GIs Colour In?, Biodegredation, Star Wars Nemesis

Australia has developed a biodegradable food packaging that's cheap and dissolves into carbon dioxide and water [WRD]. I have high hopes.

Whilst not a commited Trekkie (or Trekker) I like to watch Star Trek when I can. I've only seen one of the movies on a cinema screen. That happened by chance, since it was shown in the field I was camping in at Glastonbury :o). However, just one viewing of the new trailer for Nemesis and I'm already keen to book my ticket. Looks great! Since it's not out till December I guess I'll just have to fill time by scribbling in the Military colouring book. Don't ask me ...

Web Evolution, Link-Banks, MadKane, Accessibility

I've been wandering around the website of MadKane, the author of the Blogger's Rhapsody. There's lots of funny stuff there. Check out Dubya's Dayly Diary. Now you can laugh your socks of, while keeping up with American politics!

Here's a great new idea for translation using the web.

If you link to a Disenchanted article and are amongst the top 20 referrers to that article they instantly refer back to you. Cool concept. Stuff like this and Stephens Web could really change the dynamic of surfing for blog readers and writers. Dive Into Mark has now done the same. This is a bit weird as I had a blog 90% complete which talked about Dive Into Mark. I'd come across their growing series on web page accessibility. The only reason I hadn't blogged this yet is I hadn't changed my template to reflect the sensible strategy. Maybe now that I've admitted I know, I'll get around to doing something about it :o).

Anyway, going back to referring back, so to speak, if you start following those links above and follow the referrer back-links found there, you can quickly come across this article. It talks about the new trend of back-linking and how it fits into the blogosphere. Very interesting. At this juncture I should point out that I originally came to Disenchanted following a link to Stephen's Web that had appeared in my referral list, courtesy of themselves. Following me? :o) Anyway in the first paragraph of the Blogspace Under the Microscope it says the following:

Suddenly a new kind of feedback loop was created. With a twist of the lens, conversations that had been diffuse and indirect came sharply into focus. Almost immediately the meme replicated.

I considered the route that I'd followed to get to the article, and the fact that thousands of others had done the same. My conclusion? I think it's proved itself apposite in the extreme! My prediction: We'll be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing in the near future ... and I think we'll like it ...

Blogging great to learn web dev, FTJob, Spam

Today's thought of the day: blogging is a great way to learn web development. If you want it to be, that is. There's HTML, obviously, if only to link to pictures and articles. I began tweaking tables and so forth in my template almost immediately. Maybe I should have gone for Style Sheets but I was already slightly familiar with tables and wanted to tinkle with my layout straight away. I have just learnt a snippet of CSS. I wanted to set the "hover link" font, so that the colour changed when you had the pointer over a link. This was to make it obvious where I'd jammed more than one link into a single word. See "pros" in previous article for an example.

There's been the brief foray into XML for the RSS feeds. I've also picked up a little JavaScript to get the font size to change occasionally in the "Bloing" title. It seemed a nicer idea than an animated gif. The great thing is that you can avoid all this stuff if you like. Meanwhile, for inquisitive programmers, like me, it means I can just dip in to what I what when I want. Much more accommodating than aiming to attempt building a whole web site from scratch. All this without having a server or paying out any cash. Geek heaven ;o).

In brief: Watch out, you may get sued for complaining about spam. Anyone who's filling in application forms this year is going to love f__kthatjob.com. Even if you're not (like me) it's hilarious!

Minuteman!, Referrals, Pepys, Rhapsody

I went to a gig last night and it was storming! I'd seen Minuteman before but this time they really rocked the house! I'd do a proper review but I'm no muso and I would only sound like a wally :o). I'll leave it to the pros or listen for yourselves. They are also on the play lists of at least Radio 1 and XFM. Definitely one to watch as they start to release their first singles.

