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One of the things I love the most about the internet is its ability to connect you to like minded people. Having the internet means I can reach out to people who are as weird as I am wherever they might be in the world! Granted it’s given the crazies a platform to join together in the most disheartening and shocking ways, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I am thinking more of the times where you have a question that no one else can answer. For instance I have a health concern and I wonder if I’m normal or dying from the world’s rarest condition. Or those times I’m playing the name game with the family and my brother in law insists that Bujumburistan is a country and the rest of us just can’t be sure! Or you hear a snippet of a song on an advert and you really want to buy it on iTunes and no one seems to know it. The internet gives me the assurance that someone out there in the world has had the same thoughts and I sigh knowing that I am not alone. It is the greatest human condition isn’t it, wanting to know that you’re normal and that you belong. Sir Tim Berners-Lee (OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA no less!!), the inventor of the World Wide Web, knew this all too well and has been the saving grace for weirdoes across the world. Thank you TimBL!

About a year ago I discovered that I have a condition related to the eating of raw carrots. My nieces will tell you that I love nothing more than to munch on a carrot and gulp down an ice-cold glass of water before bed. Don’t judge me; we all have bedtime rituals, right? I discovered however that after partaking in this daily ritual I would have hiccups. Not just hiccups, but serious rib rattling, chest crunching hiccups. I’m pretty sure they resemble what a heart attack must feel like! So these hiccups happened every single night and it took a while for me to figure out that this only happened after the carrots. As any good investigator would do, I tested my reaction to eating raw carrots. I ate carrots at different times of the day, I tried different size carrots, and I ate carrots standing up, sitting down and laying down. I tried carrot batons, carrot rings and whole carrots. The hiccups persisted. I told my husband about my condition and he had this look on his face, he often has this look. The look that says, ‘Really Penny?’. So I decided that I’d go to my old friend WWW. And dear friends you’ll be happy to know (or at least I was!) that I am not alone in the world. I simply typed the words HICCUPS AFTER EATING CARROTS into my search engine and there it was! Pages and pages of people like me. Try it! I have even joined the support group, I and thousands of other people have this certified medical condition. Check out our support group, it’s hilarious.

 http://www.sundrip.com/journal/2007/05/09/hiccups-and-carrots-support-group/

 The internet has also led to the rise and rise of social networking platforms. Never has there been more personal information voluntarily broadcast onto a more public forum. It again goes to that need to feel connected, I guess. It’s probably the reason why I blog. But what happens to my thoughts and tired old jokes when I die?  A weird thought right? But by now we know I have issues! I ask because a few years ago, a close friend of mine died.  I couldn’t bring myself to ‘unfriend’ him and yet he was gone. I went back to his Facebook profile a couple of times and realised that I wasn’t alone in this as a few of his friends had occasionally posted something on his wall, sometimes a message saying how much they missed him and sometimes someone expressing their shock at hearing of his passing. It got me thinking, what happens to your life on the internet when you pass away? I came across an article in the Mail&Guardian a few months ago exploring just that and I realised, I’m not that weird after all. So if you love the internet and have loads of stuff out there and are crazy enough to wonder about what will happen to it all after you’re dead, check this article out at

http://mg.co.za/article/2012-05-10-digital-death-planning-for-dummies

And when you’re done let’s explore this a little more. Do you care about what will happen to your personal information when you’re gone? And what special things has the internet helped you to find??