Either my grip on reality is diminishing, or every year since 2003 has gone quicker than the last. Logic dictates that the fastest year so far has been this last one. Australia seems to have occurred just six months ago, when in fact I was there this time last year. Scary.

Because everyone who took a placement year on my course is now being spat out from the far end of the machinery of academia, I found myself in Loughborough over this last weekend.

Mike greeted me on Friday, along with Waddy and their Grantham friend, Chris. We headed over to Mike’s degree show and spent the next couple of hours exploring the illustration exhibits. The work was mixed, but mainly very good and Mike had managed to produce his best work to date (money please). Everything was made more enjoyable by how well oiled we were by the time we left, so I think it’s only fair to thank the university for the free wine.

After a quick trip to The Griffin, we spent the night at FND. I ran into a number of old faces and bar a fire alarm which left us all outside for an hour, it was good night.

On Saturday I went to check out the furniture and textiles exhibits with Nature and Cat, and once again was blown away by the quality of both the printed and woven work (last year too). It sounds really odd, even to me, as I’m not one of those people particularly interested in textiles normally, but honestly, the work was stunning.

In the evening Sean, Laura, Corrie and I went for Pizza Hut and several hours of (very funny) quality catch up time. Afterwards I met up with Mike in Echos, took him for a curry and went to sleep.

Sunday was back up and at ‘em. Over at Hollywell, the venue for the Industrial Design show I spent a couple of hours catching up with yet more people and viewing the 2006/7 output from my old course. Once again, standards were high and there were some nice products.

My bag is stuffed with business cards.

Anna gave me a lift back up onto campus for a mid-afternoon meeting with the boys from RMP and it was only then I had to get myself home.

Public transport was a bit hit and miss all weekend though and with the rain on Friday, I very nearly got stranded at Derby. On the way back I ended up on a bus from Leicester to Brum too. Oh well, I’m back up there on Wednesday, but this time I’m going to drive it.

There were a few people I didn’t manage to catch all weekend, which was a bit of a shame, but otherwise, a enjoyable little time was had. I also seem to remember promising someone I’d mention them in this entry, but I really can’t remember who it was. If you know who you are and are gutted by my black hole of a memory, let me know I will make amends…

Oh yeh, get well soon Deakin. And try not to fall over again.

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One of the few consistent things about my days is my music. The only times I’m not regularly listening to something is usually when I’m away on my long trips (I don’t tend to take my iPod), but I have to admit that during my visit to Nepal and India, I picked up a taste for Bollywood film soundtracks.

Since I’ve got back, I’ve got into the habit of listening to internet radio on my Mac. I used to do this a bit in the past, but now I’ve hooked up my stereo to my sound system using a iPod headphone splitter it’s a much better experience. I’ve been a Radio 1 man for a long time, although mainly for Jo Whiley and Zane Lowe. I’m not a particular fan of Moyles and unfortunately find Edith Bowman’s voice tiresome, so I decided to try something else.

BBC 6music is one of those stations that probably isn’t taken that seriously. In fact, most people probably haven’t heard of it. Despite this, it plays some really good stuff, the presenters are up-and-coming or ex-mainstream types (Lemacq, Nemone, Shaun Keaveny) but because this isn’t mainstream they can play a bit more variety.

Admittedly not everything is to my taste, but on the whole I’ve been a lot more impressed than I have with Radio 1 of late.

You’ll notice that both of these are still BBC stations, and it is a concious decision. I dislike the adverts you have to navigate on the commercial stations, but somedays when I’m feeling lazy or not really listening properly, I’ll flip to Kerrang. Unfortunately, their online player leaves something to be desired… this little BBC Radio Dashboard widget is just too convenient.

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OK, so we’ve all got social network accounts now. If it’s not Facebook, it’s MySpace or Bebo or Ning or whatever.

I’ve been making these points to friends for a while now in various discussions, yet the implications of mass shared personal data in years to come doesn’t seem to have been considered by many people at all. I often find people surprised by the ideas, which I think are very likely to become a reality.

I think it maybe because we’re too used to thinking in block of five years when it come to the internet. Also, I’m not talking about the scary aspects of a Big Brother society (we hear them lot) but some of the benefits to be encountered in years to come, especially by future generations.

For example, we all know the popular Friends Reunited website. A place where you can rediscover lost relatives, classmates and streetmates was probably the once most-popular social networking tool. The Friends Reunited idea was great and today’s “2.0” social network tools have built on this.

But over the next few decades Friends Reunited will become completely redundant. I’m not saying the company will necessarily disappear down the pan, they will probably evolve to avoid disaster, but there is one crucial ongoing change that is sealing the fate of this service.

We are now forging maps of all our relationships way before they have a chance to be forgotten or be disconnected. In fifty years time, no one will need to use a reuniting service to find long-lost friends, instead you will just be able to look them up. Even if you forget their name, a few minor details (a year or an event you both attended) will give search tools enough to locate the person in your records. And even if you never added them as a ‘friend’, one of your friends may have done, so you search their records instead.

The social network is creating an incredibly rich layer of information that will eventually be available to our children and our children’s children. At the moment, if I want to find out the occupation, location and children of my great, great, great, great grandfather I know I can. I go to the census records and search, but this is probably the limit of what I can discover.

