1967's predictions for the "World of 1999"

From a film called "1999 A.D.", this clip shows 1967's vision of computing in the home of 1999. I particularly like the visionary view that it would still be the man paying all the bills - nice !!

Can you trust Wikipedia ?

This is the question asked by Luca de Alfaro who has written software which looks at the content of a Wikipedia entry and rates its veracity based on the history of the content. It "counts the degree to which any given contributor's work survives subsequent edits by other people" and assigns a colour to the words based on this reputation.

It is currently a standalone application which uses an older subset of Wikipedia entries, but Luca is hoping to work with the Wikimedia Foundation to offer it as a web application on the live site.

More here.

New cooling solution for the next generation...

As we all know, the main barrier to having super-fast processors and chips is that they need cooling and today's technology just isn't up to the job. A few (nutters) people have experimented with overclocking processors and cooling them using liquid nitrogen - see this site for a P4 that reached 5.24Ghz clock speed when cooled to -190 degrees C, but this isn't really practical for most of us !

The BBC news site today mentions a new method of cooling chips which uses "ionic wind" to dissipate the heat produced by increasingly powerful devices. Apparently the reason why fans don't cool as much as we think they do is that as the air from the fan wafts over the chip, the molecules nearest to the chip's surface can get stuck and therefore hinder the cooling process. Purdue University researchers have developed a way to shift these "stuck molecules" by using a small voltage which when applied to the ionic engine positively charges particles at one end of the chip which are then dragged towards a negatively charged wire at the other end thereby forcing constant air movement. This effect apparently increases the cooling effect of conventional fans by a massive 250% which could mean that faster and smaller chips can be produced.

Blimey !

Microsoft - apparently not the innovator we thought it was...

This rather long, and rather angry sounding (!) article by F.W. van Wensveen argues that Microsoft has not actually innovated anything since its foundation in 1975. We all know the story of the design for the Windows GUI being "nicked" from Apple, but the article argues that precisely nothing has been innovated by the mega-corp since its inception. If you have a spare few minutes (read: half hour !) it makes some interesting points about Microsoft's products over the years...

Worried about data security on your old hard disks ?

As we all know, there's only one way to ensure that your data can not be retrieved from your old hard disks - and that's by destroying them ! Have a look at the video below to see an industrial shredder make mincemeat of a number of hard disks. I want one !

Linden Lab shuts down the fun in Second Life

On wednesday Linden Lab announced a new policy which bans all forms of gambling within Second Life to comply with the American government's outlawing of online gambling which came into effect last October. A large amount of revenue is generated in Second Life from the many casino owners who buy land from Linden Lab and the fear is that those people will be forced to sell their land and may even leave the virtual world altogether. This will cause a massive drop in land prices but Linden Lab itself may not recover the money lost due to the new policy.

To me this seems to be an example of how laws and policies are unable to cope with an entity such as Second Life which has thousands of non-American "residents" and who shouldn't really be subject to American law. Many of the casino owners weren't American but they are having their businesses shut down because their virtual land is on a server which is physically located in America. It could be said that it'd be good for each country to have a server farm for its residents to connect to Second Life which would allow those who connect access to those activities that the country says are legal, but this is really missing the point of Second Life. It's supposed to be an international community which regulates itself. Linden Lab itself advertises "Your World, Your Imagination", but really it's "American World, Your Imagination (within limits)".

Oh yeah, I ended up in the Linden Village last night and found myself part of a rally against the new anti-gambling policy. There's me in the front holding the small banner !!

Environ-Mentalism targets Google

Slashdot reports that a blogger by the name of Mark Ontkush claims that Google, with its white background, consumes 74 watts of power whereas if it changed the background colour to black it would "only" use 59 watts. Heap Media, listening to these claims have created a black version of Google's search page appropriately named Blackle. Really though, the saving in energy is negligible and is apparently so small as to be within the error margin of most power meters. The Wall Street Journal did an investigation into Mark's claims and concluded that turning down the brightness of the monitor had a far greater effect than any change of background colour could produce. The small power saving is also only applicable to those using CRT monitors (now in the minority) as LCDs consume the same (small amount) or power no matter what is displayed on screen.

iPhone vs Blackberry for corporate use - and the winner is....

The Blackberry, hands down. Well at least according to a contributor to TechCrunch who has been using a Blackberry 8800 and an iPhone side by side for a few weeks. The useful comparison chart shows that while the iPhone is great as a mobile phone/music player for the home user, it just doesn't have the capabilities required for use in business. Such things as intelligent push email and email data synchronization are completely lacking in Apple's product. Still, the product isn't really marketed to the "suits" and they don't really need to worry about being unable to penetrate this market due to the demand from the ordinary consumer still going strong.

