30/03/2007 - Friday

The third series of Doctor Who starts tomorrow. I'm not too sure what the new assistant will be like, but she has got to be better than Billie Piper! To celebrate Doctor Who starting again we'll be making a dalek cake (courtesy of Blue Peter). I'll take pictures as it goes along.

I found a great laptop for all the girls! Although I doubt anyone would actually buy one and show it off!

A tool for programmers and command line people is Console. It's a command prompt replacement (in a way) for Windows which lets you create new command prompts in a tabbed window. This saves having multiple prompts open and is especially handy if you usually have multiple ssh windows open (just put each one into a seperately named tab and you'll never forget which one is which). It's not a real command prompt replacement as it actually spawns a hidden command prompt to which it sends the commands you type. You're also not limited to cmd.exe as a command prompt. If you have Cygwin installed then you can use bash instead, or any other command prompt that you have.

I'm getting a massive load of visitors to this blog! Over the last few days I've had around five people visit. Not five people per day, five prople in total. Some days have seen zero people visit. Maybe I should really make an effort to post more with handy links and stuff so that I can get people back! Although, most of the visitors I've had have found their way here through google searches for "transparent desktop icon text windows xp" or something similar. They end up here sometimes because of my post about ClearIcon (which I still use!). I'm not that bothered though as I'll still continue posting even if no one visited!

24/03/2007 - Saturday

I bought a new hard drive which arrived on Thursday and I spent all Thursday and Friday reinstalling all the software that I use (after reinstalling Windows of course). It took a while as I was copying over existing data from my old hard drive (which I was reusing as something else) and I also wanted to reorganise where things were going. Luckily I'm now pretty much done, I just have two or three things left which I don't really need at this moment. I now have 400 GB of storage, 320 GB on the new drive and 80 GB on the existing drive.

It snowed briefly at the beginning of the week and I took some photos. They look like I've messed with them and introduced motion blurring of the snow, but that's really the speed at which it was coming down! I haven't uploaded the photos yet, but when I do I'll provide a link.

I also took pictures of the lunar eclipse, but my camera is hardly good enough to pick up any detail, and for some reason the moon was moving and appears several times in a few of the pictures!

20/03/2007 - Tuesday

I poked through 90,000 songs played on last.fm today. Not long until I hit 100k! I might put up some stats later, like top artists and songs.

The healtheriser is coming along nicely. I finally got a menu design that I'm (mostly) happy with, which lets me get on with writing some of the code to make it work. I'm currently doing the login part as it's pretty useless without being able to login and store data. I should have that all sorted in the morning and I'll be able to move on to some of the required sections like weights and measurements. I have other sections planned, like meals and exercise, but these aren't my core focus right now. I'm also planning to add a forum later on so that things can be discussed (that's if the site even gets used by anyone other than me).

Eurovision 2007

We picked the UK's Eurovision entry last night and I must say that I'm happy with the one that got through. Scooch (link to their myspace page) sang a great Eurovision type song that just HAD to go through. If you didn't see it last night, then imagine the Fast Food Rockers group (did the Fast Food song) and dress them up as flight attendants, then you have Scooch.

14/03/2007 - Wednesday

Global Warming is a hot topic these days (no pun intended) with the government banging on about what we should be doing for the future. We're supposed to be using energy-saving lightbulbs come 2011 and have cut CO2 emissions by 60% come 2050. Energy-saving lightbulbs are ok, but show me one that outputs the same amount of light as a normal lightbulb and I'll replace every bulb in the house with them! I've never actually seen an energy-saving lightbulb that matched a normal bulb for its brightness. For me, I'd probably have to use three or four times the number of normal bulbs to get the same room brightness using energy-saving bulbs. Can anyone tell me how this is supposed to end up more energy efficient?

One thing that I heard on the news the other day is that big businesses, with huge profits, get given grants to lower their CO2 emissions, whereas small businesses, with small or no profits, have to pay themselves to lower their CO2 emissions. How exactly is that fair?

Comic Relief is here again. I've been watching Fame Academy and still fail to understand how the "judges" manage to keep their jobs. If two of the judges say that someones performance was good then the third judge will nearly always say that their performance was really bad. Also, one of the judges said that one of the celebrities has had great performances all the way through and had found nothing to fault him on. That was shocking to hear as the celebrity couldn't sing to save his life, couldn't hold a note, and mainly just spoke his way through the songs. I'm not faulting the celebrity as he tried his best, it's the judges that have no sense.

I also fail to understand how Girls Aloud and Sugababes were allowed to sing this years Comic Relief song. The song is a pisspoor remix of Walk This Way and neither of the groups can perform it in a decent way. Also, neither of the two groups can actually sing live, and the first time I heard the song properly was when they were singing it live on Fame Academy. I suppose they'll also be singing it live on Comic Relief on Friday, unfortunately.

I've finally come up with a "decent" name for my health website. It'll now be called Healtheriser! I've been trying to come up with a logo image to use, but as I'm really not that good with image editing it has taken a while. It takes ages for me to get something that doesn't look like trash, then it takes even longer while I fiddle with parts of it trying to make it look better. I've come up with something that I'm mostly satisfied with, although I might still need to twiddle the text colour. It was while editing the logo that I came up with the name! I did have the name as "Health Machine", then "Health Watch", then "Your Health", but none of them looked right on the logo as the two bits of text could never be properly centred (due to an image that is in the centre), so I wanted something with one word and came up with Healtheriser. I know it's not really a word, but hey, who really cares? Now all I have to do is finish off the buttons (I was working on a new kind of button, but might end up with the other ones instead) and I'll have a start of a page to look at. I've been putting off actually doing anything for the website until I had something to really look at, so now that I have some graphics for it I can then get started on the meaty part which is writing all the code for it. It should be fun as I have some pretty funky ideas for features that I hope I'll be able to pull off.

13/03/2007 - Tuesday

Doctor Who returns to our TV screens on the 31st March. It has been sorely missed since the second season finished in July last year. Lets hope that It's a lot better now that Billie Piper's character isn't in it to make it look trashy!

Heroes is on a break until the 23rd April. They just love putting shows on breaks when the show has just hit a major plot point!

05/03/2007 - Monday

Ok, so it has been a week since my last post. I was trying to blog more but I really haven't had much to blog about recently! I've been doing the design docs for my health website recently so that I actually have a plan to follow for once. This has resulted in writing down all the interactions that take place so that I know what is left to implement before a feature is complete. I should be starting on actually implementing stuff soon as I'm nearly finished writing everything down (it's easy when most of the features follow the same interaction!). I'll try to blog more about it once I've actually got something to show.

Why is it that whenever a football team does badly it's the manager who is fired? West Ham lost on Sunday 4-3 to Tottenham and it looks like they'll be going back down to the championship, and all I keep hearing is that the manager is likely to be fired. It is the players who let the team down each time they play, and no matter what the manager attempts to do, if the players don't want to play a good game then the team will lose. For West Ham to have any chance of survival (well, for next season at least) they need to fire all of the first team players and actually get some players that want to play. The West Ham players are good at partying though, but that doesn't help them play football.

It's the same with the England football team. England lose most of the time because the players just want to be paid lots of money so that they can spend it all on cars, car fines (because they're not good at driving cars and either speed or crash), alcohol and women. If the manager fielded a team of good football players then England are more likely to win a game. I'm also glad that David Beckham isn't being allowed back into the team. It's stupid to waste a place just for someone whos only "skill" is kicking dead balls. That place should go to someone who can actually play football.