Today (March 26th) is Epilepsy Awareness Day.  So are you aware of epilepsy?  Probably.  It's unlikely you're aware of mine, though, and for years I wasn't either.  I have simple and complex partial temporal lobe epilepsy: it's non-convulsive, meaning I don't do any of that falling-down shaky stuff that makes old people get itchy with spoons (don't do that, by the way.  No spoons.  Spoons break teeth. Here's what you should really do if someone's having a convulsive epileptic seizure).  In fact, I haven't even seen the frothing-at-the-mouth thing people tend to go on about.  I have the type of epilepsy they reckon Joan of Arc had - the type people have tended to interpret as religious visions.  They're not, of course.  But I wasn't diagnosed until I was 22, which meant that - because of not being aware of epilepsy - I had two options available to me.

Option 1: I was chosen by some higher power and should begin interpreting my out-of-body experiences (starting with strong feelings of deja vu, passing into visions and a wave of emotions, and then onto feeling like lightly toasted death for an hour or so) as visitations by God.

I was raised as a Christian (both Anglican and Catholic, but that's another story), but the idea that I, Helen Nina Elizabeth Purves, of Louth (Lincolnshire) had been hand-picked by Almighty God in order to relate His Message to the masses seemed far-fetched even to an extremely imaginative pre-teen like me.  As a result I decided to become an atheist, which leads me to my only other option at the time.

Option 2: I was insane, and should never tell anyone about what I was experiencing for fear they would shut me up in a lunatic asylum.  This, regrettably, was the option I went for.  I suspect that if I'd been gullible/cynical enough to plump for Option 1 I'd be significantly better off by now.  The market for human God-conduits is still pretty lucrative by all accounts.

As I result I hung on to my visions, deja-vus and heavy downers for years, terrified by the idea I'd be found out and end up being institutionalised.  Unfortunately this was a genuine option for non-convulsive epileptics right up until the end of the last century (in some countries, epileptic people were not even permitted to marry), and many older people are still suffering from years of invasive treatment and padded cells.  Like me, doctors and psychologists were not always fully aware of epilepsy.  I was counselled for depression, but even then I was too terrified to tell my therapists the real reason for my heavy downers: that I was sticking my head into another dimension.

Eventually, though, I chose a moment to cross a line.  At 22, after handing in in my 20,000 word dissertation and radio documentary to Nottingham Trent for assessment in the knowledge I was almost certainly guaranteed to get a good mark for my Masters in Radio Journalism, I decided I'd achieved enough in my life that I'd have good times to reflect upon when in my padded cell.  I took myself off to my doctors, wrists ready-moisturised, to get myself cuffed and hauled away.  I genuinely believed I would be taken straight to an institution in a straitjacket.

Of course I wasn't, because if I had been it's extremely unlikely I'd be writing this.  Luckily for me Nottingham is the best place to be for people with epilepsy (the hospital there actually developed the MRI scanner): my doctor immediately referred me to Queens Medical Centre where I was and still am seen by my fantastic neuro Dr O'Donoghue.  I went through the tests within the space of a month, started medication almost immediately and my epilepsy awareness went through the roof.

For example, did you know that St. Valentine is actually the patron saint of epilepsy? February used to be real downer for me before I knew that (I'm chronically and notorious single).  This year I even baked and iced an enormous cake, and moaned on about epilepsy to everyone who came and ate it.  Epilepsy: a brilliant excuse for cake.  I even dyed the icing purple (the colour used by epilepsy charities), put Joan of Arc's flames up the sides and included oodles of buttercream and popping candy for the ultimate crazy epileptic sugar high.

To be perfectly honest, it sucks having epilepsy - it really does, and in so many ways that I could write an article a week for a year and still not cover it.  However, it can also be quite funny.  I have dozens of stories about things I have said or done when in the grip of complex partial seizures: during these I remain able to walk, talk and use my mobile phone, albeit extremely erratically, and have a tendency to go shopping.  Once it was 34 pints of milk, another time one of every colour and brand of washing up liquid in Tesco (aside from yellow - I would never buy yellow washing up liquid, even under the grip of an epileptic seizure).  Recently I have had a tendency to veer towards pickled onion Monster Munch - the image at the top is a photo I took during my last complex partial.  The accompanying text message, sent to my mate Agnes Guano (he of The Downstairs Lounge), read "Kj vghhhrdftgxffgrwffgg monst ker munches dghvtggf ets etted".

