2003 was the year I spent moderating at PS. I was flattered to be chosen and thought I did reasonably well. I wasn’t afraid to get my hands dirty (not that there is much dirt but when things need doing and you know there might be a reaction it still takes a certain steel to come out and say it) and I felt I contributed good ideas to the site. At least one of the people I nominated to join the staff is still on the team so I must’ve had some good judgement. It ended very suddenly and with a fair amount of fall out. I’ve only recently discovered the truth about what happened behind the scenes. There is nothing anyone wrote which couldn’t have been sorted out with a quiet word or suggestion. But there must’ve been plenty that wasn’t said as no one seemed to stick up for me and so I was informed I was no longer needed when I found my access had been revoked over night.

But if they did me wrong then I’ve done them wrong too. I have strange episodes – sometimes they result in an overdose, sometimes in bleeding limbs and sometimes I say things I really shouldn’t or which aren’t actually true no matter how true they may appear in my confused brain. If you think this makes me unsuited to the job by default, I would take issue with you. I’m old school – whatever you say in private, you defend your chaps in public. A Yes Minister quote but true enough for this.

2003 was when I gave in to my cravings and bought a Mac. Windows XP hadn’t sated my appetite for something new and exciting and so, in April, I joined the worshipers of OSX. The first thing you notice is that @ is in the wrong place on a Mac keyboard. It just is – the " and the @ are swapped. Why? Why would anyone mess without minds like that? It is wrong. Period. The second thing to notice is that OSX is in many ways much better than Windows. Once you get your head round things like disc images (DMG files) and only having one mouse button and there not being a start menu.

The day I got my Mac was a strange one. The night before I started being ill. Rather strangely, I was so curious to know what made me ill that I repeated everything I’d done over subsequent days and worked out exactly what had upset my innards. So I was being unwell pretty much every hour on the hour over a fraught night and so was up around six and resigned to pottering about until a shiny Apple van arrived to deliver my new friend. The shiny Apple van turned out to be a thoroughly grotty, rusty, dirty white van of the kind which annoys damn near everyone. A menace. Shouldn’t be allowed on the road. Et cetera. But it had my Mac inside and I’m a forgiving soul. Medical science has yet to explain it but I wasn’t unwell again after it arrived. So an Apple Mac is officially a cure for an upset stomach.

It is vaguely topical, though more by luck than design, that Apple should launch Safari for Windows this week. During my Mac time, one of the things I would rave to people about was how much better Safari was compared with Internet Explorer. By which I mean the PC version of IE rather than the appalling, antiquated, wretched, ugly, eye straining IE which Microsoft have dumped on the Mac. Safari was swift, elegant, tabbed, well organised and lovely. And now I have a chance to go back to using it on this PC… but I don’t think I will. Firefox has superseded it and which the basic browser in Safari is more than a match, it doesn’t have the add-ins. The extensions as they used to be. I can’t surf without Ad-Block. I would get exposed to all sorts of detritus from the seedier end of capitalism.

I think my Mac counts as my most expensive whim ever. I spent two months using it at the end of 2006 when my PC died and it is still fundamentally a good machine with a good operating system. But Macs feel a bit underpowered, the gimmicks get a bit tiresome after a while, there isn’t anything like the range of software (especially freeware) available and there was too much about the PC which I missed. I tried to be a Mac convert but ultimately I failed. That isn’t to say I don’t have my eye on a Mac Mini when OSX – Leopard launches at the end of the year. I could have a new PC and a new Mac and switch between the two having just the one keyboard, screen and mouse. That would set me amongst the gods.

There were three early websites before the big one was birthed. The first was an MSN group we created after a repeat run of The Day Today. M’self and m’colleague fancied ourselves as Morrises for the e-age and set about writing informative, educational and almost certainly untrue things about the world. The first – an MSN group – sadly no longer exists. They used to email me every 90 days asking if I wanted to keep it (I did because I’m a hoarder on- and off-line) but they must’ve stopped. The second was done using Freeserve templates and was restricted to eight pages. Yes – eight. I think both of those were products of 2002. They were steps along the road which lead to the first "proper" site – Private Eye of Harmony. This was my first effort at actual HTML. It was a valuable learning ground – I learned how to do a whole bunch of stuff which was completely unusable and non-intuitive and which I’ve never attempted to replicate on the new site. It also uses frames which aren’t the best idea in the world. But it was a fun site to do and gave a first home to two of the corner stones (some say stalwarts) of the Vervoid – Dennis Brent and the episode guide.

When, in October 2003, I decided to do a website for real, it was supposed to be not much more than a home for the episode guide – now christened "The Matrix 2.0 (beta)". I didn’t know what else I wanted the site to be about and, nearly four years on, I don’t think the site is about anything in particular. It has an indefinable mix which seems to work. It is loose enough that anyone with a burning desire to write about anything can find a home here but tight enough that it doesn’t all fall apart at the seems.

So 2003 was a year of major changes, some of which are still felt today. In the real world I was made redundant, met someone I got along with terribly well but who decided in the end that she didn’t want a long-distance thing and fell into a new job which eventually became the vaguely defined role that keeps me busy today.