March 2008 Archives

Wrestlemania was live on pay-per-view from Orlando, Florida last night. I didn't watch it live but watched it this afternoon; meaning that I could fast forward through all the associated back stories and backstage crap that goes on. Fast forwarding past all the crap saved an hour in viewing time.

Anyway, I fully enjoyed the show. A number of predictable results but also a couple of surprises. Nothing really stood out as being bad but there was at least 2 or 3 matches that I would rate as really good.

I saw this and thought "Holy Cow!"

What can you say? The guy is a legend...

We were supposed to be going to Birmingham this evening to watch Nightwish. Unfortunately, Stuart wasn't able to get tickets when he tried; about a month ago. So, we're not going. We will be roleplaying as usual instead.

Since losing my job in November I've been receiving Jobseeker's Allowance but as of 22nd March 2008 that has been stopped due to a doubt on my claim.

When I originally made the benefit claim one of the questions on the form is why you lost your job. I lost mine through misconduct and said so on the form. I'm not going to go into the details, suffice to say that the company viewed my actions as misconduct.

In the middle of December I received a letter from Carlisle BDC stating that there had been a doubt and they were waiting for a reply from the employer. I spoke to my advisor about it and she informed me that the company had a month to reply. I spoke to her again at the back end of January and she informed me that the doubt seemed to have been resolved in my favour because the company had not responded.

In the middle of February I received a letter back from Carlisle BDC stating that the doubt had been reopened after they had received a reply from the company and that I had a month to reply with my comments. My advisor recommended that I take the full month just in case the decision went against me. I did so and sent my comments back in the middle of March, stating that I had been upfront from the start and was disappointed in the amount of time the company had taken.

Anyway, I've now received a reply from Carlisle BDC stating that they cannot pay me Jobseeker's Allowance from 22nd March 2008 until 13th June 2008. I also won't be awarded National Insurance Contributions for the same period. The letter then goes on to state that they cannot pay Jobseeker's Allowance from 14th June 2008 either. They cannot pay me because my entitlement based on Class 1 National Insurance Contributions has run out. It makes me wonder why I was paying National Insurance Contributions for the last six years.

The letter states that if I'm looking for work and intend to dispute or appeal against the decision I should still provide signed declarations on my ES40. Damn right I intend to dispute/appeal. How am I supposed to live, pay bills, buy food etc? I know I live with my Dad but he's retired now and receiving pension credit and disability living allowance. I can't expect him to pay for me as well. On top of everything else I'm not totally convinced they can legally stop the payments. When I first made the claim, and more recently when the amount went up, I received a letter from the DWP that stated the amount I was receiving was the minimum the government said I needed to live on. Doubtless, there is something in the provisoning of benefits that give the department the right to withhold payment.

I will be going to my local JobCentre Plus office on Monday to lodge an appeal against the decision and to also make a claim for Hardship payments.

The Halo 3 Heroic Map Pack which was released on December 11th 2007 at a cost of 800 Points on XBox Live Marketplace is now available for free. The 3 maps available in the pack are Standoff, Rat's Nest and Foundry. They come in at a combined size of 487mb; which is rather hefty to say the least.

To download the map pack, sign into Xbox LIVE on your Xbox 360 and then go to the Marketplace blade. Select "Game Store," then select "All Games." Scroll down to "Halo 3" and select it. Your final step is to select the "Heroic Map Pack," and then "Confirm Download."

The Byron Review was released this morning. Dr Tanya Byron's report was even handed and it's obvious that she knows what she's talking about.

The Byron Review proposes:

• Introduce a mandatory age-rating system for all games, to be handled by the BBFC
• Ensure that retailers defying the age-rating are punished appropriately
• Make age ratings on the game boxes larger and clearer
• Ensure that in situations where there is a risk of actual harm, restrictions can be adequately enforced
• PEGI will continue to rate 3+ and 7+ titles.

The final decision of any implementation is up to the government and it isn't guaranteed that they will follow the recommendations in the report.

Cybernet, not the late-night ITV video games show, but rather a company based in Irvine Spectrum, California, make a range of space saving PCs. They produce 2 distinct versions; the i-One LCD PC, a PC inside an LCD monitor, I suppose a wee bit similar to how the iMac may have evolved and the Zero-Footprint PC, a PC inside a keyboard; harkening back to the days of the Amiga 1200.

The lowest priced i-One starts at $999 and the lowest priced ZPC starts at $629. Both are fully customisable and are definitely aimed at customers who have limited amounts of space. One of the testimonials on the site is from a company which uses the ZPC in a Class 1 Clean Room. The ZPC has allowed them to replace their previous rack-mounted solution with the much less space consuming ZPC.