Digital Divide still growing...

The BBC reports that the usage of computers, the internet, and other digital devices is still dominated by male under 55 year olds. This continuing trend is despite government efforts to try to get older people and women using the internet. The report also states that those on a lower income and without further or higher education are less likely to be using the internet (which is fairly obvious I would've thought- if you're not earning much, you're not likely to be able to buy a computer and pay a monthly broadband subscription are you ?!!!).

The report also mentions that 42% of students have created a profile on a social networking site such as Facebook or MySpace as opposed to just 15% of the employed and only 2% of retired people. This is not really that surprising since students tend to have a lot of free time on their hands to use such sites whereas the employed are generally working (duh !) during the day and relaxing at night. I think retired people's reluctance to join such sites is probably due to their reputation as a "young person's thing" and so don't hold much interest for the older person (the exception being my 64 year old uncle who has a Bebo profile, but then again he also has a Honda Goldwing with neon underlighting so maybe he's not your typical retired person !!!).

If you think 24mbps is fast, think again...

Engadget reports that the fastest home broadband connection has been installed for a 75 year old Swede. The fibre connection gives reported speeds of 40Gbps meaning that you could, theoretically, download a full high definition dvd in about 2 seconds !!! The 75 year old is the mother of Sweden's "internet legend" (whatever that means !) Peter Lothberg. Apparently such speeds are possible due to a new modulation technique which allows data to be transferred directly between routers up to 2000 kilometres apart with no intermediary transponders. I think we'll be waiting a looooong time to get those sort of speeds over here though...

AjaxLife - Second Life viewer created by a 15 year old

Reuters' Second Life news page has an interview with Katherine Berry, a 15 year old British girl who has coded a Second Life web browser viewer - apparently she coded all 2000+ lines of it in a weekend !! At the moment it's fairly limited in that you cannot walk around or teleport, but the fact that she has created a client which can connect to the Second Life Grid and allow chat and IM is a great first step to a fully working viewer which will remove the need for a large client download. And all this from a 15 year old - sickening !!!
NB. When I tried, I could not connect to the viewer as it looks like Katherine's server is being hammered by all the people wanting to try it - I'll let you know when I've had a go though !

"I've fallen and I can't get up" - Is this you ? Then I have the solution !

ETRI's Bioinformatics Team have developed a mobile phone which connects to a belt sensor which detects falling motion. This was developed, primarily, for elderly people who may be prone to falls. When the sensor detects the falling motion, the mobile phone sends a message to a computer sitting in a hospital and this computer then automatically calls the phone to find out if the person is hurt. The phone is equipped with GPS so that an ambulance can easily find the injured person.
Nice solution, but not if you're an grandmother who enjoys bouncy castles....

MASSIVE 70" Touch Screen PC - now if only it was running OSX...

Engadget has a story on a new 70" all in one touch screen PC which is soon to be available (although it is aimed more at companies than individuals - you'd need a pretty big living room to house it after all !!). It's a shame that one of the pictures shows an XP error message though !!

Even more social networking sites - noooooo !!

It seems that both Yahoo and Google are now jumping on the social networking bandwagon and are due to launch the "interestingly-named" Yahoo Mosh, and "more conventional-sounding" Google SocialStream respectively. TechCrunch have a good description of both including a video description of the SocialStream product. SocialStream seems to be an interesting cross-over between RSS feed reader and social networking site, allowing you to see clips of your friends' recent postings on SocialStream itself as well as blogger and others.

The problem is, there's now so many social networking sites that people can't keep up with them and it'll be tricky persuading Facebook users, for instance, to change their primary site due to the fact that friends tend not to move to other sites without good reason. It'll be interesting to see who comes out on top now that the likes of Google are involved !

Vista Migration in a year ? Hmmmmmm...

In this week's IT Week magazine there's an article which quotes Dell saying that "businesses should expect a migration to Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system to take up to three years" for firms without current plans. This means that if we started planning the Vista rollout now, it could be 2010 before we see the migration completed ! The article argues that the application testing and packaging phase of a Vista migration, and the end-user training, can take up to a year (this includes remedial work required for the 20 percent of applications which currently do not work under Vista). Better start now !!

Better than the Microsoft Surface Computer - and a whole lot bigger !

