of pictures. Most were a black and white, ugly, unformatted nightmare that would send many to sleep. Animation, video and sound were non-existent. Porn was available only to the wealthy, in much the same way electricity was at the turn of the century. These were truly hard times. There was a very popular search engine; but surprisingly it wasn’t called Google. Google was nowhere to be found. The search engine I was taught to be the centre of the internet universe was called Yahoo. Yahoo was set as the home page on the school computer and provided a starting point for all trips around the web. At this time it was a thin page, with a list of categories down the middle and the search box at the top. Nothing fancy, just a directory that was similar in design to a phone book. This design was great for newcomers to the web, which of course, pretty much everyone was. One other noticeable feature was that the page wasn’t covered in silly adverts for fast weight loss, penis enlargement tablets or the secret to having whiter teeth. The internet was a much purer place back then. In fact, I was never supervised while using it at school in the early days. Today, this just wouldn’t happen. A public inquiry would be held, and the tabloids would have a field day, if it were discovered a child at school was trusted to be sensible online.

After a few weeks of general messing around, and waiting for stuff to load, me and my classmates were pleased to learn from our teacher we had an actual task to perform. We were told that this task would help us understand the awesome power of the internet. We were taught to send email. To start with, we sent email to other members of the class. We only had the one email address, which everyone shared. This meant all we were actually doing was sending an email to our own address. This probably wasn’t the best way to show off the awesomeness; ultimately it seemed a pointless exercise. I could understand the technical limitations of the single email address, but why would I want to type a message to my friends when I could just go and talk to them? We also had this thing called a phone, which could be deployed at weekends and during school holidays. “This will never catch on” I remember thinking. Of course, I didn’t know that in the future, I would find myself in situations where I would rather pierce my own left eyelid with a rusty nail than talk to certain people on the phone.

What our class didn’t know, during this intensive email training period, was that at another school, the same exercise was underway. Our teacher and a teacher at the other school had hatched a plan. Each member of the class would be assigned a “pen friend” at the other school. This was possibly the most exciting thing to happen since the arrival of the white Power Ranger (who was a fictional character in the TV show, Power Rangers – rather than a racist member of the national park service). However my personal excitement was short lived. The other school was in Wales, it was a lot smaller than ours. In fact, the total number of pupils in that school was roughly equal to the number in our class. So the pupils were drafted in from all age groups at the Welsh school. This meant my “pen friend” was about four years younger than me, and didn’t seem to be very bright. This completely ruined my enjoyment of the project. You see; I had known the same group of people since I was born. We had been at school together for years. All of a sudden, here I was, sat in front of a device that allowed me to talk to people I have never met before, and would of otherwise never have had the opportunity to talk to, about anything in the world. I had imagined the hours of stimulating discussion that lay ahead. However fate had assigned me to an idiot, who did well to string together a few lines of text. I was absolutely gutted; I even asked to be reassigned. Unfortunately, this request was turned down due to the lack of children in Wales.

From: Mike (Aged 10)

To:   Welsh Boy (Aged 6)

Subject: Hello

Message: Hi my name is Mike. It’s great to talk to you. Wow, isn’t this exciting. We have a unique opportunity to talk to one another and build a friendship that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. This could be the start of an exciting new age. Amazing. I look forward to your reply.

Mike.

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From: Welsh Boy (Aged 6)

To:   Mike (Aged 10)

Subject: RE: Hello

Message: hi mike

i lyke m0nkies. th ey are fun.

The conversations with the Welsh boy were brief and often uninformative. I was put off the concept of email for some time. My teacher could tell I was disheartened and offered me some encouragement. He reminded me that as exotic as Wales was, the internet was global. There was no reason why I wouldn’t be able to talk to someone in America. Inspired once again, I returned to the school computer and continued find my way around the web.

One evening, I went along to school with my parents for the aptly named parents evening. I sat outside the classroom on the internet computer while the parents listened to how good I was at everything except physical education. At the end of the meeting I got the opportunity to show my Dad the internet and how good it was. I remember him being impressed, not overly, but just enough. A couple of weeks later my Dad returned from work with an extra box. It contained a piece of hardware, and about thirty floppy disks. The hardware was one of those noisy boxes that you could plug into the phone and computer. We had the internet at home. It took about a week to get the bloody thing working. Eventually we got there. I couldn’t quite believe it. I could now go on the internet at home whenever I wanted, I thought to myself. I was wrong. We didn’t have a fancy separate phone line like the school did. Thus, a session on the internet would have rendered our primary inbound communication channel useless. To put it another way, the phone would be engaged.