Ultimately, as nice an idea as they are I think they've only really got a niche-market. Although, I don't doubt some geeky(ish) home users will like the idea and go out and buy one.

HMV currently have a sale on. I was going to buy myself a copy of The Simpsons Movie for only £4.99 but instead spotted The Omen: Pentology for only £7.99 instead. There were loads of other things I could've also bought but restricted myself to just the one item.

I've just watched the France - England game and can honestly say it was a poor game and England can feel disappointed that they lost the game. England didn't play particularly well and with such a lacklustre display they definitely didn't deserve to win the game, but can feel that they, maybe, deserved a draw. France looked dangerous going forward, but the defence seemed to cope well enough.

David James didn't really have much to do other than pick the ball out of his net after the penalty that won the game for France. The back four was pretty solid throughout other than the momentary lapse that led to the penalty from which France scored. Rio Ferdinand and John Terry were solid again. Ashley Cole is probably the best choice we have at left-back although his distribution is questionable at times. Wes Brown wasn't at all impressive and his distribution was woeful at times. I'm a Manchester United fan but Glen Johnson impressed me more in the brief spell he got. I'm not totally sure that we have a natural successor to Gary Neville yet.

In midfield Owen Hargreaves was solid and dependable; probably our best player. Gareth Barry also had a really good game. Steven Gerrard was pretty decent. David Beckham, winning his 100th cap, spent good periods of the game watching the game go by him and spent a lot of the game underused, but the moments he did get the ball, his distribution was as good as ever. David Bentley came on after an hour in place of Beckham and did well. England, for whatever reason, decided to play a lot on the left side of the pitch in the first half and it was rather compact at times. However, Joe Cole was pretty good out there. Stewart Downing replaced him for the second half and I really have to question his continued selection. The guy can't bring a ball under control, can't pass the ball and definitely can't cross the ball. I doubt very much that he can even run or tackle. I'm not a Chelsea fan but it's patently obvious that Joe Cole is the best left-sided midfield player that England has.

Up front, Wayne Rooney was exposed for much of his time on the pitch. Playing by himself, he tried his best but was often crowded out by the defence. It just felt that the balls in to him were not of sufficient quality and support from midfield was lacking. Michael Owen and Peter Crouch came on for the second half and were both pretty unimpressive.

All in all it was a pretty laboured performance. I think the core of the side is there but we need somebody at right back to replace the absent Gary Neville and we need to stop playing just 1 up front. As good as Wayne Rooney is, he can't work miracles against quality defences on his own. He needs a partner up front, be it Michael Owen, Peter Crouch or even somebody like Jermaine Pennant or Jermaine Defoe.

I've been receiving a rather large amount of spam on a daily basis for at least the last couple of years. It started off with about 150-200 a day but has recently peaked at a regular figure closer to 1000. In fact, once or twice it's been closer to 1500. Anyway, with broadband I never really concerned myself too much about it and let my email client and the filters I had set up within it sort them out. However, it still wasn't sorting them all and I'd still have to trawl through at least 100 a day to make sure there wasn't any genuine emails getting caught.

Anyway, I finally decided to try and sort it out a bit better; with the intention of stopping the spam even getting as far as my inbox. I had a poke about in my domain control panel and thought I'd figured it out. Rather than redirecting all unqualified domain addresses to the main account I told it to filter them first; searching for certain prefixes. Anything that didn't match the prefixes would be bounced. Testing seemed to back me up.

However, thanks to Mondrak, I managed to discover that it was blocking all emails except the ones I had originated from my own PC, either via the email client or via any of the web mail services I have access to. After further tweaking I managed to eventually solve that problem only to run into a different one. The way the filters have been designed means that as well as allowing bowch@ as a valid prefix it would also allow notbowch@ or fakebowch@ or any other prefix ending with bowch@. Setting filter options that would solve this wasn't working. Everytime I set it to read "Does Not Equal" it would change to "Equal" for no apparent reason.

I have ended up setting up extra email accounts and telling the server to forward them to my main account. Any unqualified emails will now get bounced back with a failure message. Valid email addresses now only include bowch (at), blog (at), useful (at), webmaster (at) and yahoogroups (at) with everything else bouncing. I've set them up with relatively low disk quotas and will hopefully not need to change much. I'm going to keep an eye on it over the next couple of weeks and make sure that it forwards okay and isn't eating up valuable space on my domain server.