I hope you're more aware of epilepsy now.  Probably not: but if you see a tall girl with purple hair and glasses bulk-buying Monster Munch in Tesco whilst mumbling about tramps (example text message: "Tramp sit touch hit bite smell") please do make sure I don't walk in front of traffic.  Ta muchly.

So why exactly are people getting so irritated about it?  Apple fanboy-ism is generally a joke because an almost religious fervour is applied to design principles and (disputed) technological advantages over Windows machines.  I'm no Windows apologist, but I'd say this usually means people are prepared to lay out far more money than is reasonable  on a machine they are unlikely to exploit as fully as it is designed to be exploited.  I feel this can best be summed up by the following amusing viral video of a frog.

Good video, right?  Yeah.  I watched it twice.  But the first time I saw that video, I was sitting on a tram: I plugged myself into my iPhone (yes, I have my own collection of Apple tech) to divert myself from an incredibly dull conversation two nearby geeks were having about what the pixel count was likely to be on the new iPad.  As I watched the frog blindly attacking imaginary ants, I wondered to myself whether the frog had considered how many pixels were on the screen of his/her owner's iPhone.  Perhaps the reason it turned so violently on its owner was not down to its disillusionment at the imaginary nature of the ants it wanted to eat, but in retribution for being forced to play its favourite game on an inferior device.  True, that's obviously at least an iPhone 4, but perhaps it was expecting a 4S?

No.  That is of course a ludicrous scenario.  Frogs are 99% unlikely to understand the difference between an iPhone 4 and an iPhone 4S - and besides, Froggish isn't listed in the languages officially supported by Siri.  What with Siri being the only discernible difference between the two devices, that's unlikely to be what's annoying the frog.  Probably the frog is just hungry.  However, were the frog in that 1% I have left open for the possibility of improbably technologically-advanced reptiles, I don't think it would be fussy about Siri either: because Siri is just software.

I can't illustrate the point I want to press any further without boring myself (and probably you, too) into endless and merciful sleep, so I'm going to delve way back into my personal internet history yet again in the hope that if I can build my argument into personal experiences that happened so long ago nobody can dispute them, I might win.  Let's see if it works.

When I was a child, my mother's father was massively into electronic typewriters, multi-use fax machines/phones and other frankly pointless gizmos.  In fact, he bought one of the first Palm Pilots.  I still have it: lord knows where it is, but I did just manage to find the collapsible keyboard which is a thing of beauty.  Here, marvel at its beauty.

For me, it's like looking at an ancient arrowhead lost in the mud of a forgotten cave.  In reality, it's a bit of obsolete tech in a box full of tat in my spare room.  Each to their own.

Anyway, Grampa eventually ended up giving me this old tat, item after item, because as awesome as it was he never ended up using it.  When I got it, I'd play with it for a while - you know, input stock figures, write a to do list, write "55378008" in the calculator - then get bored and shove it in a drawer.  Palm Pilots were not designed for little children: there was nothing I could use it for.

In stark contrast, when my father got his first computer (it is impossible to date this event because (a) it feels like I've always had access to a computer and (b) my father doesn't relish being woken up in the middle of the night) my brother and I were on it like a shot.  Not because of the clicky sound it made when reading floppy disks or whatever it was that came before floppy disks, nor the exciting knowledge we were little children allowed to play on what we knew was a Grownup Thing.  What I liked was that I could play a game called Magic Maths (a very, very early text-based game I've found impossible to trace), and my maths would get better.  I don't remember that first computer: I don't remember how old I was when we got it, how much memory it could hold, what operating system it used (although I do remember it only had green text on a black screen) or anything else, but I do remember Magic Maths.  When we upgraded to a newer machine, I was allowed to hang on to the last one simply because I loved playing Magic Maths.  It wasn't about the computer, it was what I could do with it.

Fast forward to now, and I'm still the same: I don't think anyone else is different, either. A while ago I went to the launch of the new Salford University buildings at MediaCityUK, and while the work on display was impressive I have to admit I spent more time watching visitors to the open day play with the big multi-touch tables - provided, I believe, by Microsoft (you can check out how Manchester's using this technology on the Microsoft Surface website).

