Why I stay in on Friday nights

I get a lot of people asking me, "Why is the Australian dollar falling against the US dollar recently even though US interest rates are still dropping?", to which I respond that I haven't really got a clue.

People then usually say that they expect that someone like me, who stays in on Friday nights, would know something nerdy and technical like that. And then the conversation wends its way round to why I stay home. And I tell them the very thing that I am about to reveal to you:
On Friday night you have the internet ALL TO YOURSELF.

Gasp! Just ponder that notion for a moment.

It's a bit like how Mad Max spent a lot of time driving on the wrong side of the road in Beyond Thunderdome - because hey, it's not like anyone else was on the road, right? In fact, I often dress like Mad Max while I have the world's entire communication infrastructure at my beck and call. Black leather, dirty, scowling, bad haircut. Makes a nice change from the rest of the week when I wear neutral greens and browns and am dirty and scowling with a bad haircut. The Road Worrier.

Admittedly, it's easy to let your standards slip when you're online by yourself. Just like being in the house alone when you take big bites straight out of the cheese and promise yourself you'll whittle away the teeth-marks later. Or you don't bother to get a clean knife to flick chunks out of the jam jar for dinner; you just use the one that you licked clean earlier on because you only cut your tongue a little bit. On the internet, of course, such behaviour is entirely normal, if not somewhat prissy and affected. So it really doesn't matter. And even it did, there's no-one there to notice anyway.

So what kind of things can you do when you have the internet entirely to yourself? I like to go to freechess.org and offer to play games of blitz chess with 1 second time limits to the cast of zeros who are also there. I like to create eBay listings for items like Queensland with a Buy It Now price of 99 cents and a time limit of 4 hours. I like to check a good online newspaper for news updates that never happen because the staff, like all good journalists, would rather get smashed than write the news on a Friday night (or come to think of it, on a Tuesday morning). But most of all I like to read ads. Because at that moment, every single computer at Google is dedicated to figuring out exactly what I want. And one day, when they get it right, I want to be there.