PortableApps.com is a really useful site that I can highly recommend to anybody that has a need to have a collection of applications handy. It's especially handy if you're going to look at somebody's PC and you want to use software that you're familiar with. The Standard version will run from a 512mb USB stick, their Lite version will run from a 256mb USB stick and the totally stripped down Base version will run off a 1.44mb floppy disk. All 3 versions are easily extendable with other applications available from the same site.

I have recently discovered a rather awesome fan written web comic called The Ten Doctors. If you're a fan of Doctor Who I suggest you go and check it out. The previous link will take you to the archives so you can start reading from Page 1 without spoiling future pages.

Retired Columbia University Professor, Gertrude Neumark Rothschild claims that Sony violated her patents that involved methods of using light emitting diodes to read data off of discs. (The full details are: U.S. Patent No. 4,904,618, "Process for Doping Crystals of Wide Band Gap Semiconductors," and U.S. Patent No. 5,252,499, "Wide Band-Gap Semiconductors Having Low Bipolar Resistivity and Method of Formation")

Rothchild's complaint filed with the US International Trade Commission (ITC) on February 20th claims that some 30 companies, including Sony Corporation, Samsung Group, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd., LG Electronics, Pioneer Corporation and others, are violating a patent she owns for light-emitting and laser diodes.

Professor Rothschild has requested that the 30 companies be issued a cease and desist order, preventing them from manufacturing and importing anymore units into the US.

The ITC has agreed to investigate the matter, and it's worth noting that Rothchild has already successfully tested the legislative waters with a lawsuit against Philips, which was settled out of court in February.

I've just watched the second part of Sky's adaptation of The Colour Of Magic and thoroughly enjoyed it. I would class myself as a fan of Pratchett's work; not an absolute fanatic, but somebody with more than a passing familiarity and can honestly say that I'm happy with the job they've done with this adaptation.

Although nothing has been confirmed it's very likely that more adaptations will follow; David Jason has already said he would like to do more. On a related note, Sam Raimi owns the rights for The Wee Free Men and although no further details are available, it's expected to hit cinemas in 2010.

Following on from Sky's hugely successful, Christmas 2006, adaptation of Terry Pratchett's Hogfather, we were treated to the first half of their adaptation of The Colour Of Magic last night. They've actually adapted The Colour Of Magic and The Light Fantastic into one film. The first part was pretty faithful to the first book with only a few scenes left out for timing and narrative purposes and they have really spent some time getting the Discworld looking and feeling right. My main gripe is that the special effects for the luggage seems amateurish and feels more comedic than it should be. But, even with that, I'm still really looking forward to part 2 tonight.

Chelsea 2-1 Arsenal

Didier Drogba scored twice in the last 20 minutes to cancel out Bacary Sagna's first ever goal for Arsenal; scored on the hour, and give Chelsea 3 vital points near the top of the table.

United are top with 73 points and the result has helped Chelsea leapfrog over Arsenal and maintain the 5 point gap Manchester United had on them at the start of the day. Arsenal are a further point behind in 3rd. Liverpool are still 4th; but 14 points adrift of United. All 4 teams have 7 games remaining. United will feel confident but they still have to entertain Arsenal and visit Blackburn Rovers and Chelsea within their final 7 games.

Manchester United 3 - 0 Liverpool

I've just watched the first game of Sky's double-header and as a Man Utd fan I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a pretty even first 30 minutes until Wes Brown popped up and scored. Then just before half time Fernando Torres was fouled and ended up getting booked for complaining. Javier Mascherano came running across from halfway across the pitch to complain to the referee. After previously been booked for a foul and spending most of the first half harping on at Steve Bennett, the referee, he ended getting himself a second yellow card, and sent off; reducing Liverpool to 10 men. Bennett's reaction did seem a wee bit over the top but given the fallout from Ashley Cole's behaviour in midweek it can be somewhat understandable. Cristiano Ronaldo scored with a header from a corner in the second half and Nani scored a quite sublime goal late on to make it 3-0. Liverpool can probably feel a bit aggrieved at the referee but United really were dominant.

I'm now going to go and watch the 2nd game: Chelsea vs Arsenal.

