ethos

6 NOVEMBER 2005
Zapped
TV or not tv. Whether it's the diminishing daylight or the hyperbole of new ïmust see' programmes, the question is a hardy annual, as regular as a government proclamation.
This year the honour fell to RTE's Tubridy Show. One of the researchers lived for a week without watching television. I don't know what happened but it must have been tough: "For Sinead, television is mother, father, brother, sister, friend and lover rolled into one", according to the show's website.
While I have been tempted to switch off the television - say around 9.40pm on a Saturday night - I wouldn't have the same attachment as Sinead is purported to have. Partially because those sentiments are illegal but mostly because I have just spent a week of abstinence myself.
When a blue flash filled the room, the bang was barely audible above the rain hammering on the roof. Seconds later the air exploded with thunder and lightning illuminated the fields with nature's own floodlights. My phone line was instantly fried and a forlorn dive to unplug the computer was pure Canute.
As I stood there clinging to the slender lifebuoy of denial, a horrible smell confirmed the reality. A mixture of melting plastic and charcoaled chips. When the tempest subsided, I opened the computer and knew immediately that a death certificate would follow. That's the way to go. No long drawn out fault diagnosis, helplines, repairs, helplines and more diagnosis. With a bang, not a whimper.
One week later, the toasted computer is in the silicone cemetery and a shining, smelly (the right kind) model sits in its place. The phone lines are back (buiochas Pat) and I'm online.
What have I learned? Here are some top tips: mobile phones are useful sometimes; unplug the phone line when the weather gets gamey; keep a copy of important files somewhere safe and make back-up copies regularly.
I also realised that there's a thin line between geekery and so-called normality. Going without a television for a week is the stuff of daytime commercial radio, not to mention magazine articles, but not having access to the internet and/or a computer sends eyeballs skyward.
Sitting for an average of 21 hours a week staring at a screen is deemed normal because, after all, it's television. If it's a computer screen, then, according to Ross O'Carroll Kelly, a goy who SO knows about these things, "it's, loike, total nerdsville".
I suppose, given time, that attitude will change. I'm old enough to remember when television sets were unfashionably rare, and required nerd knowledge to align a snowy picture. Sometime in the future, computers, or whatever name they pick up along the way, will become the subject matter for abstinence on morning radio programmes (or whatever they'll be called then).
Getting back online did involve a lot of catching up. If it was television, I wouldn't have to wait long before channel 832 ran the repeats. And then again one hour later or the following 'catch-up' Sunday. What I missed most were what are quaintly called 'visitors' to my website.
The term always reminds me of when relatives, priests or nuns called to our house and we'd have to tidy up the place quickly because we had 'visitors'. The similarities don't stop there. The computer servers from where the 'visitors' come from are called 'hosts'. And they make 'requests' from the server which houses my website.
The site logs are full of information about the 'visitors'. Firstly they show how many arrive each day and what countries they are based in. I got a couple from Iraq once and some from Kosovo. Then there's the .gov and .mil folks, who work for the US government and military respectively. And our own gov.ie.
The latter is responsible for some great conspiracy theories about surveillance, when really it was just a civil servant Googling for sudoku during a lunch break.
Information on what type of computer operating systems people use to access the net is plentiful, with Microsoft taking the lion's share. Not so with browsers, where Mozilla, Safari and Konqueror combined are almost on a par with Microsoft.
My favourite part of the site log is the list of what 'visitors' search for, which is how they end up on my site. Sunday, Tribune and Irish are always high on the list but ever since I wrote about the origins of sudoku a couple of months ago, the hits keep on coming. Mr O'Carroll-Kelly is totally up there as well, along with my own name.
A mention of big hitters like author JK Rowling brings in the numbers, following a piece I wrote about a hugely popular Harry Potter website. The state of Irish telecoms is evident from the searches for 'broadband' and campaign group 'IrelandOffline'.
While identifying individuals is impossible, those who 'visit' from companies that have their own unique servers does narrow the field down somewhat. Following a piece I wrote about an incensed airline passenger in Britain, I noticed that a well-known legal firm had 'visited' and 'requested' the relevant page. I did my own ï'visiting' and discovered the company specialised in libel litigation.
I just live in hope that lightning doesn't strike twice in the same place.

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