or a fun way to waste away some surf time ? and get a fascinating insight into Internet culture try Google Trends (.

Google Trends measures the frequency with which words or phrases are searched for from computers in individual countries and cities.

Bermuda is the top region for searching for the term ?Bermuda?, though tourism officials should take note when classified by city.

Halifax, Nova Scotia tops the lot, followed by US cities Boston, Cambridge, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta, and Miami. Toronto pulls in at tenth spot.

A high point occurred on 4 August last year, with a story about hurricane Harvey?s approach to the Island.

In fact the top stories are either about the regulator?s probe of insurer AIG, or about hurricanes.

Other people are using the tool for more serious research, such as by looking at regional variants on searches for ?democracy?.

South Africa comes out tops in the regional section, followed by the US, Australia, Canada, and India.

The most searches for ?Lebanon? come from Lebanon itself, followed by Syria and Jordan.

Pakistan leads the country rankings in those searching for ?sex?. However, when classified by city, Cairo, Egypt, leads the pack, followed by four cities in India. Bermuda does not even register when I chose it from the pull down list (not enough

?search volume to show graphs?).

I guess no one wants to look like Mel Gibson these days, but if you think you could resemble someone famous, try going to the MyHeritage site (. MyHeritage is an online genealogy site that provides a facial-recognition service.

It now has a new application on the site that allows you to upload a photograph of yourself. Click the ?Find the Celebrity in You? button, and the photo is run through the site?s facial-recognition scanner. You are then matched up with your celebrity look-alikes. Free registration is required to run the service.

It is good to see that the art of letter writing, and posting by regular ?snail? mail, is still alive in some parts of the world.

A study by market analysis Mintel shows that letter writing is still thriving in Britain, with a surprising number of people reaching for pen and paper.

Mintel?s survey shows that fewer than one in ten feel that ?handwritten letters are old-fashioned?. As younger generations are less likely than older ones to feel this way the art of letter writing would seem to have secured its future, Mintel said.

Despite the advent of new technology, such as emails and texts, the market for personal stationery and writing instruments, rose by nine per cent between 2001 and 2005 to reach ?527 million, Mintel said.

The analyst forecasts that in the coming five years growth is expected to average 11 per cent to reach ?605 million by 2011, from the estimated ?546 million this year, a rise of four per.

?There is an assumption that new technology always replaces old in the way that DVDs have replaced the video,? Mintel says about the survey. ?But e-mails and texts have not replaced personal stationery and writing instruments, and in fact the old and the new seem to be complementing each other well.?

Mintel notes that the fastest growing sectors of the writing instrument market are the high end and quality pens. Demand for fountain pens grew by 18 per cent between 2001 and 2005. That?s what I use when I want to escape the e-mail cycle.

To avoid a ?hacker Wednesday? make sure you implement the 12 fixes Microsoft issued yesterday. Microsoft issues fixes for its software on the second Tuesday of every month. Hackers usually try to exploit the vulnerabilities soon afterward, before administrators may have had time to install them. In a preview of the fixes, the company said ten of them fix problems with Windows. The other two are patches for Microsoft Office. Both groups of patches are expected to have at least one marked as a ?critical? issue.

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Contact Ahmed at elamin.ahmedgmail.com.