I've been doing some research on the Middle East during the 12th century for my Saturday game and got sidetracked into the world in general in the 12th century and then England in particular. After reading a few articles, now well off topic, I came across an article about Cumbrian Dialect and realised how much of the local dialect I actually use/have used without realising that it's specifically local. Just a few examples include:

• la'al - meaning little
• yam - meaning home (as garn yam) [I'm going home]
• skit - meaning make fun of
• twat - meaning hit someone
• marra - meaning friend (ahreet, marra) [Hi, Mate]
• hossing - meaning raining heavily (it's hossing it duwn) [Regular occurrence]

And then there's the old sheep counting system:

1. yan
2. tyan
3. tethera
4. methera
5. pimp
6. sethera
7. lethera
8. hovera
9. dovera
10. dick
11. yandick
12. tyandick
13. tetheradick
14. metheradick
15. bumfit
16. yan-bumfit
17. tyan-bumfit
18. tethera-bumfit
19. methera-bumfit
20. giggot

I could always remember 1-4 but that was about it. In fact I always have a tendency to say 'yan' rather than 'one' anyway; even when speaking with non-locals.

Makes you wonder how much other people use local dialect/phrases without realising.

I came across a rather useful website for Vista users earlier today. The Windows Vista User Guide aims to provide a concise, easy to follow guide on how to get started with Windows Vista. The guides are written to help everybody from the inexperienced, absolute beginner to the more advanced user.

I hadn't seen this until Craig showed it to me at Paul's party and thought I would share the dangers with everybody. Beware of the deadliest virus on the planet:

I was watching a podcast earlier concerning the Microsoft Techfest 2008 and the Live Translator site was mentioned. Like many of the other translating sites on the net it'll take inputted text in one of several languages and output a translated version. What really stands out though is the way it translates whole sites. I've got a Firefox plugin that will render a translated version of any site in another tab/window but Live Translator does a side-by-side translation in the same tab/window. Quite cool.

Apparently, rumours coming out of the Sci-Fi Channel in America are hinting at a prequel for Battlestar Galactica. A 2 hour pilot written by Remi Aubuchon and Ronald D Moore, with Jeff Reiner set to direct is due to begin casting shortly. No official details on Caprica are currently available.

Doctor Who: Season 4 is only a matter of a few weeks away. The BBC will begin showing trailers for it starting this Saturday; 22nd March 2008. Usually, they start airing trailers two weeks before the show goes live. If so, that would mean a premiere date of 5th April 2008 for Season 4.

Anyway to get you in the mood, I present the trailers they'll be airing on TV and in the Cinema.

My nephew loaned me Guitar Hero III: Legends Of Rock for the XBox 360 yesterday. I played it all yesterday evening and completed it on Easy. Unfortunately I couldn't get the Wireless Guitar to connect to the 360 and had to use a normal pad. I've tried one song on Medium and it was definitely harder than playing on Easy. I have a new found respect/envy for people that can play it on Expert.

John Hewer, synonymous with the portrayal of the grandfatherly Captain Birdseye on British television from 1967 until 1998 has died. He was 86.

When Captain Birdseye was temporarily axed in 1971 an obituary was run in the Times; and three years later when the adverts were reinstated the newspaper ran a story reporting that news of his death had been "grossly exaggerated".

The adverts changed little over the years and would always feature the grandfatherly captain calling in a group of children to dine on fish fingers on board a boat.

He was a member of London's Players Theatre, and had also appeared in many musical productions. In the 1950s he starred opposite Julie Andrews in The Boy Friend on Broadway.

He was born on 13th January 1922 in Leyton, London and passed away on 16th March 2008 in Twickenham, London.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke, arguably the greatest Science Fiction writer since H.G. Wells, died earlier today in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived since 1956. He was born on 16th December 1917 and died on 19th March 2008 at the age of 90. He had been suffering from breathing problems recently and had also suffered from post-polio syndrome for the last two decades.

"Sometimes I am asked how I would like to be remembered," Clarke said recently. "I have had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer and space promoter. Of all these I would like to be remembered as a writer."

He had also stated that he did not regret having never followed his novels into space, adding that he had arranged to have DNA from strands of his hair sent into orbit. "One day, some super civilization may encounter this relic from the vanished species and I may exist in another time," he said. "Move over, Stephen King."

I've recently installed the latest version of Ubuntu (7.10) on my laptop and I'm dual booting it with Windows XP Professional.

There's no specific reason as to why I've installed a Linux distribution on the laptop other than just as a test platform. I'd gone through a period about 10 years ago where I had given serious thought to installing Linux (SUSE 6.4) on my main desktop but ended up not bothering; the install routine was quite daunting. Anyway, I've used older versions of Ubuntu Live CDs in the past and been most impressed. Just after the New Year I ordered a couple of Ubuntu CDs (x86 and x64 versions) and thought I'd give it a try.

