Meeting Mr or Miss Right isn’t easy. Silly little details – shyness, extreme body odour, dressing like a security guard from Star Trek or carrying bits of your murdered ex-partner around with you in a bin bag – often prevent people from getting to know the real you. If only they could look beyond that and see your sparkling personality! Thanks to online dating, they can.

Online dating is easy: just sign up and then lie, lie, lie. You may spend your days watching Star Trek re-runs and pretending to be Captain Kirk while stuffing your face with Wotsits, but online you’ll say you love long romantic walks, trips to the theatre and teaching cats to play the banjo. Inches – and in some cases, several feet – are magically added to your height, multiple zeroes appear on the end of your salary, and your occupation becomes the job you’d like to do rather than the one you actually do.

And none of this matters, because the people you meet are all lying too – but one thing you can’t really fake is your personality, and that really is something special. Before long you’re chatting with someone who seems to be a soulmate – smart, funny, available, and as interested in you as you are in them. So why not meet?

And you do, and that’s when the wheels fall off the love bus. They’re shy. They’re wearing a red Lycra jumper. There’s a definite whiff of cheese. And they’re carrying something in a bin bag.

[Originally published in Official Windows Vista magazine. Their budget didn’t stretch to the real Guy Browning, heh]

As promised, here’s some quick footage from the Sanyo camcorder I was banging on about. The embedded version is standard definition, but you can view it in HD by clicking through to the Vimeo site.

Quick example of video from the Sanyo Xacti HD-1000 from Gary Marshall on Vimeo.

BSI British Standards has published a draft of the forthcoming BS 8878 standard on its website, and it’s keen to hear from interested parties. From the press release:

Julie Howell, Chair of the committee responsible for drafting DPC BS 8878, commented, “Once published, this standard will be a fantastic tool for organizations wishing to understand their responsibilities in enabling disabled people to use web content.  DPC BS 8878 encourages the enhancement of the overall user experience – a much more holistic approach than we have seen previously and one that I hope will yield exciting results.  Right now we want to encourage as many people as possible to read and comment on the draft standard to ensure it is as relevant as possible.”

I interviewed Julie last week, and she means it when she says she wants lots of input from interested parties – not just disabled Internet users, but anybody with an interest in accessibility. The consultation period ends on 31 January.

Rupert Murdoch’s biographer Michael Wolff reckons MySpace could soon be worth absolutely nothing. Why? Because everybody on it is a “cretin”.

if you’re on MySpace now, you’re a [expletive] cretin. And you’re not only a [expletive] cretin, but you’re poor. Nobody who has beyond an 8th grade level of education is on MySpace. It is for backwards people.

“Hi, I’m Steve Jobs – and I’m bargain crazy!” Doesn’t work, does it? Anyway, the UK Apple Store’s one-day event is on, and there’s the odd discount – a fiver off an iPod, thirty quid off an iMac, sixty quid off a MacBook and a free horse.

I’m lying about the horse.

According to the latest bunch of government statistics, 94.1% of Brits connect to the internet via broadband – and the percentage of dial-up modem users has dropped below 5%. That means to all intents and purposes, dial-up is dead. Which in some respects is a shame.

Don’t get me wrong. Dial-up was desperately slow, horrifically expensive and hopelessly unreliable, and today’s net users would be flabbergasted by our excitement when modems went from 14.4kbps to 28.8, and then upwards to the dizzy peaks of 56kbps – so photos of naked people loaded almost immediately, and you could download an MP3 in about a week.

Of course, broadband is miles better. But there’s one thing missing.

Broadband doesn’t boing.

I loved the crackles and boings as my modem laboriously dialled my ISP, negotiated a connection and finally shut up. It was the equivalent of the HBO “waaaah” at the start of The Wire, or the “Previously” intro to NYPD Blue: a sound that told you something interesting was going to happen. And no matter how many times you went online and nothing interesting happened whatsoever, the boings never stopped having that effect.

For all its joys, broadband is just there, like a light switch. Dial-up was an adventure.

My old Powerbook is knackered – six keys no longer working, and I suspect the culprit may be baby food – so I’ve dragged out my arthritic Acer Aspire, which “runs” Vista. It’s basically a desperately underpowered laptop that struggles to get out of bed, let alone actually do anything. So hurrah for Google Chrome, which runs beautifully on it.

Chrome isn’t perfect – it still isn’t extensible, and there’s an issue with Hotmail where you can read but not write emails – but it’s still a cracking wee browser. I’d definitely recommend it for everyday browsing on underpowered Windows kit.