Do you roll your eyes when ever you hear the word internet mentioned yet again on a television news story? Do you cringe as you realise a conversational black hole is about to appear at your dinner party when someone (usually a guy suffering from a mid-life crisis -- prematurely) brings up an internet topic? Are you ready to throw up when a stranger you've just met asks you for your e-mail so they can continue the friendship? If you answered `yes' to these questions then you may be suffering from `digital distress' according to Harris Online.

The company's survey reveals more than one-third of American consumers admit to suffering from the affliction. Apparently, the frenetic pace of technology development puts many Americans into `digital-depression' according to Harris Online.

The survey showed that 60 percent of respondents said they have simply stopped trying to keep up with the latest technology; 64 percent cited price as their reason for avoiding the digital revolution; and 70 percent of total survey respondents claimed to not own any digital home entertainment products.

The founders of start up Bermuda-based QuoVadis (www.quovadisoffshore.com) got a boost last week when the US passed federal digital legislation. Stephen Davidson of QuoVadis said the legislation is expected to "spur an important second wave of e-commerce implementations. ..particularly in the high-end market that Bermuda serves.'' He said the legislation leaves Bermuda well-positioned to host substantial business, due to the Island's existing Electronic Transactions Act -- which also deals with digital signatures and electronic records -- and QuoVadis' certificate authority service.

"At this time, Bermuda will be the first offshore jurisdiction with a certificate authority which is needed to use diGi8al signatures in a business context,'' he said.

What happens when a bunch of Canadians with some old dot matrix printers get a grant from the Canada Council of the Arts, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, and le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec? A `Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers' of course.

These guys hooked up what looks like 12 dot-matrix printers to a computerised program which `plays' the printers. The `User', a collective formed of an architect and a composer, have produced what's actually an interesting sound.

It's one of the more interesting uses for old machines. You can download the three different sounds from the site at www.theuser.silophone.net.

At the very least, the sound just serves to remind us just how noisy those clacker machines were. Actually I shouldn't use the past tense. With the fan whirr coming from most non-Mac computers these days many offices are actually pretty noise places to live in. That's a problem the computer industry has to work on.

A Slashdot e-mailer (www.slashdot.org) said the dot-matrix project reminds him of the HP Scanjet `easter egg'. An easter egg in `nerdspeak' means an often hidden feature of a piece of software put in there by the designers to show how smart they are to other nerds who spend their lives discovering these delights.

Apparently the HP Scanjet Easter Egg plays Beethoven's `Ode to Joy' with the scan motor's whine if you set your scanner to SCSI ID number zero and start up while holding the scan button down. I'm not about to try this with my scanner so I don't know if this tibit is true.

The guys who did the dot matrix symphony explain themselves thus: `Formed one morning over breakfast, The User inhabits the trailing edge of technology.

This vantage point affords an excellent view of technology from behind.

Exploring the more prosaic side of the human condition, The User has chosen ambient noise, the by-product of existence, as the subject of its current work. Sifting a few pertinent grains from the beach of noise is The User 's self-imposed and inexplicable task.' They are now working on Silophone which basically puts a microphone inside a silo grain elevator in Montreal and draws sounds via the internet and telephone and broadcasts them.

`For one year, the chambers of the Silophone will fill and empty themselves of sounds arriving from and departing to places all over the world, evoking the ebb and flow of the grain which filled the storage chambers of Silo Number 5,' they state.

Thanks guys.

Tech Tattle deals with topics relating to technology. Contact Ahmed at ahmedelamin y hotmail.com or (01133) 467901474.