This didn’t sit well with the parents. Sessions had to be conducted in short, sharp, covert bursts of activity. I was only ever allowed “ten minutes”. The speed was such that ten minutes was just enough to logon, look at one website, then logoff. Eventually the rules were relaxed as it was discovered that no one seemed to phone us much anyway. Ten minutes became half an hour and I could explore more and more. I discovered that our internet service provider hosted forums and chat rooms. These were incredible. I could talk to people in real time, about anything. I was amazed when I learned that I was talking to a resident of Norwich. That was two hundred miles away! Then I spoke to a girl from California. Oh my. This was unbelievable. If you had told me one year previously, I would have been talking to an actual real life American using my computer in a year’s time, I would have probably run away crying. Her name was Jenny; I spoke to her a couple of times. We mainly talked about the weather. She was nice, but she was fourteen and I was ten. We wanted to different things, so we drifted apart. Also, I think her dad changed internet service provider.

Cool-Chat-Room-For-Cool-People

Jenny: Hello, my name is Jenny.

Mike: Hello Jenny I’m Mike.

Jenny: Where are you from Mike?

Mike: England. How about you?

Jenny: I’m from California.

Mike: Wow! That’s incredible. So what’s the weather like at the moment?

I had noticed that most of the web sites on the net were set up by individuals rather than organizations. People would pick a topic, usually a hobby, write stuff about it and put it online. Most of the topics were insanely lame and uninteresting, but that wasn’t the point. I was excited by the fact that they had managed to get stuff out to the rest of the world. You could always tell the sites set up by individuals, because they were usually hosted on free space provided by internet service providers and had incredibly long web addresses. Few individuals had registered their own “.com” or “.co.uk” domain names. They were much more expensive back then. I really wanted my own website. There were just a couple of bridges I had to cross to get one. For starters, my life consisted mainly of going on the internet, watching the television and going to school. I hadn’t got a hobby, or a “thing” that I could write about. Then there was the other problem, I hadn’t got a frigging clue how to go about making a website. Think about it, I was ten years old, six months previously I hadn’t even heard of the internet. How was I going to be able to build part of it? I spent an entire weekend trying to think of my next step. I got nothing.

Back in school, I asked my teacher how to make a website. He said he didn’t know. Bugger. He then came up with an incredible idea, an idea so obvious I couldn’t believe I didn’t think of it. I was probably distracted by evil girls at the time. He told me to go look it up on the internet. Genius. It was at this exact moment everything clicked into place in my tiny head. The internet made absolute perfect sense. If everyone puts everything they know onto the internet, no question will ever go unanswered again. So, all I needed to do was find out how to make a website, then make one about everything I know.

http://www.myrandomfreeinternetserviceprovider.com/customers/pages/randomcategory/magicalcheese/username/index.html 

 A typical late 1990′s free website URL.

I did my research and found that my internet service provider had their own software which allowed the construction of simple web pages. I learned the basics and sat down ready to start writing up everything I knew. I started, and then went for tea. Then came back and carried on. Then I went to watch the television. Then came back and did a bit more. Then I went to bed. It wasn’t long before I discovered that at this pace I wasn’t going to be able to write down everything I knew. It would take years and I would be learning more stuff all the time, so I had in fact, taken on an infinite task. This gave me a headache, so I stopped for a bit. I decided that I couldn’t make a website about everything; I needed one topic, but what?

School again, and I was about to start the last ever topic that I would study at primary school – Space. I was quite into science and had been looking forward to this for some time. I had few friends. We had to make a report that was at least ten pages long. At the time, that was like being asked to translate the complete works of Shakespeare into Polish. I realized that I was going to be doing a lot of typing, so why not make use of the copy and paste function? I could use the words from my report in the website. I did, and about three weeks later the site was finished and ready to go. The site was called “Space for Kids”. I uploaded it to some free web space provided by our internet service provider. It was now visible to anyone in the world that wanted to see it. Obviously, they would have had to find it first, which would have been a bit of a mission due to the long address required to access it. Still, I was very excited and proud. A little bit lonely as well.

Looking back at it now, I can tell that my site wouldn’t have been very aesthetically pleasing. There were no pictures, I never worked out how to get them to display properly. This was probably a good thing, as I had nicked most of them from Microsoft Encarta, and this would have breached some copyright law. I was ten years old so naturally I used bright colours where possible. The site would not have been good for migraine sufferers or people with any sense of style. If you were a migraine sufferer with a sense of style then you really wouldn’t have liked it. It earned me accolades from my teacher and even my headteacher, who peddled the line “local school child learns to make website from scratch thanks to internet connection at school” to the local press. The fact that I had actually made the site at home didn’t seem to come up. Having a website became my “thing” too. It was read out as my hobby during the leaver’s assembly at the end of the school year.

Nowadays it’s possible to knock up a website within seconds, everyone can do it, and they do. However back in the day it was considered a pretty big deal. Especially for a ten year old to have done it with only a few months of internet experience. It was very cool, unfortunately few of my classmates thought the same of me.