I welcome the new debate about banning battery chickens. In all honesty, I don't tend to be very "right on". I know it sounds selfish (and I guess it is) but it's much easier to be concerned when there's a direct benefit for me. I purchase as many mass-produced groceries as the next household but I do object to the decline in standards this has caused. It's seems to me that quality vegetables and meat aren't as available as they once were. I'm even finding myself sympathising with our European cousins for their attempts to ban the vegetable-oil product known as "English chocolate". Anyway, getting back to the point, I swapped to free-range eggs a couple of years ago when I discovered just how good they taste. I'm convinced that if we don't change our buying habits to reflect the quality of the goods we'll be on a very slippery slope. Man cannot live by Big Mac and Sunny-D alone :o).

In yet more tweaks to the template: I'm now using Stephen's Web Referrals to display the last 10 referrals in the sidebar. Cheers Stephen! Also added is the Google Challenge icon. Looks like a bit of a laugh.

Bloing recently had the pleasure of becoming the 1000th weblog to join the Pepys Project. Mike has now kindly put a funky banner on their homepage. Cool! Thanks to the new referral bit in the sidebar I can already see a few people have popped over from there. Welcome! Cup of tea?

For a little light relief, check out the Blogger's Rhapsody.

Boring Work, "Owen is ..."

One last blog before I go back to boring work tomorrow.

I came across this idea thanks to Jon's blog. It's another simple "fun with Google" concept. Just do a search for "YourName is" in Google. It seems "Owen is" ...

... a very recent initiative which has as its aim the building of an on-line library of Welsh-language texts.

... new England captain

... aiming to make his goal-scoring mark on the World Cup as Sven-Goran Eriksson's England advance into the second stage of the tournament.

... Chairman of the Legislative Committee on Economic Development and serves on the Governor’s Council on Substance Abuse

... also the editor of the International Journal for Engineering Computations and is a member of several Editorial Boards.

... from the "Lancaster's Unsung Scientific Heroes" website.

... Mike Kinsella

... part of The Classical Music Web Ring

... joint industry/academia collaboration

... a shovel-and-truck open pit

... located in the Upper Hunter Valley of New South Wales, 20km north of the township of Singleton.

... moved to head of the class

... Growin'

... gay but in Ceri's words "is having a hard time coming out of the closet".

... Will's son and very similar to his dad in many ways

... England's top striker

... unfazed by the close attention he can expect to face

... just Fab-ulous

... my favorite actor and it helps that he's in my favorite musical!

... First Aider for the Department with a full certificate in first aid skills and knowledge from the St. John Ambulance Service

... a master in the art of sheepdog handling.

... and that's just from the first 20 of 20,600 possibilities. I don't think it really sums me up but what a laugh. :o)

Who "you is"?

Digital emotion, SpiderGoats, Drugs, Zeitgeist

How quickly the world is changing. It seems we now have machines with emotion and genetically created SpiderGoats. I kid you not. The goats have been created to produce silk for use in body armour.

In Brief: The Observer has been investigating how the Brixton drug decriminalisation experiment has been going. After yesterday's post re. obesity comes worrying news about the "other half". Apparently there's been a boom in Pro-Anorexia pages on the web. Not great.

After my OTT coverage of Google the other day, I just learnt a couple of things I didn't know. Firstly, within the new and experimental area known as Google Labs there's a new keyboard shortcut search which I like the look of. Then, tucked away in their Press Center, is the Google Zeitgeist. It's an interesting breakdown of search patterns and trends over time. For example, It shows Counterstrike is gaining popularity as a search term, but r kelly and mike tyson are disappearing fast. About time too! Bye! Talking of CS, could CS Plus be taking over when it's released. Very mixed reception to this so far.

Space is the colour of Latte. Is the Starbucks takeover due soon? /shivers. Being mean, I have to say that I noticed that a Google search for starbucks devil returns 7,240 results. He he.

Thought of the day. Blogging has really got me back in to surfing. I'd begun to use the Web as a tool having decided there wasn't enough time to keep up with anything else and I must say it's nice to be dipping my toes back in :o).

Brain Glow, Fat, Sex, Buffy Burgers, Blog Roll

Back to some more light hearted blogging today. Was that a sigh of relief I hear? :o)

Some Brains glow at smiling faces. Doesn't surprise me. A smiley face can light up my whole day. (And the extraverted angle applies according to my Bloginality.

