Space Age Accommodation

I'm away at a two-day conference at the University of Hertfordshire. This is the first time I have spent the night in a university hall of residence room since I was a student 25 years ago!

Things have changed. The campus itself is comprised of a cluster of spectacular statements and feats of architecture. The accommodation itself was in a building shaped like a third of a giant ring doughnut with rooms on four floors looking in to a central courtyard.

This university used to be called Hatfield Polytechnic - a poly with a real history. It also hosted a great venue for music in the 70s and 80s.

Two exhausting days later I find myself home again, easing myself through a day, picking up the actions that came out of the event and clearing the eternal backlog of email.

Favourites - going going gone

I spent some time last night checking through my favourites on Internet Explorer, looking to see what has happened to some of the many sites I have flagged over the last few years. It was a process that really showed me how ephemeral the internet can be. About 75% of all the links either didn't work at all, or were to temporary pages redirecting to another site. It's incredible to see how quickly things disappear on the net.

This makes it only too clear that publishing on the net doesn't necessarily mean that something is always out there. So many great sites have bitten the dust for one reason or another.

There are services set up to archive the internet - so I guess that archive pages of some of these sites will be sitting on some server somewhere - out in the deeper internet. But they are as good as lost to the casual browser.

All those billions of pages appearing and then disappearing - all that effort being wiped away in the blink of a computer screen.