It's impressive technology, but when people approached it their instinct was not to marvel at the screen resolution or ask nearby helpers to list the functionality provided.  Of course not.  The first thing people did - an instinct shared by children and adults alike - was to immediately touch it: to see what moved, and how, and look at the pictures and information on the screen.  Children wanted to play games, adults wanted to see pictures and both wanted to generally marvel as stuff whooshed across the screen.  I watched for over half an hour and during that time not one man, woman or child started discussing the limitations of the operating system or the upcoming patch Microsoft was going to release to fix blah blah blah.  I can assure you that, working and socialising with the delightful geeks that I do, I have met plenty of people who would happily bore on about such things for hours.  However, the people experiencing Surface for the first time were not my colleagues: they were ordinary people.  The kind of people who simply use technology, as opposed to the tiny percentage of people who make it, or write about it, or read about it on Gizmodo.  These people were not interested in the details of how the tables worked - they were far more interested in could be done with them.

This is why I, like so many others, am increasingly sick of pointless hardware releases which include negligible improvements.  I got my first iPhone because it could do things my O2 XDA couldn't: it had better games, it could play my music, and it came with the possibility to expand with an ever-growing library of free and cheap apps.  My iPhone 4 is smaller, has a second camera, free messaging to other iPhones on a 3G connection and a very noticeable retina display.  Not a life-changing offering, but my contract was up so I switched.  But the 4S - well, it just mostly has Siri.  So basically, in terms of what your average user sees, progress is actually slowing down.

A similar thing appears to happening with iPads.  The first was revolutionary; the second had useful improvements, and the third... well, it's a bit better.  If you know what you're looking for.  Which it appears even Gizmodo staff don't (that link again).  You can still do the same things with an iPad 3 that you can with a first-gen iPad: play games, watch videos, get the internet, look rich.  Sure, it has a camera, but so does the iPad 2.  Sure, it has more pixels, but - well, you can still see stuff on it.  I'm getting bored with this now.  Reeling off iPad specs is like writing about expensive cars: great, they'll go up to 200mph, but where on earth can you legally drive at that speed?  And how long can you safely bore on about it at parties before people start making assumptions about the size of your manhood?

So, I don't care which iPad you have.  All I know is, you have one and I don't.  Good for you.

The last guy?  His accent was infinitely better. A DJ, from Detroit no less, and this time we turned it around: we did things back to front, as it were.  We met in a nightclub a few weeks ago, and since then we've become engaged.

Got a dirty mind?  Clean it.  This is all about the internet: because in my life, nearly everything is about the internet.

Back to the beginning.  My whole experience of the world changed as early as 1998, when my father got an AOL CD in the post.  It wasn't long afterwards that he got a second phone line, as I discovered Tripod, Geocities
and then, for two beautiful years, Napster.

In sixth form, I met a group of nerd-boys who showed me how to code my own websites using various free hosting and domain registration services.  I learned the web as it evolved: I coded frames, and then tables - and when the older ones inevitably left to study maths and science at Cambridge, they helpfully continued to teach me the beginnings of CSS over instant messaging service ICQ. One of them was friends with Ewan, and brought him to my parents' legendary summer party after we clicked through our shared love of heavy metal (oh, the shame).  At the party, we distinctly un-clicked, and I thought that would be that.

Of course, the world is a different place now.  Some of my oldest friends are now people I have come to know via the internet - and most of my newest friends too, through Twitter.  It's strange to think how lonely I would have felt, moving to Manchester, without the knowledge that I could occasionally go and impose myself upon Mof Gimmers and chums.

It was during one of these impositions that my beady eyes first alighted upon my new internet fiance, DJ Meph.  Those of you wishing to stalk him can do so at djmeph.net.  We spoke fairly briefly - just enough for me to work out he was worth following on Twitter.  The rest is history: in short, we are both epic trolls and have hoaxed our friends abominally.

Props to Daniel Pass for setting us up on Leap Day: I proposed while my prey was asleep, and when he awoke to find a stream of tweets about chloroform and canapes he was moved to make it Facebook Official.  I logged on that night, accepted his friend request and was immediately met with a maelstrom of congratulations on my new relationship status as it dawned upon me that I'd finally met someone as mischievous as myself.