Reading the BBC News site's article about touch screen technology, it seems that New York University research scientist Jeff Han has gone one better than Microsoft with a multi-touch screen that already has the likes of Lockheed Martin, CBS and Pixar interested. Have a look at the demonstration video on Jeff's company Perceptive Pixel's site - I want one !

World of Borecraft

Just read an interesting article about companies and schools trying to make learning more fun by designing games which educate the player. The author of the article argues that by designing a game purely to teach the user something, it actually removes any element of fun that might have existed due to the fact that the player is fully aware that they are playing the "game" for a serious reason. This is certainly a different view to the one that Altered Learning are pushing !

Must get out more.... My Second Life Job

I've now become such a regular at Taff's Bar (a Welsh-themed pub with a dancefloor - I go there because of the great music !) that I've been given a job !
My official title is "Taff's Bar Host" which basically means that I'm supposed to greet people. My unofficial title, however, is "Queen of the Raffle" after raising a raffle prize of 1500L$ in a couple of hours (the highest it has ever been is about 1700L$ but that was when the raffle was weekly) !! The bar owner actually paid me 100L$ for my "work" ! Like I said, I really must get out more...

Second Life in Education (and other virtual worlds)

Found a really good blog about virtual environments with an emphasis on their uses in education. There are a number of interesting slideshows as well as videos about how people are using these virtual environments in their lives. There's also quite a nice examination of the "Web 2.0" concept in the "Web, Web 2.0 and Virtual Worlds" slideshow.

Microsoft Office RoundTable

Just read about a new videoconferencing/webcam hybrid product from Microsoft called Microsoft Office RoundTable . It uses a number of webcams housed in a very sci-fi looking base to show a panoramic view of the conference room and utilises some clever software which shows a close up of the person currently speaking. Apparently it can't be fooled by non-human sounds too (such as tapping on the table, clanking a coffee cup on the table etc.). The product is designed for use with Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007 and Office Communications Server 2007.

Apparently the product uses mirrors so that the people in the meeting don't feel intimidated by a camera pointing directly at them. So in this case, the product really IS smoke and, well, webcams !!

Microsoft Research at Cambridge

Just watched an interesting video showing the work that Microsoft's Research group does in Cambridge. Particularly interesting was the section about a laptop screen which utilises "Surface Computer" multi-touch technology - more useful to most people than having a large coffee-table style surface computer I would've thought!

Microsoft Surface Computer - do you REALLY want one? (requires sound)

Vista DVD Anti-Counterfeiting Measures

A person with very good eyesight spotted something in the hologram on the Vista installation DVD. It turns out there's actually 4 tiny (and when I say "tiny" I mean less than 1mm !) pictures hidden within the Vista hologram logo. One of the photos shows a few faces from the group who designed the Vista hologram according to the Windows Vista Blog, with the other images showing artworks in the public domain - amazing resolution when you consider their size:

See here for the rest of the pictures!

All these measures are to ensure that you are using authentic media to install your OS. What will they think of next ?!!

Second Life Metrics.. whatever next ?!

I've just found a company called Maya Realities whose sole purpose is to provide metrics to sim owners in second life showing things such as number of visitors per hour, whereabouts avatars teleport into the sim, how long they stay etc. It's amazing (I think) that companies are providing such things for a virtual world - but then again, with big businesses such as IBM, Sony and Apple getting involved in Second Life, there will be a need to provide such statistics.

Innovations - it just gets better !

I've been looking at various speeches by people who attended the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference and there's a few amazing innovations to be seen.

The most interesting things I've seen are Blaise Aguera y Arcas's demonstration of Photosynth which is a way of pulling together photographs of places and mapping them onto a 3d map (you have to watch the video to understand it as I can't really describe it that well in words !). You can try out Microsoft's tech preview of it here.

Another interesting idea was Anand Agarawala's BumpTop user interface. Essentially, he's used his own, real life desktop as inspiration for a new user interface. This means that instead of having "flat" icons on a desktop, the icons are fully "malleable" - you can screw them into a ball, throw them at others, stack them up, pin them to the "walls" of the user interface, and make them larger and smaller. I'm not really sure what the practical applications of this type of user interface would be, other than for home users to have an interface which more realistically mirrors real life. For professional users, however, this type of interface would be confusing and make things difficult to find as it is such a change from the organised, regimented desktop presented by Microsoft and Apple (and not forgetting Linux !) - granted, these user interfaces aren't perfect but they work for the majority of people. (I'd still like to have a play with the BumpTop UI though !!!)

