into the storm

Isn't the internet brilliant? I was sitting outside this morning having woken up at 6am, and thought that you don't see many cirrus clouds (having watched a documentary about clouds last week) so I decided to look them up on Wiki. And there it was, all the information about cirrus clouds you want. Years ago I would have had to have owned a pretty comprehensive set of encyclopedias* to find out this stuff. These days I don't own any sort of dictionaries, atlases or reference books because it's all just there. Or here, rather. Take last Saturday, I was going up to my friend Steve's in a part of England I've never been to before, and in the eighties and most of the nineties I would have needed a detailed map or instructions on how to get there, and I would have probably have visited or phoned the station for train times. On Saturday I simply Googled his post code, panned out a bit on the map to see where the station was, then looked up the train times and prices on thetrainline.com. And if it hadn't been way out in the countryside I could probably have even checked what his house looked like on Street View.
Yesterday I spent at least three hours reading Giles Coren's restaurant reviews (and finding out a new series of Supersizers Go... is just about to air, hurray!) and getting recipe ideas for my pork. Today I will probably find out what most of my friends did over the weekend even though I haven't seen them, and have sparked off a debate about Keith TOTP.
The bad side of the internet is that I am working tonight and have sleeping to do at some point. Also the floor needs a good going over. And I will most likely sit here hitting F5 instead of doing anything. The internet is good though innit?

*And I have looked up the correct plural.