His many friends were lured into dozens of comments, but mine (alas) are more experienced in the Ways of Helen.  I fended off streams of text messages with a standard reply, and sat back waiting for the news to spread to my mother.

During this deliciously agonising period I had time to reflect, as I have many times before, on the way we all of us rely so completely upon technology which as children we could never have dreamed of.  I remember the wonder my little brother and I experienced when rescued from a car crash by a business man with a gigantic car phone: nobody imagined that twenty years later I'd be casually using its great, great, great grandphone to announce my digital relationship to a man I was communicating with through a third cousin of the computerised typewriters the legal secretaries at my dad's office were using to type up conveyancing documents.

It's an interesting thought, and not one which can be covered in just one blog post.  It would be like trying to summarise my whole life in one ANSI-formatted TXT file opened in MS Notepad (which is, as it happens, what I am currently typing this into - old habits die hard).  But just imagine: if technology has changed so much about the way we live and communicate now, what will the world look like for our children?

Luckily for DJ Meph, internet babies have yet to be invented: but it can only be a matter of time.  The world saw its first internet marriage way back in 1996, and let's face it, stranger things really have happened: it's just that now they have, they're no longer strange...

While we all ponder this incredibly profound thought (and while DJ Meph gets his legal team together to pen the first official restraining order of what I'm sure will be a long and beautiful relationship) I'll leave you with the bloody awful song all of us have had nagging away at our brains since you read the title of this blog post.  Sorry for that, by the way.

How did I do it? Through Weight Watchers (specifically, the Weight Watchers iPhone app), and I don't need paying to evangelise about their plan. I would happily recommend them to anyone: I won't bother going into details as you can find out more about the Pro Points diet on their website, but it's been the easiest thing I've ever done.

I still have a couple of stones to lose, but I've already learned so many difficult lessons. All we're ever given is the positive spin on weight loss: TV programmes, adverts, books, and websites all give you this massive spiel about how you'll look and feel so much better. Well, you might: but there are down-sides too, and ones that you won't find many people being honest enough to talk about.

When I started experiencing the darker side of intense weight loss, I had nowhere to turn: nobody I know or even know of has ever lost so much weight as me. Celebrities, sure, and vlogging Americans who've had gastric bands fitted, but that's not the same as the experience of just finding a healthy diet and sticking to it. Even the brilliant Weight Watchers forum doesn't touch upon the darker side of things - on the whole, people just don't like to admit they have problems (although since asking for similar stories to mine on the forums there, I've been shown some very insightful blog posts from members).

Note: please don't let this put you off losing weight, if you're in the process of trying to do so or considering starting a new diet. Losing weight is awesome. I will live much, much longer now, and once everything's settled down I expect my quality of life to be amazing. Believe the hype: losing weight is the best thing you can possibly do. But I'm an incurably honest person, and I think somebody needs to at least touch on this subject. So, for people out there starting the same journey I've undertaken, here are some of the most difficult lessons I've learned along the way.

For the first few months, you'll feel really bad about yourself
I'd never dieted before, but I imagine this is the main reason people give up before they get very far. When you start a diet (although I'm not really sure I can think of Weight Watchers as a diet any more - more of a gradual lifestyle change) you have to immediately cut down on the amount of food you eat - and although it feels great to know you're making positive changes, you can often start to feel really guilty about the recent past.

I started obsessing about how much food I used to eat, and nearly ended up comfort-eating a few times - which would have been deadly, as it probably would have started a dreadfully upsetting downwards spiral. Luckily I didn't feel there was much hanging on my weight loss - I didn't pressure myself, and I'd never lost weight before so was delighted and almost overwhelmingly incredulous when it started to work. Also, Weight Watchers cuts your food intake very gradually, so at first I could eat quite a lot.

There isn't a deadline
Rather naively, I used to think that I'd lose all eight stone and THEN everything would be different. WRONG. It creeps up on you slowly: after six stones, my life is already very different. All those things you think will happen after your weight loss actually start happening much earlier, as you constantly change shape. You don't have to have a BMI of between 18-25 to notice changes to your life, or for things to get better for you. In fact, it's easier to deal with: can you imagine the shock of suddenly waking up looking perfect? It's been hard enough dealing with the stuff below over the course of a full year, never mind overnight!