I've been really impressed with the ease with which the Ubuntu installer resized and created partitions and with only the minimum of interaction installed and set itself up. The only info I had to enter was name, username, password and time zone settings. It hasn't grumbled about any of my hardware and even recognised my Wireless card. After entering my WEP key I was up and running on the net in no time. I must admit there's been significantly more updates to download than with a Windows XP SP2 install but it's not been too great of a hardship.

I'd almost go as far as to say that the new version of Ubuntu has brought Linux goodness into the reach of the not so tech-savvy general public. Firefox on Ubuntu, unsurprisingly, looks and feels exactly the same as the Windows version. Evolution, the email client was a breeze to set up. OpenOffice is a free, and pretty good, alternative to MS Office and Pidgin is a nice multi-format IM client in the style of Trillian. There's nothing I've come across so far where I've missed a Windows client or application. About the only downside is the lack of serious game support but Wine can help in that respect.

I'm going to play about with it for at least another month or so and then give some serious thought to adding the x64 version to my main desktop PC.

Although I do have a Facebook account I think this video sums it all up nicely...

Up until yesterday we hadn't had a game on Saturday for almost a month due to the Lord of the Rings marathon, the 24 hour sponsored event and a party. John had been running Vampire nWoD prior to our break to test it ready for running it at the 24 hour and wasn't willing to continue running. Paul wasn't ready to continue his Horse Lords / Horde D&D game because he was still trying to convert to 3rd ed, Colin had offered to run Hunter but had said he really needed a couple of more weeks to prep but could go if necessary. So I offered to run either Werewolf Dark Ages or Vampire Dark Ages. The majority decision was to give Colin some more time and play Vampire Dark Ages.

I haven't run a Vampire game before, let alone Dark Ages, and was really interested in testing a setting I had plans for. I've played plenty of Vampire and Werewolf in the past and do run Ratkin on a regular basis. These are all Storyteller based systems and the mechanics of the system works across them all; albeit with some subtle differences between them.

Anyway, the setting I've placed them all in is the Holy Land in 1195; right between the 3rd and 4th crusades; during the 5 year period of peace accorded to the region by the Treaty of Jaffa. One of the interesting side effects of the setting is that there are significant amounts of holy ground in the area which can affect their abilities, or in some cases their willingness to even enter an area. I'd originally planned for them to be based in Jerusalem and gave them the choice of playing either nominally Christian or Saracen characters and they've chosen Christians. Now, since Jerusalem was under Saracen control in 1195, although individual pilgrims were free to come and go, I've relocated them slightly further north in Tyre.

Colin's playing a Lombardy Nosferatu, Paul is playing a Burgundy Salubri Healer, John's playing a Swedish Gangrel, Scoot's playing a Slav Tzimisce and Ginger Paul is playing a Basque Malkavian. Thankfully, they have all managed, among some rather interesting language choices, to select Latin, which was the main tongue spoken in the period.

There's been a few severely mutilated corpses discovered both on the road south to Jerusalem and the road north to Damascus and after looking at the latest corpse they've had a foray out into the wilderness to see what they could discover. They've done some research and they think, thanks to reports that they've received, that they've figured out a pattern for the attacks and plan to lay an ambush for the next attack.

One of the pieces of advice I was given when I had my toes done was that I should refrain from having a bath whilst they were still healing. The information suggested at least 2 or 3 weeks as a minimum. I've gone 2 months. Now, before you go 'ugh' I've not gone 2 months without any form of bath/shower. I've had regular showers during that period. Although we don't have a shower my sister does and I've been popping round to her house regularly in the last 2 months.

Anyway, I've obviously been paying close attention to the state of my toes whenever I've soaked them and changed the dressing. I had planned to go round to my sister's house yesterday evening but her shower is now broken; apparently the pipe from the unit to the head has come away from the shower itself. I decided that my toes were sufficiently healed and I had a bath instead. It's quite remarkable how you can miss something as simple as a bath. It felt so relaxing just lying there and having a soak; and my toes came out of the process relatively intact. I even took the opportunity to tidy up some of the scabbing when the scabs were suitably soft. Now you can go 'ugh'.

I have reimplemented one of the features that I used to have on the site; namely the Snap Shots™ preview. The way that this was originally set up, prior to the upgrade to MT4, was that you could hover on any link on the site and it would preview the page the link was connected to. Now, since they have upgraded their system, you can selectively alter the way that this works.

I've enabled it on the external links in the main body of the site and disabled it completely in both sidebars and the footer. Additionally, rather than the preview being available on the entire link it is just available on the little icon that appears after the text of the link. Hopefully, this shouldn't distract too much and gives visitors the chance to see what I'm linking to before clicking on the link.

