1,000 posts for ZDNet: Time to hand over the reins

This is my 1,000th post on ZDNet's iGeneration, and it shall also be my last. It's time to hand over the reins to someone else.

I look at the writer I once was, starting out as a then 19-year-old undergraduate student, sitting at my desk in my university halls, thinking of what to write about.

I was immature, idiotic, and occasionally threw laptops out of windows for cheap kicks. Half the time I failed to spell check, and I still have no idea how I got away with some of the hidden imagery in my writing for so many years, where I would set up the capital letter of each sentence to spell out things like: "I LOVE CAKE", and: "BRING ME WINE".

Oh, how I shudder with embarrassment. And those posts will never, ever go away, forever on the web to shame me until my old and grey years.

Under no circumstances would I ever 'hope' for thermonuclear war, in which the Internet collapses and an electromagnetic pulse wipes out the history of the web as we know, but there are a few exceptions.

What's next for me?

I'll be staying within ZDNet, floating around, and mostly making coffee for the monkey typewriters, as I hope to see whether a near-infinite number of junior lackeys can in fact reproduce the works of Shakespeare.

You can find me on London Calling, my new column where I dissect the news from London, the UK and wider Europe, as well as covering the morning shift on Between the Lines.

In the meantime, I wish my replacement the very best. Charlie Osborne is one of the finest young writers I have ever had the pleasure of meeting and working with, and has a razor-sharp intellect and wit.

For some famous last words, I had better make it worth it:

We've accomplished a great deal together, haven't we?