Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

It looks like this year is my year for seeing bands I'd always wished I'd seen.

To follow up two doses of Thomas Dolby, I've just booked tickets to go see the prog rock supergroup Asia at the Shepherds Bush Empire - and it's the original line up of John Wetton, Carl Palmer, Steve Howe and Geoff Downes.

w00t and all that.

Their eponymous first album was the first album I ever bought, back in Woolworth's in St Helier...

The message on the front of the first ever web server reads: "This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER IT DOWN!!"

I made a little pilgrimage while at CERN yesterday.

Sat in a glass case in their museum is a small black computer.

It doesn't look like much, but it's Tim Berners Lee's NeXT cube. It's the machine where he wrote the specifications for HTTP and HTML, and turned on the web.

This is the computer that changed the world.

This is the computer that changed my life.

Geneva, Switzerland
November 2006