Please send me some email if you want to let me know you were here... or leave a message on my Tripod Answering Machine at the bottom of this page.

Lots of sites have lists of test 'questions' to help you decide if you're an Internet Junkie... here's an example:

You wake up at 3 am to go to the bathroom and stop to check your email on the way back to bed.

I might be an Internet Junkie... but I'm a computer junkie first... here are some examples from my own set of questions:

Can you confidently use the words 'food processor' in a sentence, or is it likely to come out 'word processor'?

Can you look at a number plate with SWP on it without thinking of a swap file?

More? Confessions...

30 October 1997: Weight loss need not be expensive. I didn't go to a weight loss center, but I am losing weight. The Calorie Burning Activities were good for a laugh, but I needed more information.

Before I started reading - mainly on the Internet - about fat and calories, I couldn't work out why I wasn't losing weight... I didn't eat much... maybe I couldn't expect to lose weight after having 6 babies????

I read that we should get a maximum of 30% of calories from fat... That seemed like a lot... I was having very little fat... or so I thought until I read that 30% really means 40gm - 90gm (the 90gm for a teenage boy! - and remember, that's a maximum)

I was having about a litre of full cream milk a day... 40gm of fat a day (and also a lot of calories!) just from milk! And I thought 4% fat was low...!!

Now, instead of drinking a liter of full cream milk, I drink about half a liter of 'fat modified' milk. My clothes fit again!

I hope to lose more weight... and keep my blood pressure down...

The Maths: If you have 1,500 calories daily, that means the maximum should be 30% of 1,500 calories, or 450 calories. To convert that to fat grams, divide 450 by 9 (one gram of fat has 9 calories)... and that's a daily maximum of 50 grams of fat.

Some 'food for thought': 'made with organic flour' or 'low in salt' or 'no artificial flavours, colours, or preservatives' is not the same as 'low in fat'!!

More 'food for thought': even a very plain biscuit has 1 gram of fat...

October 1997: We had some health problems during August and September; and we 'ran away' for about nine days this month. No Internet! No World Wide Web! No email! Not even a computer! It was different... but I'm back...

August 1997: I've discovered that I can use Paint Shop Pro to change 256 color graphics to have any number of colors, and not just 2, 16 (8 bit) or 16 million (24 bit). What I needed to do was change the file to a 24 bit file first (as for the deformations and special effects). A 24 bit file can be changed to 16-256 colors. Experiment with each file to find 'how low you can go' without significantly affecting the graphic. A graphic which has fewer colors will be smaller; and smaller files won't take as long to load.

Definition of A4:

The size of paper the printer is actually loaded with. Compare with "Letter", the size of paper that the twerp ahead of you in the print queue has tried to print with. This is why the printer has stopped and is patiently waiting for a load of Letter paper in the second tray. This usually occurs when attempting to print out a vital report that should have been on the boss's desk ten minutes ago.

As you visit Web sites, Internet Explorer saves various graphics and other files in a temp folder - probably C:\Windows\Temporary Internet Files. This makes loading web pages much faster... and also gives me/you a big 'scratch box' of files to examine later. You can read more about 'scratch boxes' in my 'Time' article.

If nothing ever sticks to TEFLON, how do they make TEFLON stick to the pan?

And... why doesn't glue stick to the inside of the bottle?

Why is the alphabet in that order? Is it because of that song? (My kids can sing it backwards...!)

How do you know if a certificate of authenticity is real? What do they do, send you another one to prove it? How do you know THAT one's any good?