How to live without batteries

David McMahon posts another interesting question on his blog this weekend:

How efficiently (or inefficiently) would your household function without batteries?

For me, the first thing which came to mind was that my camera wouldn't work without batteries. So if I had no batteries in the house, I'd have to go back to the "old-fashioned" film method (some film cameras don't need batteries). But this is more inconvenient than it would seem. If I wanted to change to film, here are some of the costs that would be involved:

• I'd have to buy a new SLR. Cost: AUD$700+
• Since September (four months ago), I've taken approximately 9,000 photos. If I were to take these on film, I would need about 375 rolls of film. These would cost over AUD$1,800.
• To develop the 375 rolls of film would cost about AUD$6,000

This brings the total cost of film photography for 4 months to about AUD$8,600! And that's ignoring the storage factor - 375 rolls of film take a lot of storage space.

Apart from cameras, there are quite a few other things in the house that use batteries. For example:

• T.V. remote controls - These devices are very handy, and without them we would all be forced to perform the laborious chore of actually standing up and walking across the room whenever we wanted to turn up the volume.
• Cordless (or mobile) telephone - Have you ever noticed that when you're talking on a cordless phone you tend to start walking around the room? Without them, you'd have to stay standing beside the phone the whole time - until you need to get the pencil and paper that aren't there.
• Computer - Hang on, doesn't the computer run without batteries? Yes, as long as it is turned on. But when you turn off your computer, a small battery inside of the case takes care of the time, making sure that when you next start up, it knows what day and hour it is. Without batteries, we'd have to reset the computer's time - and the time of every clock in the house - all day.
  

The verdict: Thank God for digital photography - and pray that we never run out of batteries!

Question: Have you ever Ego-Googled?

David McMahon posts an interesting question on his blog: Have you ever Googled yourself?

My answer to this: Certainly. I think that just about everyone who uses the internet frequently is overcome by the desire to find themselves in the vast realms of cyberspace. But for most people, the answer to the following question will be the same as mine:
Did you find anything?: No
Of course not all of us are famous, so we may not be within the first 30,000 odd pages of a Google search for our name. This really depends on how obscure your name is. When I Google my fake name which I sometimes use for dubious registration forms, I am at the top of the list. That is because nobody famous has that name. However, in a search for "David Webb", I'm nowhere.

What about you? Have you ever Googled yourself? If you want to answer this question, I encourage you to vote using the poll on the right hand side of this page. Next week we'll see how the votes fall - so keep posted!

Update: I have recieved a lot of feedback on this post, and everybody who has commented has pretty much the same story as me: they have Googled themselves, but they usually don't rank very high, if at all. This concludes the question - most people have Googled themseleves.