The draw for the Quarter Finals, Semi-Finals and Final of the Champions League have just recently been drawn in Lyon.

Quarter Finals (1st/2nd April 2008 & 8th/9th April 2008)
1. Arsenal vs Liverpool
2. AS Roma vs Manchester United
3. FC Schalke 04 vs FC Barcelona
4. Fernerbache SK vs Chelsea

Semi Finals (22nd/23rd April 2008 & 29th/30th April 2008)
a. Winner 1 (Arsenal/Liverpool) vs Winner 4 (Fernerbache SK/Chelsea)
b. Winner 3 (FC Schalke 04/FC Barcelona) vs Winner 2 (AS Roma/Manchester United)

Final (21st May 2008)
Winner b vs Winner a

Both the quarter finals and semi finals will be played over 2 legs with the final being played at a neutral venue, the Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow.

First impressions are that if Chelsea get past Fenerbache it would mean that an English club would definitely reach the final with their semi-final opponents either being Arsenal or Liverpool. And if that happens then Manchester United would need to get past both AS Roma, whom they met in the group stages this season, and the winner of the Schalke/Barcelona tie to get to a possible all English final.

I just discovered that there's a new The Lost Boys movie in the pipeline. The Lost Boys 2: The Tribe is slated for a July 2008 release. Even though it has both Corey Feldman and Corey Haim attached the fact that it is going straight to DVD probably tells us all that we need to know.

After looking through the changes announced in this week's budget it would appear that very little will change with my day-to-day, week-on-week spending ability.

Income Tax & National Insurance
Due to the fact that I'm currently not working, the raising of the personal allowance to £5,345, reduction from 22% down to 20% and abolition of the 10% starting band won't affect me. The change in National insurance Contribution rates and thresholds also won't affect me directly. Of course, when I start working again these will become relevant.

Tax Credit & Child Benefit
These changes also don't affect me and to be honest, although there are rises in these, it would appear that they aren't t likely to be of any significant benefit to parents anyway; especially when inflation and rises in the price of commodities such as wheat are taken into consideration. Look for significant rises in the cost of flour and bread as the worldwide wheat shortage starts kicking in.

Winter Fuel Payment
I don't qualify; I'm under 60. But, this will help my Dad somewhat.

Individual Savings Accounts (ISAs)
I don't have any ISAs so the increase in the overall annual investment limit and the change from the starting 10% rate on the non savings income to a starting 10% rate on the savings income doesn't affect me.

Alcohol & Tobacco
Although I do drink it isn't particularly often; even when I was in full time employment. I rarely drink pints so the 4p rise in the price of a pint has no bearing. The 55p rise in the price of a bottle of spirits is what is likely to affect me most. I tend to drink Jack Daniels and Coke whilst out and once in a blue moon I'll treat myself to a decent bottle of malt whisky. On the Tobacco side, I don't smoke, so the increases there won't affect me.

Motoring Taxes
The changes in Vehicle Excise Duty won't directly affect me. My Dad is disabled and he is therefore exempt from paying the duty; this is paid directly via his DLA. The freeze on the planned fuel duty increase of 2 pence per litre in April 2008 until October 2008 is quite welcome; although I'm wondering how long companies like Tesco and Morrison can maintain their local prices at about 105p per litre when some forecourts in London are charging up to 130p per litre.

Other Measures
A lot of the other measures announced in the budget lean towards protecting the environment.

The government has called on retailers to encourage the shift away from single-use carrier bags and have announced that if there is not sufficient progress by the end of the year they will look to impose a charge on these bags from early next year.

All new non-domestic buildings to be zero carbon from 2019. This is in addition to the ambition for all new homes to be zero carbon from 2016.

Air Passenger Duty will be replaced with a duty payable per plane rather than per passenger from November 2009.

Finally, the UK is currently working towards a long-term goal of reducing CO2 emissions by at least 60 per cent by 2050. The Climate Change Bill will commit the government to fixed and binding 5-year carbon budgets

I've had an iPod for a month now and it's almost become an extra limb. Prior to winning the iPod I had never bothered with podcasts and got most of my tech news and such by browsing the web. Now, although I do still browse the net a fair bit, the main source of information has become a variety of different podcasts.

