Memes: Friday Five

Ahh, I haven’t done a “Meme” for ages and since it seems nearly everybody else on my blogroll has done this weeks Friday Five, I thought I’d join in 😉

1. How much time do you spend online each day?
Typically around 18 hours a day. Yep: that’s roughly 8 hours away from the ‘net per day (around 7 hours sleep per day). I does help that I work as a systems/servers/network administrator and search engine optimizer and hence need a lot of network access during the working day… I’m actually semi dreading my forthcoming holiday because of this: it’ll be the longest I’ve been “net-less” for over 6 years and I’m dreading the amount of email I’ll have when I return (an average of 3,000 emails per day [mostly spam] with a 7 day holiday… *gulp*).

Do you think I’ll get withdrawal symptoms?

2. What is your browser homepage set to?

It’s set to about:blank . Yep, when my web browsers start up, they show a blank page: it’s quick loading and since I normally know all the URLs I want to get to off the top of my head (and auto-complete knows the as well), it’s not much of a delay. I can usually type the complete path to my MovableType installation of this blog within 1.5seconds(!) since my fingers know it that well.

I did, at one point, have a specially made “local” HTML folder with links to all the main sites I visited – but it seemed to just slow me down more than anything else. At work, I’ve got IE’s toolbar “Links” configured so that I just need to click on one link and it’ll log me directly into most of our datacenters and billing/helpdesk systems.

Oh – I’ve also got the Google Toolbar installed so I’ve got “one click access” to Google anyway.

3. Do you use any instant messaging programs? If so, which one(s)?

Trillian (registered beta). This means it auto connections me to MSN, AOL, ICQ and Yahoo within seconds and I can easily “Away” myself from all of them with single clicks, have a single program loaded to handle all connections, have a nice “Away” handler etc etc. It hasn’t been loaded much recently though as I just haven’t been in a “chatty mood” (and when it is loaded, it’s usually got me marked as “Away” so people avoid interrupting my busy schedule).

4. Where was your first webpage located?

On my ISP’s “homepages” system for customers. I had around 5Mb webspace and a 10Mb/month bandwidth limit back in 1998 IIRC (although I was on the internet for a couple of years before then: back when USENET was usable and news, IRC and email were the only real options available on the internet – no fancy web pages for us back then!).

In May 1998, I got my own commercial web space with a web host (even though my ISP – Demon – had upgraded the “free webspace for customers” quite a bit, I was still hitting the monthly bandwidth limits quite often), in 1999 I had to upgrade to another web host as my previous one (now no longer trading) could no longer handle the amount of traffic I was generating, and last year (2002) I had to get my own dedicated server as my web host (Positive Internet) said I was consuming too much resources as a “Shared hosting” customer. I’m now in the process of moving to a third web host as my bandwidth requirements are hitting Positive’s dedicated server maximums (40Gb/month) and this new web host is a lot cheaper (around 50% cheaper and I get 700Gb/month bandwidth!). I don’t really want the hassle of maintaining dedicated servers in my spare time (I have enough of it at work), but unfortunately for such busy sites as mine, I’ve got no choice 🙁

5. How long have you had your current website?
If we are talking about “this site” (aka my blog) then it’s been in existence since November 2002