Agloco Holy Grail viewbar cometh out (and just sitteth there)!

NOTE (added after following post): I did it! I actually GOT the mythical Agloco Viewbar (you know, the one they had us all buying into before it even existed). I feel like some medieval crusader, recovering some jewel-encrusted cup from a Jerusalem treasure-store. Could this be the Holy Grail?! He takes it in trembling hands and places it on the table, and just gazes at it for a while, expecting perhaps something miraculous to happen. The cup does nothing. A bit like the Agloco Viewbar.

Well, it's finally here - those poor exploited Chinese workers in Shanghai probably gave up their last breath to get it to us, but we are finally all able to download the Agloco Viewbar! It says so in an email everybody received in the last few days. All you have to do is go to the site... erm... oops, seems to be down. Oh wait, got in after the 15th attempt. Then all you do is do what we have been waiting with bated breath to do for months: click on the "Download Viewbar" button that has appeared on the main page... Er... "Connection Timed Out"...

Agloco Viewbar-mania must be reaching fever pitch. It's all those 17,000 referrals of John Chow's flocking to start making him huge piles of money and clogging up Agloco's poor servers! Or perhaps it's MY FIVE referrals adding the straws that broke the server-camel's back (oh yes, FIVE! You think I have been sitting twiddling my thumbs!?) .

Anyway, once you succeed in actually downloading the viewbar, you are going to start making 10s and 10s of cents JUST FOR SURFING, think of that! Not only that, but the people YOU referred will be bringing you in loads of money too! Well, you won't actually be making it straight away... Only when they think they might have enough money to pay anyone out, which seems perfectly reasonable.

The moment of truth has finally come though - after months of obfuscation, speculation, titilation, expectation, we will finally get the chance to install a spurious bit of software that doesn't actually seem to do anything and start raking in the filthy lucre! What are you waiting for!!!

Why you will stop using ICQ at the age of 30

Remember ICQ? It was the first widely popular chat client, far more user-friendly than IRC, allowing Internet newbies suddenly to chat to people all over the world for free (though a lot of us were still using it over dial-up).

The thing about it was that you got a lot of unsolicited chat requests, and probably still do if you use it. If you are a girl you get a lot of guys of similar age, or older, wanting to chat, and I can say as a guy that there were a fair amount of girls initiating chats with me. I won't go into my opinion of the motivation behind these chat requests, though you should definitely be careful, especially as a girl.

Now, on ICQ, the way you search for someone to chat with is via certain criteria, and one of them is age. So the guy searches for girl, 23-29, say (the latter being one of the age ranges ICQ offers you), maybe adds his city or some interest, and out pop a number of "victims" (ahem, excuse the expression).

Well, it WAS kinda nice getting the occasional girl aged 24-25 initiating chats with me when I was 28-29 - even though I used ICQ for talking to known friends and really did not do much "blind" chatting - I did not (and still don't) rate it much as a way of getting to know someone. But it was sort of flattering.

But then I turned 30, and what happened? Of course, I started getting "hit" by ladies searching in the 30-39 bracket! There is nothing you can do about this short of lying about your age - ICQ just lumps you into this new, rather arbitrary and wide-ranging age-bracket! The 23-29s vanished overnight, and suddenly I was no longer the focus of interest of young ladies of this age group, to whom surely, until this fateful event, I represented an older, more worldly-wise guy. Now I was running scared from the aggressive advances of the "older woman", me, a mere stripling, the prey of femmes fatales, some of them, like, nearly 40 years old!!

Well, that was very quickly the end of my use of ICQ - along came the relative anonymity of Skype and I could use my computer, safe from the clutches of Thelma, aged thirty-eight from Theydon.

And that is why, when you turn thirty, you will stop using ICQ...!

The Blogfish - the next generation in blogging

The Blog-Fish (not a reference to the Gnome panel applet of similar name) is like the Babel-Fish of Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy Fame. What you do is put the Blog-Fish (actually a sophisticated electronic mind-reading device) in your ear and there it stays indefinitely.

What it does is eliminate the need to write blog entries anymore. No more minutes and minutes of thinking up new stuff to write. The Blog-Fish simply interprets the electrical signal caused by the constant stream of thoughts in your brain and converts them into a blog entry!! This saves lots of time and makes sure your blog is always up-to-date too!

Plugins for the Blog-Fish are available for all the major blogging platforms, and more expensive models of the device are available which will auto-ping the major blog services direct from your brain, tag your thoughts with key words and protect the precious contents of your mind from comment spam.

It is thought that the Blog-Fish is already being used by some of the major bloggers, still with mixed results, hence the recent details of John Chow's Mother's Day Dinner and a stream of recursing, never-ending Top Five Top Five Top Five Lists Lists Lists from Darren Rowse.

Once the technology is perfected, though, we can expect the death of the classic blog, and a new era in stream-of-consciousness direct-brain blogging where (brain-) content will be king and Google Ads will be served to tailor whatever the brain-blog reader is currently thinking about!

NB: to avoid brain overload, remember to unsubscribe from all blog feeds BEFORE installing the Blog-Fish!