None of your favourite clothes will fit you
I love clothes. Not fashion, but just clothes in general. I've always been fat, so during my life I've found ways of getting hold of the most amazing outfits to fit and flatter my shape. A special Calvin Klein dress from a sale at Bloomingdale's in New York, an amazing denim skirt from Pink Marzipan, great cocktail dresses I had tailored to fit me from Monsoon (it's amazing what tailors can do with dresses which have generous linings). I've had to throw all of these away, and it was actually quite emotional - not to mention expensive, because I've been through several wardrobes now. But it's better to get rid of clothes that are too large - if you're doing things right, you'll be certain that you'll never be able to wear them again.

Your body shape will completely change
On a related note: what flatters me now is completely different. I never used to be able to wear wrap tops because they drew attention to my podgy waist: I'm not entirely able to pull them off now, but my trusty old waterfall cardis just utterly swamp my increasingly hourglass figure. This wasn't a shape I expected to be, as I've never been even close to slim before. But now I have curves, I'm having to reassess how I think when I'm choosing clothes.

You will get cold
Very cold. And not just in cold weather - last summer my thinner, lighter friends boggled as I wore a coat and scarf even on the hottest days of the year. I miss my fat-blanket. I used to have an amazing personal thermostat: never too hot in the summer, and always warm enough in the winter. Now I'm almost constantly cold - especially my hands and feet. When you lose weight naturally, you do of course lose it from all over your body - the first new clothes you buy will probably be jumpers.

Weird skin
Without veering into TMI territory, things will be difficult with your skin for a while. Skin on my face has cleared up - way less spots, which is just awesome - but for a while, skin elsewhere was not looking so good. Moisturise as much as you can - I use Bio Oil (supposedly for pregnant women/stretch marks) which you can get on Amazon but it's expensive and actually I reckon just about any good moisturiser would do the trick.

Food won't be there to comfort you any more
Food used to be my emotional go-to. Bad day at work? Monster Munch. Fallen out with a mate? Kit Kats. Argument with mother? Massive takeaway pizza. The list goes on. However, I genuinely think about food differently now - it's there to taste nice, but comfort has to come from somewhere else. My very supportive best friend Ruth has been instrumental in this, but you can't rest your whole emotional being in one person's hands - that's not fair. What's more, weight loss is an emotional roller coaster: because this next one is a biggie.

People will treat you incredibly differently
Here's where I come off as arrogant, but I can take that because this is the single most difficult thing I've had to face, and it's not something I imagine people who haven't gone through this experience will understand. This continues to upset me greatly, but everyone - friends and family as well as complete strangers - has started acting differently towards me. The old cliché about thin people being popular is not without truth.

I get really angry about this, but I don't think people can help it. Mostly it's people I pass in the street - instead of looking past me, men will often look at me: down, and then up. I occasionally get chatted up by guys in bars now, and previously-lesser spotted female friends are far more likely to start inviting me to nights out, dance classes, yoga etc.

This is supposed to be good, right? Well, no. It's actually quite intimidating if you haven't faced it before. I find it very scary: when I used to attract anyone, it often would be slightly strange, quiet, shy men. Now I'm actually starting to get noticed by the type of guy I prefer - more assertive, manly men. It's awesome, but it's taking a while to get used to.

I was also unconsciously used to people assuming I'd be a shy, insular, rather dull individual and developed a buoyant, cynical personality to try and combat this effect - so I've noticed my personality has started to adapt ever so slightly. I feel way more relaxed and less stressed, and it's weird.

Last but not least: medication
As you may or may not know, I have non-convulsive temporal lobe epilepsy. For god's sake, before you lose weight, go and see your GP! As I lost more and more of my body weight, I started finding myself becoming sluggish, incoherent and forgetful. I didn't work it out for weeks, but then I realised that due to my weight loss I was effectively overdosing on anti-epileptic drugs. This is seriously not cool, but to be fair to myself I really did lose weight almost by accident.

As I said earlier, it's been great - but I really wish more people would speak out about the down sides, if only to help those who are having a tough time. If you have blogged, vlogged or podcasted about this or have more useful links then comment below.

Useful links:
Weight Watchers: http://www.weightwatchers.co.uk
BBC Health BMI Calculator: http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/tools/bmi_calculator/bmi.shtml
NHS Live Well: Lose weight: http://www.nhs.uk/livewell/loseweight/Pages/Loseweighthome.aspx

The picture above was probably taken in the 1940s, but I remember her looking more regal: something more like this next picture (even though this is a publicity photo taken in her Guernsey home in 1974, before I was born).

