The Internet has just celebrated its twentieth birthday.

A mere two decades on, it has been embraced by the world and has become as essential to society as the telephone or the printing press.

My own intoduction to the Internet came about somewhere in the early nineties.

In those days, web pages were static and graphics tended to be used for illustration rather than decoration.  Multimedia was virtually unheard of, as speeds tended to be low.  My corporate connection to the Internet backbone was a dedicated 256K line which served 2,000 staff.

My home connection for many years was a 56K dialup which served me very well.  Then broadband arrived and my connection jumped to a (relatively) massive 3M.

My connection is still 3M and is remarkably constant. I have few contention issues and am pretty much guaranteed maximum speeds at all times.

I have noticed lately though, that I am experiencing more of the problems I used to be familiar with in my dialup days.  I get page load errors, sites that are very slow to load and general timeout errors.

Has the Internet reached capacity?  Has YouTube, media streaming and the sheer volume of information saturated the bandwidth?

Is it just me, or has anyone else experienced this?

Not long after Head Rambles was launched, I signed up with Google Adsense.

It seemed like a fair way of covering expenses, and I had heard good [and bad] reports about them.

Before long, I discovered that the only way to make significant gains was to make the ads the primary function of the site, with the content running second.

I hate sites where I have to pick my way carefully around banners and Google links.  It’s irritating in the extreme and gives the strong impression that the site owner is more interested in making money than in imparting information.

After running Google Adsense for a couple of years, I have decided it just isn’t worth it.  Taking into account the irritation they cause to readers and the server overheads slowing down the site, and balancing that against the pittance that was being earned, I decided to strip them off the site as soon as the payment level was reached.

I reached that level a couple of weeks ago, and the cheque should be in the post shortly.  As soon as I hit the magic mark, I removed all traces of Google Adsense from the site.  Plugins were removed and all coding in the template was erased.  Good riddance.

What is very strange though is that I’m still earning.  Within the last two weeks or so, my earnings have continued to grow at their customary snails-pace.

I like that.

Good on ya, Google!

I have had the misfortune to have had some PC trouble lately.

In each case, it involved reformatting the hard disk and installing everything from scratch.

I find that it can greatly benefit a machine to reformat and reinstall about once a year anyway, to clear out all the crap that accumulates, like redundant DLLs and fonts, not to mention tidying the registry.

When it comes to a rebuild, I have a list of absolute essentials that have to be installed as soon as the machine is running.

First is the Anti Virus.  I use AVG, as I find it is well supported and consistently gets good write-ups.  I have never had any problems with it anyway.

Next comes Firefox and Thunderbird.  I refuse, on principle to use Internet Explorer or Outlook.  I hate them.

WinRAR is next, as a lot of software installations require decompressing, and I find WinRAR to be the most versatile.

Now that the essentials are in, what comes next?

WampServer is an essential tool of the trade.  The ability to run PHP and MySQL on a local machine is an absolute essential for me, and I just love that programme for its simplicity, though it can be a bit of a pain tweaking the configuration to suit my needs.

One of the worst bits of software ever invented has to be Notepad.  As a default text editor, it is utterly useless.  For years now, I have been using Textpad which is one of those programs that is as simple or as complex as you want it to be.  An amazing piece of work.

Another utility I like is DAEMON Tools Lite.  This is a neat little application that you can use to mount ISO files into a virtual CD ROM.  Storing ISO files is a hell of a lot easier than storing CDs or DVDs!

Once I have that lot up and running, I’m just about ready to install software.

So what do you consider to be essential?