Ten years ago today ...

I first logged on to the internet. It took over a day to do, because the dial up modem I'd bought did not actually work. My ISP tried all sorts of things and never even suggested the modem might not work.

When I rang the company that made the modem, they told me I could send it back and they'd send me another, several days later.

While I had carefully selected the modem, choosing another was easy. I went to the local shop and bought the first one I saw ... which worked.

The past 10 years online have been very rewarding. I have "met" lots of interesting people also involved in the 2 matters I'm mostly interested in:

Christ and his church
and
Music.

In 2003 when we visited our son in California and our niece in Boston, I also made phone calls to American friends I'd "met" on the net and we spent a few days in London, where we met up with an aunty and uncle of my wife, and travelled up to Scotland where we met 2 Christian friends and one music friend. It was wonderful to meet them in the flesh and to enjoy their kind hospitality.

I can't imagine how I'd get on without the great connections we enjoy on the net and the amazing amount of information available online. Today I've been preparing a U3A talk on Tchaikovsky and his 1812 overture and, as usual, found some terrific resources to guide me through presenting this next Thursday.

Barbie's Dream Church

Barbie's Dream Church is a great dig at our materialism and lack of desire to confom ourselves to God's standards, I think.