Another piece that rang true to me on a personal level was about Obesity clues from brain-imaging. I have, for the record, a low sense of gravity. A little extra cushioning. OK I'm fat :o). I hoping to rectify this like most of my fellow blobsters but you have to outsmart what feels like an addiction. I have been trying to understand and beat the whole "feel down -> eat -> feel better -> feel fat -> feel worse ... repeat" cycle since I was in primary school so I've had a lot of time to think about it :o). This article matches my conclusions more than so many other views I've seen. An interesting read even if you're not a Lardy.

In brief:

• Apparently advertisers should avoid sex and buffy burgers.
• BBC News overtakes Sky News.
• We may have lost the footy but at least the Brazilian players thought Beckham was cute :o).

In yet another change to my template, I'm now using Blogrolling.com for my blogroll. It lists the blogs as before but will now show if they've updated. Very groovy. Now all I need to do is add some more blogs :o). They even have an RSS feed of the blog roll. Oops - I nearly managed to avoid the subject this time :o).

Blogs, News Aggregators and RSS feeds

Right apologies up front for this post. If it all seems to be going a bit techy all of a sudden, please forgive me. There's so many new things to investigate and talk about since I'm new to so much of the blogging shenanigans. Bloing will settle down into a cosier, chattier place after the initial excitement has passed I promise :o).

I just have to say more about RSS feeds as I've encountered all kinds of things since my last post! Firstly, some posts around the web indicate that Feedreader may be a bit buggy and you can't use it through a proxy server and firewall (i.e. not at work).

NewzCrawler seems popular but it's $24.95 at the time of writing although there is a 14 day trial version. This does allow the use of a proxy server. At first glance it looks like you may be able to use it to create feeds for your blog or Usenet posts but I'm unsure about this feature. I'm assuming that it does allow you to create your own XML feeds but only if you post all your entries using NewzCrawler. I.e. blogs straight to Blogger wouldn't get streamed. This is just an assumption though.

There are other news aggregators, as these readers can be called. Including some that work via a web page (handy to avoid firewall/proxy issues). A couple of examples of these are Figby and Newsisfree. Whilst these mean you can read your feeds from any place you have browser access, I believe they are limited to the news sources available on their respective sites. Here's a good comparison of free News Aggregators from a good blogger.

I was tempted to start using a local blogging tool as this would allow me to create XML templates as well as the HTML ones and thus provide my own feed. It has the minor disadvantage that I would only be able to modify and enter blogs from home. But then I came across the great little RSSify PHP script. It can be used to convert your HTML output from Blogger into an RSS .92 feed. See the icon in the sidebar for my feed. You won't need ASP/PHP or any of that jazz on your server either. It just takes a little tweak of your template. You only need to add one tag. Nice one Voidstar! This literally took 2 minutes to do.

One limitation of RSSify is that since Blogger doesn't use titles it tries to concoct one using the first 40 characters of each post. That's why all my posts now have the little bold titles. Should make the feeds prettier. BTW I came up with a handy way of preventing it using any more characters after the title. I use a COMMENT tag, just after the title, that's simply full of spaces. Seems to work a treat! Well when I say it works, I can't seem to subscribe to from it from feedreader but I'm not sure what's not working yet ...

I also discovered that YACCS, the guys who kindly provide the comments on this site, also provide RSS feeds of these comments. Now I can be notified every time someone leaves a message, if I'm at an RSS reader :o). Should you wish to do so, the RSS shortcut is . This works a treat and could be most handy.

Remember: All this has been used for free on basic ISP homepages. No money or server (ASP, PHP etc) scripting required! If you have access to server tools then there's plenty of more flexible solutions available but this will do me for the moment. On a slight aside, fyuse looks interesting. I'd also like to check out Blogtrack but the site seems to be unavailable for the time being :o(.

For the bloggers, Weblogs.com has a list of blogs that have RSS feeds. As far as I can see you wouldn't be able to use this with the voidstar feed as you need to post update changes to Weblogs.com.

For more information, this RSS for Librarians article is a very readable and links to useful places.

Back with updates and something non-programmy soon ;o).

EU/Iran friends?, RSS, London Blog Map

Some more good news on the international communication front with the EU extending a hand of friendship to Iran [BBC]. BTW I'm a bit behind on my news at the moment. So apologies if I'm a tad off the cutting edge :o).