I originally started off listening to just 2 or 3 podcasts but am now subscribed to over 20. These include:

• 5 different podcasts from The TWiT Netcast Network
• 3 different podcasts from CNET.com
• 3 different podcasts from GameTrailers.com
• 3 different podcasts from Escape Artists, namely:
  • the sci-fi based Escape Pod
  • the horror based Pseudo Pod
  • the fantasy based Pod Castle; due to launch April 1st
• 2 different podcasts from BBC Radio
• The trailers podcast from ScreenRush
• The video podcast from DL.TV
• The video podcast from Kerrang
• The EPL (English Premier League) podcast from ITN
• The 1Up Radio podcast from 1Up.com
• The audio fiction series The Metamor City Podcast

No sooner do I decide that I'm not going to Download this year; due to a lack of acts that I was interested in, than they announce some acts that are making me reconsider.

Out of the original set of announcements only Mötörhead and Disturbed really interested me. Since then Kid Rock, Apocalyptica, Alter Bridge, Within Temptation and Children Of Bodom have also been announced.

I'm now back in two minds again.

Cali Lewis covered Twitter In Plain English from Common Craft on a recent episode of GeekBrief.TV. I'm not a Twitter user. I get the idea, but it just doesn't interest me. However, their website also includes instruction concerning Blogs, RSS Feeds and the undoubted highlight; Zombies. Go and take a look.

My Dad was released from hospital earlier today. Apparently, it wasn't gangrene in his toe after all, and it's responding well to the antibiotics they've given him. However, he's not totally in the clear. He has really bad circulation in his leg and they are calling him back into hospital next Monday to operate. They're going to use some small balloons to try and open up his veins to improve the circulation.

I had a bit of a late night last night, no drinking involved however; I was actually playing about with my website a wee bit more. I woke up just after 9am this morning with an absolutely pounding headache and decided that rather than get up I would give the headache another couple of hours. Anyway, went back to sleep and roused again at about 11:15am, still with the headache. I once again decided that I'd give the headache a wee bit more time and went back to sleep. I finally woke up just before 1:30pm, still with a headache. I decided that I'd wasted enough of the day and got up. I've taken a couple of tablets and to be honest I feel okay now.

To be honest; I think the title says it all...

I've spent a good couple of hours tweaking a lot of the backend of the blog. A lot of the tweaks just involved updating plugins and are just to help tighten up and streamline the way Movable Type manages itself and will not be visible or noticeable by the site visitors.

The only really visible frontend change is the addition of author and commentator images. I did have a go at trying to get pagination working to allow browsing backwards through the entries but couldn't get it to display past the first page. I'll have another look at it when I have more time and try again. In the interim, the archives pages will have to suffice.

After rumours of Flash coming to the iPhone persisting since July 2007 it would now appear unlikely. According to Apple CEO, Steve Jobs, Flash just won't cut it on the iPhone, or more accurately, the mobile version of Flash won't cut it and the desktop version would run too slowly.

The main problem is that the iPhone's embedded ARM processor is designed to use power far more efficiently than a desktop or laptop processor, cycling down when not needed in order to both conserve power and to limit heat production. Adobe's proprietary software would need to be recompiled and optimized for the ARM architecture, which isn't something Apple could do without Adobe's input.

Another problem is that the iPhone's OS X environment is designed to run from a relatively small disk image stored in NVRAM and Adobe's Flash, which isn't designed with memory conservation in mind, has memory leakage problems and would tend to use up more RAM than the iPhone's other apps are likely to use.

Couple Jobs' comments with Nokia's decision to go with Microsoft Silverlight on their next generation of phones and it leaves you wondering "Where does this leave Adobe's Flash?"

It's Friday. Time for some trivia.

Ice Cream
Flavours of ice cream available in Japan include octopus, ox tongue, cactus, chicken wing and crab. A restaurant in Osaka, Japan, serves whale ice-cream made from the blubber of the minke whale. Soft ice-cream of the type sold in ice-cream vans is given its slithery smoothness by an extract of seaweed. The last meal of Oklahoma Bomber Timothy McVeigh was almost a litre (2 pints) of mint choc-chip ice-cream.

Crisps
Odd crisp flavours available around the world include octopus, seaweed, banana, and sour cream and squid. In Hong Kong, you can buy packets of crispy fried crabs like packets of crisps.

Camels
Bedouin wedding feasts sometimes include a roast camel, stuffed with a sheep, stuffed with chickens, stuffed with fish, stuffed with eggs. Bedouin people cook a camel's hump by burying it underground and lighting a fire over the top of it. When they dig it up and eat it, the top is cooked, but the bottom still mostly raw and bloody. Camels' feet are cooked in a light stock and served with vinaigrette. Only the feet of young camels are considered tasty. Camel feet can also be cooked in camel milk.