There's lots more videos on the TED site that I'm going to be looking at over the next few days, so watch this space !

Facebook, Second Life and Windows Live Spaces

To add to the list of forums, rss feeds, blogs and wikis I've contributed to and read, I've now got a Facebook profile. The idea is you join a regional or interest-related network and put in some personal information so that others with the same interests can find you. You can also join interest groups - there's already a few University of Derby ones, mostly coming from students. Again, it's another collaborative and social use of the world wide web fitting into the "Web 2.0" remit (if you believe in the "2.0" concept that is...).
Microsoft have now jumped on the Facebook bandwagon and created Windows Live Spaces. Initial impressions are that it is pretty much copying the style of Facebook, but with blogging built-in and linking to Windows Live Messenger accounts. Looks interesting, but Facebook is winning the popularity contest at the moment, and it's only a matter of time before Google produce something similar.

Recently I've been spending more and more time in Second Life (as Gypsum Kidd - no laughing !). I've even designed myself a t-shirt to wear using a template on Robin Wood's excellent SL tutorial site (it's easier than you'd think !) and have finally found somewhere that plays music I actually want to listen to (Taff's Bar) ! What with that and creating a Second Life group (cost is 100 Linden dollars), I've hardly had time to do anything else when I get home !

I'll be having a meeting next week with various members of the R&I Group to discuss the potential changes to the student email system. The idea is to host it externally using either Google's Apps for Education, or Microsoft's Windows Live @ Edu solutions (as discussed in an earlier blog post). It'll be interesting to get some feedback from other members of LIS about this proposal, in particular concerns about the security of student data.

Vista Annoyances - or are they ??

Having used Windows Vista Ultimate as my primary OS since March this year, I'd have to disagree with most of the "annoyances" in TechRepublic's "Top 10 Windows Vista Annoyances" document:

1. No more Boot.ini
So ? How much longer do you think Microsoft should use a boot process that's already 10-ish years old ?? Change has to occur at some point and it's just a case of getting used to the new way of doing things. If you don't like Vista's built-in bcdedit program, there's plenty of free alternatives - I used one called EasyBCD to edit mine. Besides, how often did normal (ie. non-techie) users need to edit boot.ini in XP ?? Hardly ever - not many "normal" users dual-boot, and those that do don't tend to be afraid of doing a bit of reading to find out how to do it.

2. Buried Display Settings
Oh, and the display settings were so much easier to find in XP were they ? The only change is that in Vista you click on a link rather than a tab - not really that hard is it ! Again, why be so afraid of change ? I remember a massive fuss being made about the changes in XP when that first came out, but apparently XP is now the best design for an OS ever !

3. Control Panel
Again, the same fuss was made when XP came out with its changed default view for the control panel. If you didn't like it (as I didn't), you've always got the option for the Classic View. Same in Windows Vista. Oh, and you can now put an icon for the Control Panel on the desktop in the "Customize Desktop" options in Vista - didn't have that option with XP did you ?

4. Shutdown Options
What ??? I've been using Vista since March and have never been even mildly flummoxed by Vista's shutdown procedure. It's actually easier to perform a normal shutdown (ie. power off) than it was in XP - click the "power" button and presto ! Vista shuts down. Remember when you did the same thing in XP, you were prompted to Restart, Shutdown, Hibernate/Switch User. That's two clicks to shutdown as opposed to Vista's one.
I know there are a number of extra shutdown options, but these are hidden in the pop-up menu next to the "power" button, so most normal users need never see them. And if you did want to do something other than power off, you've got more options available to you than the old sleep-mode or hibernate. I've never thought that having a large number of available options was a problem - you get exactly what you want rather than a compromise.

5. Application Support (or lack thereof)
Did you make the same assumption when you moved from your old OS to Windows XP ? Don't you remember the useless compatibility mode in XP which rarely, if ever, made your old legacy applications work ? Thought not. So what did you do ? Yes, you upgraded your software. Same rules apply to Vista. Besides, you can get an easy to use Upgrade Advisor to run to prepare you for the upgrade to Vista.
And yes, it is up to the application vendors, not Microsoft, to provide updated software to run in Vista, or instructions as to how to make it work under the new OS. Personally, all of my software runs without a problem under Vista, and Second Life (which is not even supposed to work with Vista according to the website) actually works better (due to the Vista drivers for my graphics card) than it does running on XP.