However, that could all be about to change. I've just downloaded the freeware windows application Feedreader. This is new territory for me but something I've been increasingly interested in. It looks very funky. It reads and displays Internet newsfeeds aka RSS feeds based on XML. If that's nonsensical to you, it roughly means you can run the program and get instant messages when your favourite news sources get updated. There's loads of sites available. (You may have seen a funky red XML button on some sites.)

Here's a quick sampling of what you could subscribe to: Slashdot, Wired News, The Register, Quotes of the Day, CNN, Weblogs, website development, evhead, dilbert, BBC News, Blogdex, Daypop, internet stories, all types of news (London, science, space ...) and so much more! You can see a list of the Top 100 most subscribed RSS feeds c/o Userland. I believe this technology will become an important addition to blogs over time. If you can use ASP on your web server then you may be able to feed your blog into it. Watch it with interest... Meanwhile it should provide plenty of blogging opportunity :o). Of course it's the usual story right now. No time to read the feeds :o).

One last snippet: If you're a London Blogger check out the fantastic new UK Bloggers Tube map. A nifty addition to the web!

Another late night just before an early morning (England playing Brazil for breakfast). Well if you can't treat yourself on a Thursday night when can you? :o)

Real Life Counter-Strike and CS Config Scripts

The Army are using a version of Half-Life, similar to the Counter-Strike mod, for training! Says something for the quality of the game. As if that was ever in doubt :o). Thanks to the missus for spotting that one!

In celebration, here's something that may me of use to fellow CS players, it's my take on some groovy buy scripts.

Google Expose

Google are now using the Google search engine to develop Google. Could Google prove to be the next business development tool? This article gives me a good excuse to start what I hope will become a regular feature, Classic Links. The idea is to mention sites that are old favourites of mine and are well worth investigating if they're new to anyone reading this blog. Now I doubt very much that anyone reading this hasn't encountered Google. It is the search engine of the moment.

The reason I want to cover Google is that I use it so much that I have tried to glean every feature available. There's lots there! Here's a few bits and bobs. If you know them all then go straight to the top of the class!

• Advanced search allows you to search by language, type of file (Word Doc, PDF etc), links, news ...
  • Links are very handy for bloggers. You can see who's linking to you. Additionally, Google uses these links to rate the destination. So link:www.google.co.uk in the search window would show you how many web pages have hyperlinks to the UK Google site.
• Site specific search is very handy when you are pretty certain you know what site the information is on and are just looking for the page. For example, site:www.blogger.com faq would find any faqs on Blogger.com.
• Answers is handy if you can't find what your looking for using Google's power alone. Here people answer your questions or you can answer them. Reading other people's questions can be a source of interest in itself :o). It does cost cash to ask questions though.
• Did you know that when you get your search results, the bit at the top that says
  example:  Searched the web for search. Results 1-100 of about 63,700,000. Search took 0.22 seconds.
  is clickable. If a word is underlined it is a recognised dictionary word and following the link will take you to the dictionary definition.
• Cached Links: For some reason a lot of people seem to miss this feature and it can be very powerful for a variety of uses:
  • If a page you want to read has been updated and no longer has the information you wanted (such as a blog front page) the cached version will (it's the cached version that Google compares your search criteria to after all).
  • If your site goes down and you don't have a backup you may be able to recover some of it from Google's cache.
  • Always useful when a site has gone (e.g. bust), a server is down or the page has been deleted.
• If you like to shop check out the online Catalogs.
• If you use your mouse to highlight some words on a web page you can right click with your mouse and choose the Google Search option to start a new search using those words.
• Last but by no means least, the Google Toolbar provides for all your Google needs right there at the top of your browser. It's worth checking you have the latest version. Currently 1.1.57 at the time of writing. It should update automatically but I have found the need for manual intervention at times.
  • Note you can pick your local Google site (e.g. co.uk) and language.
  • Alt-G goes straight to Google Toolbar.
  • If you go to the Search Preferences drop down from the toolbar you can set:
    • The number of search results returned on each page. I like to set it to 50 rather than usual 10.
    • Filtering levels: I like to ensure that "Safe Filtering" is turned off. It's actually a very good parental type filter though, if you do need some protection.
  • Page Info gives you a quick way to take the current page and see the cached version, similar pages, pages that link to it, or a translation of it.
  • When you search from the toolbar you get a word button for each word you searched for. If you are viewing one of the pages from your results you can click on these word buttons to search the page for that word. Saves you doing Ctrl-F (or whatever) and typing in the word again. Also:
    • You can use this feature to type words into the Google search bar and then use Word Find on other criteria (i.e. use Google search box to "find words" rather than "search web").
    • Hold the Shift key while clicking a Word Find button to move backwards and find previous occurrences of the word.
    • Hold the Ctrl key while clicking a Word Find button to search only for exact matches of a word.
  • If you have the latest version you have access to extended features:
    • The combined search button can replace the search web button with one that will search web, images, dictionary, directories ... whatever, really.
    • Next and previous buttons go from one page to the next page within your results.
    • Vote buttons are a new feature that may influence Google's choices in the future.

