March 12th.

It was a very special birthday yesterday…

You may already be aware of who it was for – if not, perhaps you noticed the rather jazzy Google logo?

The image on the Google website was all singing and dancing. This image is not. Being a tax payer, one can’t afford to use Animated GIFs – plus they’re so 1998.

In case you still don’t know what the hell I am on about, the Internet turned 30 yesterday… although there are many who still question the correct date – just like they do the moon landing, if Planet Earth is flat and whether or not the Cigarette Smoking Man (from X Files) is dead. Basically, people with too much time on their hands and no girlfriend.

I very much hope that you will all take a quick break from reading my blog, to sing “Happy birthday”, followed by “For he’s a jolly good fellow *” to the Internet. After all, without it, there would be no Sean’s Stories; trolls would be a make-believe creature, that lives under a bridge; and we would still be allowing Gary Glitter to babysit our kids.

* Is the Internet a “he”? I’m sure there couldn’t have been all this gender fuss in 1989. All I cared about back then was Lego, catching snails from the garden and baking rock cakes. Mind you, I was 7.

Remember these? It’s a Compact Disc (kids – ask your grandparents). You got them free in absolutely every magazine from PC Pro to Horse and Hound to Gordon the Gopher Weekly.

You could also pick the CDs up (again, for nowt) from shops like HMV. This could result in hilarious scenarios, where you would scare your parents (or any other older relative, shopping with you), into believing you had taken up shoplifting; after witnessing their blue-eyed boy picking up a CD from the shelf and walking out of the shop, without paying.

Besides tricking parents into thinking they had raised a child destined for The Jeremy Kyle Show – or, given the fact this would have been over 15 years ago, Trisha and Kilroy – the CDs had many other great uses…

1. A surprisingly effective frisbee.
2. Tricking the gullible that the CD contained the entire internet.
3. A mirror – useful for putting on lipstick, combing your hair and sticking contact lenses into your eyes.
4. Nicking 50 of the things and sticking them to your bedroom wall. After seeing something similar on Changing Rooms and thinking it would be cool, you soon realised it looked shit.
5. Trying to write data to them, using a CD Writer. You knew it wouldn’t work, but as blank CDs cost £2 in 1999, it was worth trying. It didn’t work.
6. Believe it or not, the CDs could even help connect you to the Internet! Although the photo above is a Freeserve CD, and if my memory serves me right, Freeserve was crap.

I can’t think of any other special birthdays yesterday…

Oh wait! How stupid of me. Former Leeds United flop, Seth Johnson, turned 90. Sorry, I meant 40. I got confused, as during his time at Leeds, he had all the speed, physique and bone strength of an OAP. Yes, I’m a fine one to talk, but I don’t claim to be a professional footballer.

There was another birthday too.