6. Aero Hardware Requirements
So you have to have a fairly decent graphics card to run the Aero Glass theme - again, so ?!! Is it really a problem to use a different theme if your graphics card won't support the admittedly nice-looking but ultimately pointless Aero Glass theme ? And if it is really important to you to have translucent windows and the 3D-flip alt-tab alternative, go and buy a graphics card which WILL support it ! Besides, even the cheapest sub-£100 modern graphics card will support it so you don't have to pay a fortune. And as for the feature not being available in the Home Basic edition, well maybe you should've paid that little bit extra for an edition which has the theme included if it's so important to you ! As the old saying goes "you get what you pay for".

7. Too Many Flavors
I'd maybe agree with this one - there are a LOT of different choices when choosing a Vista edition. But again, Microsoft haven't done this for fun. They've done it because people moaned about having to pay for features that they never used. Fair enough.

8. UAC Prompts
A good idea in principle, as the article says, but I think they shouldn't have this enabled by default for accounts which are members of the Administrators group. If you're an administrator you tend to know what you're doing, and be willing and able to fix something if it goes wrong (in principle at least !), so having to say "Continue" when wanting to change anything is going a bit far. Thankfully Vista allows the feature to be disabled if you have the appropriate rights.
For an account which is a member of the Users group, however, it's probably a good idea, but again, it should be up to the Administrator of the machine in question to decide to enable the option.

9. Budget Breaker
Yes, Vista is definitely a rip off. Especially in good old rip-off Britain where we're charged a good 50% more for the OS than our US counterparts. It is a good idea to offer the cut-down version of Vista (Home Basic) as there are a lot of people out there who only use their PC to browse the internet and send a few emails. Why force them to pay more for a load of features that they'll never use ?

10. Usability Issues
"I am a fan of simplicity and this is something Windows Vista lacks". Oh, come on !! Have you SEEN how easy it is to set up a home network in Vista ? Far more easy than XP ever made it ! It almost does it without you needing to do a thing !
WXP News currently has an article titled "Will Vista Make You Dumb and Lazy?" arguing that because Vista is so easy to use, it removes the need to learn the "nuts and bolts" of an operating system - a bit different to TechRepublic's view !

So in conclusion then, I think that TechRepublic's article is very reactionary, painting XP in a light which it really doesn't deserve (remember all those BSODs ?). I'm not saying Vista's perfect - nothing ever is - but it's nowhere near as annoying as TechRepublic portrays it to be. Once the software vendors get their act together properly, the main problems with Vista (software not working under the new OS, 3rd party drivers being unavailable) will disappear. And when Windows Vienna comes out in a few years time, it'll be Vista that TechRepublic will be all nostalgic about - mark my words !!

Well.. I'm addicted to Second Life - it's official

Yes, I've now gone onto stage 2 of my addiction to Second Life by buying an avatar with some of my hard earned cash - and yes, I know I've got nothing to show for my money other than a few admittedly nice looking pixels, but it just had to be done !

Here I am, looking very smug after putting on my new "suit" :

Yes, I went for the "furry suit" option when creating my SL self (called Gypsum Kidd by the way !) - more fun than the human option I reckon !! Check out the custom HUD (Heads Up Display) for the avatar on the bottom right of that photo - it controls things like whether I show my fangs, bare my claws, wag my tail and close or open my eyes - all very important in this weird world !

Here's a video of me sitting at a lovely executive's desk in @Home island (kind of like a large electronics store) - I'm still playing around with the video - for some reason it plays very fast and I haven't found a way to reduce the frame rate yet, but bear with me !

Second go at Second Life

Well, I had another go at getting Second Life working smoothly on my laptop over the weekend - updated my XP graphics card drivers, killed as many running processes as I could, and found it didn't make the slightest bit of difference - I still had a frame rate of, at the most, 2 frames per second !!
In the end, I gave up on XP, booted into Vista Ultimate, installed Second Life (with no issues), and started it up. And guess what ? It ran smoothly, and that's despite Vista not being officially supported by Second Life yet ! It seems that the Vista driver for my graphics card can handle Second Life better than the most up to date XP driver downloaded from Dell. All the more reason for me to use Vista as my primary OS (now if only Netgear could get its act together and get the Vista driver out for my SAN device, I could ditch XP altogether....).

So what of Second Life ? Well, I had a look at the various SL Universities, including the University of Hertfordshire which has some land and a building, but not a lot else by the look of it... I also joined the University of Derby's SL group (along with Mat and Mel), but couldn't find any of them online when I was there. I'm sure we'll meet up at some point though !
I was generally impressed with the whole idea though, and am looking forward to buying my first avatar (yes, yes, I know it's money for air really, but I just really want that avatar !!).

