I was recently explaining to my mother how I was going to upgrade her PC since it was running woefully slow and was struggling by on…wait for it…256 MB of RAM! Now, I don’t want to get into a discussion about whether or not Bill Gates actually did claim that 640k of RAM was going to be enough for anyone, but in 2007, 256MB just doesn’t cut it.

I explained to Mum that I would upgrade the RAM and that that would make the machine run faster. She enquired as to when I could sort this out. I said that I had a gig and I would drop around at the weekend. Her response?

“What gig have you got on?”

It took a couple of seconds for that sentence to register, and when it did I realised that it was the perfect example of the disconnect that exists between us of the geekish ilk and those who are not. See, in Mum’s mind, when I said gig, she thought:

gig colloq noun: a musician’s booking to perform, especially for one night only

Whereas I intended it as a colloquial abbreviation of “gigabyte”.

The important thing to note here is that there are a growing number of words that we geeks take as being commonly understood, where they very well may not be. Is a Meg a girl or a unit of storage? Is a hard drive a difficult and long car journey, or a place for storing files? Do you need to feed your mouse cheese?

You get the idea. Just wanted to give you all something to think about the next time you talk with your Mum about her PC.

I bet you thought this was going to be another month, and another apology from the Cg team on how we have not been writing as much as we would like. But I have a pretty good excuse this month: pretty much all of our spare time has been spent sewing up a deal with the NZ Catholic newspaper to publish our posts in their fortnightly paper!

How cool is that?

What this means is that we will have to get a lot more regulated on our posting, if only to meet our obligation to provide fresh content to the paper. That also means more information for you on this site – everybody wins!

So, if you’re in New Zealand and want to read a great paper that covers off a whole heap of local and international Catholic news – and that will be having an insightful column for Catholic geeks in it as well – pick up a copy of the paper at the back of your local parish (it’s only $3) and/or subscribe and get reading!

According to the latest figures, more than one million New Zealand households now have internet access. That’s a lot of houses! That’s nearly two-thirds of all houses in the nation.

What’s not surprising is the list of the main uses of the internet for those surveyed:

* Sending and receiving email
* General web browsing
* Getting information on goods and services
* Internet banking

No real surprises there.

So, what does it all mean? Well, I think that it bodes well for any projects that are looking to evangelise using the internet. It also bodes very well for those trying to get their message out there cheaply and effectively – look at the explosive growth of sites like YouTube.

All in all, it makes for some interesting times ahead. Better get on with claiming back some of the cyberspace (who even use’s that term anymore?!?) for God, I say!

According to the latest figures, more than one million New Zealand households now have internet access. That’s a lot of houses! That’s nearly two-thirds of all houses in the nation.

What’s not surprising is the list of the main uses of the internet for those surveyed:

* Sending and receiving email
* General web browsing
* Getting information on goods and services
* Internet banking

No real surprises there.

So, what does it all mean? Well, I think that it bodes well for any projects that are looking to evangelise using the internet. It also bodes very well for those trying to get their message out there cheaply and effectively – look at the explosive growth of sites like YouTube.

All in all, it makes for some interesting times ahead. Better get on with claiming back some of the cyberspace (who even use’s that term anymore?!?) for God, I say!