My lasting memory of her is of visiting a grandiose house in Guernsey as a small child and being greeted by a batty old lady ferociously wielding a poker, with my mother screaming "Quick! Children, run upstairs!". She was later brought back to a nursing home in rural Lincolnshire and died some time in the 1990s. Until I opened the suitcase, I knew very little about her: now I am absolutely fascinated.

Granny Baba was born in New Zealand, either as Lorraine Lynch or Lorraine Peacock depending who you ask: after her father died, her mother remarried and gave her baby daughter her new husband's name (or Lorraine took the name later on - she certainly never thought of it beyond her childhood). She left New Zealand with her mother to study a degree in Home Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where she appears to have studied Russian for a whole semester simply in order to seduce a Russian student.

After this she and her mother went on a cruise where she met and and married a man named Rex Maiden - but not for long. She left her very young daughter, having decided the ordeal of childbirth was far too gruesome to undergo a second time, and went off on what appears from her very well-stamped passport to be an extensive world tour. She wrote and performed very well-received popular piano music, small plays and newspaper articles in Australia. Whilst in Australia she met her second husband, a young sailor called Tim Timewell, divorcing Rex: a controversial move, given that it was 1929 and her child, my grandmother, was just 18 months old.

Her work in Australia was successful enough that when war broke out she was selected to sell war bonds with people like Marlene Dietrich to Americans when World War 2 broke out. She spoke to groups of woman from all over the USA and received a great deal of gushing fan mail as a result, all of which she kept.

By the time WW2 ended, Lorraine was living in London accompanying Jack Warner, a well-known entertainer, on piano, and writing songs for impresario Charles Cochran. By this time her second husband was a member of General Electric, involved in selling domestic appliances. She sent for her daughter to live with her in London, and eventually retired with her husband to Guernsey. She had high standards: she would only buy her clothes from boutiques in London, flew to England when she needed medical treatment, would spend each summer in the best rooms of favourite hotels and continued to travel the world right into old age.

However, the thing I was most interested to find out was that Lorraine was a writer. And, more than that: in her clippings, alongside a great many lifestyle pieces about flower arranging and dinner party menus and music and well-written but frankly boring lifestyle pieces aimed at housewives, there were pieces written by someone called "Edward Lorraine". It doesn't take a genious to work out whose nom de plume that was.

And what did she write about? She wrote about modern technology - here's the end of a feature piece she wrote about the emerging importance of designers in the years directly after WW2. It seems amazing to us now, in our age of obsession with the design of ordinary objects, that such a thing was not thought of whatsoever even as recently as the late 1940s.

My favourite part of this particular article is where she describes a prototype of the modern black cab.

The cab has a new type of indicator, housed on the roof, which shows at a distance whether the cab is for hire or not, and it is well illuminated for night driving. The interior seems more spacious than the old type... the driver's seat moved forward so that he sits alongside rather than behind the engine. Tip-up seats have been replaced by a cushioned seat running the full width of the body... Sliding doors give easy exit and entrance without causing inconvenience to passers-by on crowded pavements.

So there we have it - an extremely modern woman caught in a bygone age. My favourite part of this discovery is that women were writing design and technology journalism pieces right back in the 1940s - albeit with a nom de plume. I have always known that journalism runs in my family - Purveses are notorious writers - but I'm rather proud to discover that both sides of my family have had a bash at it.

And with that, I leave you with one last picture of my excellent great granny: Lorraine Lynch, or Peacock, or Maiden, or Timewell, or even Edward Lorraine - but to me, Granny Baba.

Approximately 100 million billion people are already filming their days and putting them on YouTube, but thankfully Britain in a Day is looking for something slightly more inventive than just whining into a video camera about how you like cats and messed up your fake tan and how hard it is being ginger.

I'm definitely going to be taking part and will post my video up here after I've made it. I really hope this goes viral - it's a really interesting project that's bound to appeal especially to existing vloggers. I also like the idea of capturing a day in the life of the general public - what does Britain really get up to on its Saturdays? There are bound to be some pretty interesting videos.

