My Orange phone bill came in a few days ago.

I really must stop calling all those sex chat-up lines…

I blame London.  I was there last month, and a friend and I came across this telephone booth.  I should point out that we were walking back from a restaurant in Mayfair to the hotel on Park Lane, so don’t be accusing me of straying off to some seedy part of London.  I should additionally point out that the image below is probably work-safe, as they’ve covered the nipples with stars and this was, after all, in a public phone box!

So…

Copious Quantities of Japanese Sake + Ridiculous Hotel Cocktails + Wallpapers of Porn Phone Numbers = Regrettable Mobile Bill Hangover

Oh – and I’m particularly amused that BT have a “how was it for you?” sticker in the phone box (to the left of the phone)…  With hindsight, I should really have used that payphone rather than my mobile…

As folk may (or may not) know, I currently drive an incredibly ridiculous car – the Audi RS 6.  Everything about the car is excessively stupid for what I desperately keep claiming(/justifying) is a family estate car.

5.0 litre V10 twin-turbo.  572bhp.  0-62mph in 4.6 seconds.  650Nm torque (and delivered pretty much in a straight line, rather than a curve – see the chart a bit down this page).  Near £100,000 price tag (thanks to silly amount of pointless optional extras like the £6,000 ceramic brakes).  All wrapped up in an unassumingly plain family estate car (well, that’s what I say, anyway).

Not that there aren’t greater things to complain about, but the car does have it’s downside.  The 333g/km CO2 emissions, for one (to contrast, the emissions from the friend-of-the-green-brigade Toyota Prius is 89g/km).  Every time I drive the car, I probably pump out enough emissions to melt a polar icecap somewhere, or choke dead an innocent baby seal.

Unfortunately, the sheer petrol-thirst of the car is also hitting the wallet.  The evidence:

That’s for a full tank of petrol.  £95 (or $145 to my American friends)!  For 80 litres.  To put this in context – that will last me approximately 1 week of normal commuting.  Or a single return journey from Aberdeen to Edinburgh (that’s a 250 mile round-trip).  Yep – the 15-20 mpg fuel consumption certainly takes its toll.

Having said that – the car is fun.  Oh, dear goodness, it’s sheer, ridiculous fun.  I’m just over 1.5 years of ownership, and it still provides childish glee.

But…  My reality-check is kicking in.  And despite the childish glee, I’m starting to wonder whether it really is worth all the utter excessiveness.  I love my toy.  But it really is an utterly pointless, excessive, expensive, unjustifiable toy.  But, it’s fun…

Buyer’s remorse.  Gah!

As I crawl out from under my rock and blink at the bright sky above, I stumble into the inevitable realisation that – regardless of how hard I fight against the tide – I cannot hide from the Social 2.0 wave indefinitely.  Despite taking nearly a whole lazy year off from blogging, I find that the rest of the world has moved ever onwards.  Blogs are almost passé, an unfashionable method of monologue that has been superseded by the rise of the socially interactive Twitter and Facebook.

Over the past decade, I have long tried to separate my social and business lives – after all, the two spheres I have created could hardly be more diverse!  However, the pace of technology and social networking makes the task of keeping these two worlds apart an increasingly difficult task.

Microsoft has, over nearly two decades, provided me with great technical direction.  I connected with “computer technology” back in 1994, when I was a mere 15 years old.  Although my computing era started in the days of the Sinclair ZX Spectrum +2, computers became more than a mere mechanism for videogames when I was given my first computer – a notebook (with Intel 386SX processor) running Microsoft Windows 3.1.  Cemented by the launch of Windows 95 a mere year later, I was propelled into a passion for technology, guided mainly by Microsoft.

Microsoft has not only introduced me to my first experience with computers, but also allowed me to connect to the Internet in the early days (MSN was my first dial-up Internet Service Provider).  My home cinema and music/photo/media collection is powered exclusively by Microsoft technologies, my last two decades of work crafted on Microsoft products.  In fact, I owe my career and my last decade of income to the ecosystem that Microsoft has created – the company I started a decade ago exclusively focussing on consultancy around Microsoft products.  My personal, work, mobile and gaming experiences are all provided by Microsoft.

It is appropriate, therefore, that I should choose to embrace the available social networking technologies as they start to permeate into Microsoft technologies.  Although Microsoft has been encouraging social networking for the last few years, I believe that 2010 sees the advent of social technologies being widely adopted into the majority of its products.  Microsoft Outlook 2010 introduces the Outlook Social Connector, and the recently-announced Windows Mobile 7 Series demonstrates the omnipresence that social networking has in our day-to-day lives today.

As Microsoft have now provided the tools for me to immerse myself in this world of social networking, I have made the decision – after years of actively avoiding it – to embrace the Social 2.0 wave.  Blogging here on Windows Live Spaces will still be my main avenue to communicating with the world at large (my lengthy monologues allow me to hear the beautiful sound of my own voice in my head), but I will also be starting to Twitter, to accept friends on Facebook, and to start re-tagging and geotag my photos for online access to all.

In short, I will finally be merging my social and business lives together…

This promises to be an interesting experience…!  🙂

Despite all that, though, I still choose not to completely open my kimono at this stage, and to hide behind the safety of my South Park avatar!