Perhaps a bit harsh; but, in this case, true.

About a month or so ago he started to develop some blistering on his foot; more specifically on his big toe. At the time we told him to go and see a Doctor. He ignored us, and it's gradually got worse. Finally, today, he went to see a Doctor.

Too late.

They've told him that it's gangrene. They've taken him into hospital and whilst at first they had said that they were going to put him on antibiotics and see if that helped; it now transpires that they're likely to need to remove his big toe at the very least.

Well, okay, secondhand printer.

The HP Laserjet 4100N that I ordered off eBay arrived this afternoon; almost a week later than I had expected. It was very well packaged although I had to take it apart to ensure that there was no polystyrene pieces stuck inside it. It's actually a 4100 with a jet direct network card installed but that's no major difference. The biggie is that the listing stated it had a duplex unit with it, but it hasn't; again, it's not a major problem because I already had a duplex unit anyway. Suffice to say with the time taken for delivery, the lack of communication and the inaccuracies in the listing I've left neutral feedback.

Anyway, after installing extra memory in it out of my old printer and fiddling with a few of the settings it's up and running fine. I did have a small problem with paper jamming in the duplex unit but changing the paper tray has solved that.

Another Firefox plug-in that I can recommend is PicLens. PicLens transforms your browser into a full-screen "3D Wall" that lets you view images on the web by letting you effortlessly drag, click, and zoom your way around a wall of pictures. PicLens currently works on Flickr, Smugmug, DeviantArt, Photobucket, Picasa, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, Image search on Google, Yahoo, Ask, Live, AOL and a growing number of Media RSS-enabled web sites

Following this morning's announcement that Jeff Healey has passed away comes news that Gary Gygax; the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons has also passed away. Mr Gygax was 69 and had been in poor health for a length of time. Mr Gygax resided in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and was in semi-retirement, having almost suffered a heart attack after receiving incorrect medication to prevent further strokes after those on April 1 and May 4, 2004. He had also been diagnosed with an inoperable abdominal aortic aneurysm. He is survived by his second wife, Gail, 6 children and 7 grandchildren.

I've just discovered that Canadian blues & jazz guitarist Jeff Healey has died from a rare form of cancer, retinoblastoma, at St. Joseph's Health Centre in his home town of Toronto, Canada. He first came to prominence when he appeared in the 1989 movie Road House. He was 41 years old and is survived by his wife Christie and two children.

I got up this morning with the intentions of getting some serious prep-work done for this session's Ratkin game. Unfortunately, my Dad's PC had other ideas. When he booted it up it had a whole raft of virii and trojans listed. Upon further delving not only had he been infected with Vundo but also with various fake AV software that had disabled his existing AV protection and also a lot of administrator functions such as the ability to run the Task Manager. After spending an hour at it I decided that a complete clean install would be for the best. Suffice to say I got very little done today other than that. It's up and running and clean at least...

The 24 hour went great; but, boy am I tired. I got home by 9:15am and went to bed about 10:30am. Even though I woke up twice during the afternoon, at 3:15pm and 4:30pm it wasn't until 6:15pm that I actually got back up.

Anyway, we had fun playing In Nominee. We were Demons sent to the town of Whitehaven in the 1840s with the intention of reducing the town's level of piety. Got into a couple of fights with an Angel and his buddy and eventually succeeded.

The Ratkin that I ran was really a filler between my normal sessions of it. After settling down in Barstow after the devastation caused in Las Vegas previously one of the party went off to find an old friend and ended up getting into trouble in the sewers. After a big fight in the sewers with a Mokole, were-crocodile, where one of the characters died, it was a case of preparing for their next adventure and Fred's continued hunt for the vampire he was hired to kill.

The D&D I ran was more or less a basic dungeon crawl with the party charged to entering an old abandoned gold mine and clearing it of nasties. Most of the nasties were undead and the party managed to get all the way to the penultimate bad guy before we ran out of time. 2 of the party died in the fight with the Wyvern; which would've only left 4 characters to go up against the final baddie; a Vampire Drow Cleric. Unfortunately, as mentioned, we ran out of time and it's unlikely that I'll run the group again.

The final session was Fuzzy Heroes. We managed to get two rounds in and I ended up losing both. However, people were starting to flag by then and we decided to have a game of Munchkin and a game of Frag to round out the night. I won both.

It's 24 hour time again today; 9am today until 9am tomorrow. I'm looking forward to it; should be a lot of fun. About the only downer has been that my new printer hasn't arrived yet and I've had to do all the printing on my old 1100. No biggie; just time consuming and awkward.