Here's the Britain in a Day YouTube channel, complete with a timer and help videos etc. I particularly like the video about planning, featuring Dan Snow, because as everyone knows, Big Dan is pretty epic.

*EDIT* - here you are. I was only able to create a rough-cut in the end, and missed out a whole load of boring stuff I did like making rocky road and soap and bunting and stuff. I have literally no idea why I bothered to do that stuff. Oh well.

I've always had a bit of a thing for fortune cookies, which are (in my opinion, at least) truly the Kinder Egg of biscuits. However, they're never terribly exciting. I bought and ate a wholesale bag of them once, and I didn't even get told I'd meet a tall/dark/handsome stranger (although to be fair, I haven't. Probably because I go around eating wholesale bags of fortune cookies).

Then, a month or so ago, it occurred to me: what are we doing? Why are we letting fortune cookie writers decide our futures? Why can't we decide our own futures? This is the modern age, after all: has our society entirely run out of optimism amidst all the bad news, bad money and bad politicians which daily surround us? Why can't humanity, in the form of popular social networking website Twitter (don't know if you've heard of it) decide its own fate?

Basically, I had a worryingly optimistic moment. I promise not to do it again.

So, after much research (read: no research) I found this recipe for fortune cookies over on allrecipes.com. And doubled it. Tip 1: don't do that. Fortune cookies have to be made one at a time and moulded when molten hot. So really, don't do that.

Meanwhile, I'd set up a hashtag on Twitter - #strangefortunes - and asked my followers to suggest fortunes. The response was overwhelming, which made me feel slightly better about doubling the recipe. However, I didn't want to waste the fun fortunes on the first few cookies, which I just knew I'd ruin, so I made some Lorem Ipsum ones:

...which turned out to be a rather good idea.

Next, I mixed up some egg whites, which I will show because I'm rather proud of the snazzy whisk my friend Edward got for me.

I then added flour and blah blah blah, and (by putting them directly onto a greased baking tray and baking them ONE AT A TIME) started getting the cookies together. When they came out I have seconds to scrape them off the tray, put the fortune in, fold the cookie in half and bend it over the edge of a cup. I then put them into muffin trays ready for double baking (as they were still vaguely squidgy):

And here's what they ended up looking like:

I don't have any pictures of them being eaten, because the moment I got to work and opened the lid, WHOOSH: instantly gone. Everyone loved them - even the poor sod who got Herm Baskerville's submission (something about blood and gristle and sweetmeats: I forget). Unfortunately my favourite ("I know I'm a fortune cookie, but I can't tell you anything without a tarot pack") didn't make it: ke sera sera, I suppose.

If you have any suggestions for fortunes, leave them in the comments section - or tweet me @isntit.

I've arranged a trip to the pub to celebrate the 56th birthday of Tim Berners-Lee (and because I wanted an excuse to go to the pub with my colleagues/mates one last time before I leave London for Salford Quays), and as we're all geeks/Graham Linehan fans I thought it might be funny to take along my very own internet. When I took a black box, a car security LED and a battery to our brilliant Innovations team to check I wasn't going to break anything, I didn't expect George to be there, because he's recently retired.

A little about George Auckland, in case you don't know about him. He worked for the BBC for over 40 years - latterly in my department, BBC Learning. I feel I can safely assert that at the BBC - and particularly in all things educational at the BBC - George is legendary. Check out some of the members of his Facebook fan page - you'll notice people like Bill Thompson in there. In fact, the joke goes that although Tim Berners-Lee might have invented the world wide web, it was George who hit the Enter button.

George is a busy man. Over the years he's been involved with the original BBC Micro, set up the Beeb's first web production unit and has worked on all sorts of things - including things like Blue Peter, Bitesize, good old WebWise and - well, I can't list everything here, but he's won more awards than it's worth mentioning and far fewer than he deserves. I didn't expect George to help out, but it was jolly nice to see him.

However, I underestimated the sheer awesomeness of George Auckland. Not only did he make me my very own version of the internet, but he added a brand new function that Berners-Lee either never thought of looking for or was never brave enough to make use of when he originally kick-started the world wide web: a switch. However, times have now changed: HTML 5 and CSS 3 are increasingly popular, IE6 is finally being turned off, and the world is ready.