This week I have been mostly...

Comparing the possible replacements for the University's current student email system (NIMS) - see my post from the 18th May for more information.
The one I'd go with personally is Google Apps for Education mainly because it offers a lot more for your money (which is no money at all !). The winning features (of which there are too many to mention here) for me are the fact that there's no infrastructure requirement (Google uses APIs to perform user administration and directory synchronisation, as opposed to Microsoft's requirement for an Identity Integration Server and SQL database), there's a 20Mb attachment size limit as opposed to Microsoft's 10Mb, and with Google's solution you have the ability to do a phased user migration from the old to the new using an email gateway. Obviously though this is just my personal opinion, so I've emailed the Student Union President in order to get another opinion and to ask about the best way to conduct a survey of students' current email usage. I'll let you know when I get a reply !

I've also had a look at Second Life. It seems that quite a few Universities have "land" in Second Life, using it to provide distance learning, marketing for the Univerity, and as a testing ground for new ways of learning. Unfortunately I had a few problems with my laptop which meant that my first experience of Second Life was of extreme frustration with the "choppiness" and lag when trying to do anything at all. I'm going to give it another go this weekend though and see if I can move without waiting 2 minutes for the screen to update !

So, not a bad 2nd week in the new job - I'm pleased to say I'm still enjoying myself - here's hoping that it continues !!

Dreamscene

Tried out a Vista Ultimate extra last night called "Dreamscene". It plays (in a loop) any mpeg or wmv file as your background wallpaper. Nice idea in principle, but using it on my 3Ghz P4HT laptop with 1.2Gb of RAM, it was very resource hungry and the video noticably juddered when doing such things as opening an application or moving a file.
Besides, it really does nothing more than rip off Nvidia's NVDVD which was released in November 2002 (yes, 5 years ago !) and plays dvd video as the desktop wallpaper - and from what I recall, Nvidia's application was a lot less resource-hungry, running perfectly happily on an Athlon 2Ghz with 512Mb RAM !
Still, it is only in the preview stages, so hopefully Microsoft will iron out the stuff that hogs the system resources before going officially live with it - and hopefully, they will allow you to use .avi files as well as mpegs and wmvs since these are the most widely used types of video files these days - despite Microsoft pushing their wmv format !

First week at work - here's what happened

Well, the first week's over now and it's been a week of meeting lots of new faces and trying to remember lots of names to go with them.

I've also been given my first assignment, dealing with the replacement of the student email system and have been spending time comparing the various educational solutions from Google (Google Apps for education), Windows Live Hotmail (http://get.live.com/edu) and Yahoo (Yahoo Mail).

First impressions are that Google provides the best overall solution, offering 2.8Gb mailbox storage per user, POP in and out, and only minimal advertising on the page (with the option to turn it off !). Next week I'll be meeting the student president to get an initial idea of the types of things students use email for, along with an opportunity to ask questions about how to gather data from students about their current usage and how they'd like to see it improved (possibly using a web form ??).

I've also had a quick look at the HP Blade solution being considered and was impressed by their Virtual Connect innovation. Looks like it will reduce a lot of the hassle involved in adding new equipment onto fibre channels.

So all in all, it's been a busy week but I'm looking forward to getting stuck into various projects in the coming weeks.

I'm home !

Well, after 6 years living and working in London, I've now returned home to the East Midlands. I can't tell you how good it is to be back in the countryside away from the pollution and filth that's always present on the streets of our capital. Don't get me wrong, I did enjoy most of my time in London, mainly because of the great people I worked with down there, but it's no place to live.

Now I'm working at the University of Derby as an IT Researcher and I really believe it's the job I was born to do (cheesy I know !!!). I actually get paid to research new technologies and design solutions for people - something I've been doing for people for years as a sideline to my day to day work. I'm just finishing my first week here and it already feels like the best move I've ever made !

Probably the best thing about moving out of the capital though is the fact that I no longer have to take stinking, slow public transport to work. Being able to get into your car, turn the music up and put the windows down (when it's not raining of course !) is something I've missed for so long. I'm driving my dad's car at the moment (a rather old and clunky P reg Peugeot 106 diesel), but the plan is to replace it in the next few months with a shiny (kind of) second hand car of my own. So in the space of a month, I've gone from spending two hours on buses each day to get to and from work, to 1 hour in a car each day - and that's door to door !