Unusually I have been travelling by car for the last few days – I hate driving and I try to avoid it when I can. Sometimes though, for whatever reason, it has to be done.

There are a few benefits (but more negatives for me – I can’t work, sleep, daydream or read in the car in the same way I can on the train). The benefits are the ability to listen to the radio….though if I dragged myself into the 21st century with an IPOD I could now listen to all my fave Radio 4 shows on podcasts I believe….don’t ask me what I’ve just said – I have no real clue. I just know that the BEEB are plugging podcasts for all they are worth at the moment and even a techno thickie like me has got the message that they send you the broadcasts and you can listen at your leisure. I suppose they send you an email with them on or something but who knows!

Anyway, because I have driven the 250 miles home from my office today, I have heard a whole host of fascinating stuff….not least, a weird rant on Radio 2 about trying to ban learner drivers from using cul-de-sacs to practice their three-point turns in. One chap was on a mission to get the practice banned and spends his days charging up and down his road, video-ing the ‘culprits’ for evidence!!!!!

So, the thing that caught my imagination was a whole article – on Radio 4 - probably on ‘you and yours’ or something like that, about the future of the internet. I was fascinated by it, partly out of shameful lack of understanding on my part and partly because I am completely convinced in this bit of ‘new technology’ – even my Mum can find her way around PBASE unaided and without a parachute (sorry Mum)….but you see what I mean.

The chap who was talking about it was saying something about thinking of the internet as like a swimming pool full of tennis balls (that got the imagination going right from the start) and he said that you hoover the balls out of the pool and the bigger the nozzle on your hoover, the more balls you could get in one go. What he was trying to say was that we’re hampered at the moment because we typically have 1meg(!!??**!!) connections and that means we are at the equivalent of a nozzle that will let a single tennis ball through at a time. The progression of the argument was that it’d take a long time to suck up all the balls at that rate.

Apparently in years to come, we will be sucking up our tennis balls at the rate of 100 at a time!!! So we’ll have access to loads more information, loads more quickly….I think that’s the gist of it anyway.

So, he was talking about gigabytes and megabytes and then he said in the future it will be ‘terror bites’ – yeah, yeah, I know some techie type (probably DM with his superior voice on) will tell me it’s not a ‘terror’ byte but a tera byte or some such but the point is the idea of a terror bite just inspired me for today.

This is something of a breakthrough moment for me because I am famous for glazing over as soon as anyone asks how much ram I’ve got and how big my hard drive is. I know my computer is the thing that is attached to this lovely ‘TV’ that gives me access to a word processor and to the internet. I know it’s beige (urgh) and I know it’s noisy! As for my phone – I have no idea about ringtones, text messaging, G3 or any of that stuff – I don’t even know my own number or know how to load it with credit – it took me a week of trying and a lot of anguish to get a tenner added to it a few weeks ago. (I suppose that’s a bit of a digression really.) What I‘m trying to say is the very fact I know there is such a thing as a terror bite is a small miracle.

So, here is my ‘terror bite’……..definitely an analogue terror bite so it doesn’t need a digital to analogue converter and I don’t think it has anything to do with chips or silicone or stuff like that!!!! Oh and of course...no apples or peeps were harmed in the making of this photo.

I think it also works quite well with the stupid news of the day – the Apple Computer/Apple Corp court case……someone really should bang their heads together and tell them to stop behaving like children.

Last year, I was heading off on yet another trip....to Madrid!