The default position is hibernation (i.e. usual, day-to-day running of the internet - it is of course impossible to turn the internet off without breaking it), but you can activate advanced functions such as a fully semantic web, DSL rings, cold fusion and world peace by lifting the cover and flicking the switch. At this point the red light starts flashing, to indicate that the internet is working at maximum capacity. However, it's not advisable to do this for long, as the battery wears down fairly quickly. Luckily it's replaceable, but you know, batteries can get expensive etc. and it's a bit of a faff, since they're held in with blu-tack.

Here is a picture of George switching on The Internet v2.0 for the first time this very afternoon. Please excuse the fuzziness - it was a very emotional moment:

Thanks George. I shall treasure my internet forever.

P.S. I found this very interesting talk by George on YouTube, in case you're interested in the future of learning/mobile platforms - particularly interesting given that it's from 2007.

Jay-Z: 99 Problems

In case you can't be bothered to listen to what amounts to the pinnacle of human musical achievement, Jay-Z repeatedly states that if you're having girl problems, he feels dreadfully awful about it - but not one of his 99 problems is caused by "bitches". Having consulted Urban Dictionary I have concluded that he's talking about women, not female dogs.

This upset me greatly. What are all these problems? I set out to find out. I guessed that Jay-Z himself is very busy, so I have instead written a letter to his UK agent. Here it is.

Dear Sirs,

Helen Nina Elizabeth Purves

I'll let you know when I hear back, dear readers. In the mean time, if you can think of what any of his many problems might be, do let me know. It really does concern me that one man can have so very many problems.

For me, Ray William Johnson is the most interesting person on YouTube. This is a daring statement, not least because, aside from the odd comedy song video, the man spends his time pumping out two extremely light videos a week which to all intents and purposes follow a very strict and very childish format. He's almost always in a corner of his house, with his Watchmen wallpaper behind him; he greets his followers, gives a lively commentary on between three and five popular videos, introduces the "comment question of the day" from one of his followers, then displays the answers from the week before. The video then finishes with an advert for t-shirts and a very quick clip of either out-takes or a highlight from one of the videos he's featured.

There are several key points to Ray, though, which everyone seeking to become immensely popular on YouTube could learn from.

1. Format. People watching one of Ray's videos know exactly what to expect. Ray has picked an achievable format, and then expanded on it over a considerable period of time. To showcase this I have embedded a video from July 2010 above - at the end of this article I'll embed another, more recent example. Having a format like this means that his users know what to expect from him: it also no doubt means that he gets maximum effect with minimum effort. His tools have been developed over a period of time - if he's having an off week, he can just use the graphics, sounds and general formula he already has set in place, but if he's having a good week he can try adding something new into the mix.

2. Regularity and topicality. By having a set format, Ray is able to keep on trend: he can react quickly to new memes and because he summarises them fairly and accurately his audience feels like he helps them effortlessly stay on top of the internet. He does his research, too: he tells his viewers how popular something is, how quickly it's taking off and tries to give an assessment of what the source of its popularity might be. He does the work so they don't have to. What's more, he's now so popular that he himself is a meme-maker - he can feature videos which really aren't that popular, but because he provides links in the video description he can help videos go viral. At the time he made the video above, the "Double Rainbow" video was new on the market - now it's massive, and there are t-shirts. Ray might not have been the driving force behind this phenomenon, but at around five million views per video he must have helped.

3. User engagement. By cleverly featuring his followers at the end of each video and giving them an opportunity to essentially ride off his fame by doing something relatively easy - video a few seconds of them asking an unusual question, or showing their answer (given via YouTube's comment section, or more recently, Facebook or Twitter) Ray is offering to share his popularity at a price he can easily afford. Choosing what to feature can't be a difficult or time-consuming thing to do, and users have nothing to lose by sending in comments and responses via systems they already necessarily have access to.

4. Personality. Whether or not Ray's YouTube persona is the same as his offline one is irrelevant: it's believable. To his core audience he comes across as likeable and yet cynical, and someone that users can identify with. He champions them over anyone else: and notably, he acknowledges trolling but doesn't pass judgement on it. This shows great audience awareness: he knows who his audience is, what they like, and how they might be reacting to the videos he's showing them. He keeps the tone light and interesting, and best of all succinct - and although his videos are well-planned, I very much doubt that they are scripted.

I salute you, Ray William Johnson. Controversial as you might be, you know how to be successful: and in that, we can all learn from you.