Essentially, I can track down some specific information about maybe the past six generations, in periods of every ten years for 167 years (since the national census began). If I want to go back further, it’s really sketchy. All I can ever know about any one of my blood ancestors is the house they were staying in on one particular night on maybe six or seven days of their whole life.

I cannot see a photo of them. I do not know who they knew or who they worked for. I do not know what their job entailed or where they travelled to. I maybe able to trace their accommodation if the buildings still exist, but I can’t see it as it was as they lived. I have no idea of their personality, their likes and their dislikes.

In fact in comparison to what will be available to our descendants in a few decades time will be truly stunning. We have to remember, our data is a commodity, and is only ours until we die. After a while it becomes the property of whoever buys it. In thirty years time, we don’t know who will own Facebook. We don’t know if anyone will sell the database of millions of names (the holy grail for anyone in the illegal mass-marketing game) or make it public by accident. But we can assume that it will not be that long before demand to the access of records by historians will be huge.

In 100 years time, when most of us will be gone – our grand kids will be curious to find out what they can about granddad in his youth. There will be no stigma attached to accessing this information, as like copyright, or the archaeological excavation of an ancient grave – it eventually becomes part of the public domain.

The curious result will that the process of mapping family/interpersonal history will become far more complex than it is now, but also more accurate. Historians will be able to plot the exact movements (or at least much more than they ever could now) of any person part of a social network. Although the information is likely to be biased to some extent (as it is self-generated), it will mean they will know the equivalent of if one of your ancestors taught Shakespeare English, or if great-granddad really did punch the guy who went on to invent time-travel.

Of course, it’ll all be open to interpretation and all the silly stuff that goes along with it. Jokey relationship “descriptions” between people in Facebook will cause maximum confusion for historians, but at the same time, they will be able to partially rectify this by piecing together a personality using the other information available, such as who the person talked to, the mannerisms expressed in their comments and the places they photographed.

Bearing in mind that just in the past thousand years, there have been at around 30 generations of You, meaning that you know very, very little about the millions of relatives that eventually made you you. Had things continued as they have done for centuries before, when you eventually pass on, your entire life would be (if you’re lucky) summed up in a name between two dates – birth and death – with no record of what you we’re doing one afternoon in the summer of 2007.

I’m not sure if other people feel the same way, but there is something strange, but not necessarily unpleasant about your descendants knowing this much about you. For example, it is very possible that in two hundred years time, these exact words could be being read by a seventh-generation grandchild of mine.

Hello kiddo.

Odd eh?

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There are number of things to mention aside from rubbish logos.

• My illustrious business partner DDS had a rather successful meeting this morning in New York city at number 7 World Trade Center.
• On Monday I went to a BBC radio recording of I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue in the Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff. This was my first recording and it was enjoyable. I think the two shows that were recorded will be played on Radio 4 the week after next. The special guest was Rob Brydon of Marion & Geoff fame.
• Yahoo! Mail, for the first time in 9 years, has let me down three nights running now. I’m not sure what is going on, but there are some serious issues going on from about 5pm onwards UK time. Hopefully someone will have spotted all the people complaining on messageboards (as apparently Yahoo! don’t have a mail help desk themselves). Hopefully it’s just a by-product of them rolling out an IMAP service or something equally exciting… if that is the case then I forgive them. Temporarily.

I can’t believe it’s only Wednesday. I’ve got The Apprentice to look forward to anyway.

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I enjoyed my birthday. I didn’t do too much, as after all, being 22 isn’t a particularly important thing. If anything, it’s the end of being 21, which if anything, is a bit of a shame.

I noticed the world has gone a bit 2.0 over the past few days. Flickr has lost the ‘Gamma’ and now ‘Loves You’ (well spotted Gareth).

Also the release of the cryptically named Google Gears has led to a a peaked interest. Being able to read my news feeds while not connected to the internet; well it has some merit. However, how about in a few weeks time being able to use Google Docs as an offline application? Now that would be good…

Google also started spidering the streets of a number of US cities, and now if you have a quick peak at San Francisco or New York you can grab a 360 degree view of along any street, at any point, at ground level. You can even see the building where Currin meets a significant US business magazine on Wednesday.

Pub time.

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Two days before my 22nd birthday I’ve managed to secure my place on the road. I’ve passed my driving test.

This has been priority number one for nearly a year. Ever since finishing uni I’ve been meaning to accomplish it, but things keep on getting in the way, most specifically travelling and the DVLA who have a habit of cancelling on me.

It means those two little red plates can be well and truly lodged in the hands of sister two.

Also of note, Facebook has launched it’s new developer platform which has little interest value to me (in fact I’m a little scared of the possibilities – are we all going to hate it as much as MySpace by the end of the year?), except that there is a great little Flickr app which I am thoroughly enjoying. Flickr & Facebook is the sort of union that makes you warm inside, much like when Posh married Becks.

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Probably the biggest coup that I made on my recent trip abroad was to overcome one of my nastier habits; biting my nails.

Six weeks on, I now have longer nails than most of the large cats that you might see on a safari. Well, not strictly true, but it is nice to be able to open a can of Pepsi for the first time in my life without having to get out my house keys.

I don’t know why I couldn’t stop it before, but I’m glad I have.

Is It Friday? Yes it is .

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