Technology

Where is grandpa?

This little ditty made us smile and hopefully it will do the same for you.

The computer swallowed grandpa.
Yes, honestly it’s true!
He pressed ‘control and ‘enter’
And disappeared from view.

It devoured him completely,
The thought just makes me squirm.
he must have caught a virus
Or been eaten by a worm.

I’ve searched through the recycle bin,
And files of every kind;
I’ve even used the Internet,
But nothing did I find.

In desperation, I asked Jeeves
My searches to refine.
The reply from him was negative,
Not a thing was found ‘online.’

So, if inside your ‘Inbox,’
My Grandpa you should see,
Please ‘Copy, Scan’ and ‘Paste’ him
And send him back to me.

Irish inventions

For years the Irish have been the butt of jokes calling into question their lack of intelligence but did you know they were responsible for some of the world’s most important inventions?

For a nation which prides itself as being fun-loving and easy going, the Irish have been responsible for inventing weapons used commonly in wars!  However, they have also been responsible for some more useful and less violent inventions:

The submarine
After leaving his native Co. Clare in 1872, Philip John Holland headed to the US where he invented the world’s first submarine in 1899.

The atom bomb
Ernest Walton of Dungarvan Co. Waterford was part of the team that developed the atom bomb in 1945.

The harpoon gun
Invented in 1760 by Thomas Nesbitt as a means to cull whales off the coast of Donegal.

The armoured tank
Commissioned by Winston Churchill and developed by Walter Gordon Wilson in 1915.

The hypodermic syringe
Francis Rynd, a Dublin physician, invented the hypodermic syringe to inject patients with pain relieving drugs in 1845.

Free blogging

Finding your ancestors has certainly been made easier with the wealth of information now at your finger tips thanks to the internet, but how can you make it work for you?

One way of getting your information out there for anyone searching for family members is a blog.  “What’s a blog?” is a question most people ask when it’s first suggested to them.  A blog is quite simply your own webpage that you can let people know who you are, what’s been happening in your life and share photos with family and friends.

The next question is usually, “How do I get started?”. There are many mediums which enable you to post blogs and you can get free blogging on Google site, www.blogger.com. Once you have set up your account, Blogger offers step by step instructions on how to set up your blog, using eye catching templates, post photos and get feedback

You can take a quick tour of what’s involved in setting up your blog, which helps illustrate how easy it really is and what information you’ll need. Making it even easier is the ability to blog onto this site straight from Word, download videos from YouTube and translate your blog into other languages, nothing could be simpler. For more information on Blogger, click here.

Top Ten Googles

Imagine a life without the internet? Too difficult, but what do we really use it for?  What were Australians Googling in 2007?

Well, if you live in Victoria you were most likely to be searching for cricket, European holidays if you reside in NSW and Queenslanders were looking for second mortgages for that holiday home by the sea.  Does this give a true indication of how we as a nation live?

As 25% of Google searches each day are looking for something new (i.e. never been searched for before) it seems having vast amounts of information at our finger tips doesn’t quench our thirst for knowledge, no matter how trivial!  Add this to the fact that Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and YouTube are among the ten fastest rising searches of 2007, the world wide web is fast becoming part of every day life for so many of us.

What about the really important stuff?  For details of the top ten most Googled sports, celebs and shops, click here.

Whether you’re a beginner or technologically advanced, here you’ll find what you need to understand and make the most of your computer. There’s also a page to help with buying a mobile phone and informative guides to digital technology such as digital cameras, MP3s, or podcasting.