In a nice finish to this piece, I notice Google has been awarded Best Practices in the Webby Awards out today. Well deserved!

OSU Protesters

A first hand account of protesters at the Ohio State University being threatened with arrest and expulsion for turning their backs on the President has sparked some lively debates on Metafilter. It's validity has been questioned by some but my first impression is that it's legit. The official site for the protest has some more links to interviews and information.

Peppercorn chewing to cure cold

I'm off work today with a stonking cold. Being thick with catarrh has meant coughing fits that have prevented me sleeping and going in to work. I'm not telling you this in an effort to garner sympathy but to mention a suggestion I found for chewing 20 peppercorns whilst drinking hot water. The peppercorn idea was new to me and as the coughing was starting to cause major headaches I thought I'd give it a whirl...

Ever chewed 20 peppercorns? It's intense! Up there with munching on chilli peppers :o). One handy side effect of this is that I just eagerly drunk one cup of hot water and two pints of cold! The sore throat had been deterring me from consuming the fluids I should, so this alone was of great benefit. I'm also inclined to believe there was a more direct effect. One way or another I'm experiencing some much welcome 'clearance'. I might try some onion soup for lunch.

Now if I can focus my eyes a bit more I might be able to relax into some comfort surfing ...

Some Americans won't use Axis of Evil

Some prominent Americans have issued this statement on the war on terror. It's a superbly written statement and the sentiment has really moved me. I'd like to shake the hand of every name on that list. I don't want to join in with all the rows over September 11th. Indeed I'll probably avoid politics for the most part in this blog.

I had to highlight that statement though as it reflects my views on so much, including: trying to come to terms with the terrorist attack; finding understanding between nations and individuals; and the necessity for each of us to take responsibility for our nation's politics. All too frequently governments seem to be influenced by the media, money and big business. I believe that horrors like the World Trade Center disaster will continue to occur and things will get worse unless the rich nations of the world start to make the lives of everyone (not just their own voters) their concern. The same responsibility should also be realised by the media. It is one of the reasons I like blogs. Here everyone can choose to highlight topics they believe to be important and portray them as they see fit. Like I just have, I guess :o). Coincidently, Davenet has a great article on blogs and the media.

For now, I'll step off the soapbox and put it back in the dusty cupboard.

Caching, US Sitcom Seasons

Under what circumstances does a web page not get updated? I've been meaning to investigate this for a while. Sometimes I would update my blog and then, when I browsed to it, I would find the changes weren't there. A quick F5 (refresh) and all was revealed. I figured it was being cached but wasn't sure how to ensure the page was reloaded if it had changed. I still don't know a good answer to that question but I did discover a bit of HTML that prevents the page being cached. This means the latest version is downloaded every time the page is viewed. Please leave a comment if you know a better solution. In the meantime should anyone else wish to do the same, just place the following line in between angular brackets in the HEAD part of your page: META HTTP-EQUIV="Pragma" CONTENT="no-cache"

I just watched the last two episodes of Scrubs. What a great series that has been. As soon as the credits rolled the big question was "will there be more?". The American TV Guide has a handy Renewals and Pick-Ups listing. A useful way to see if your favourite US shows will be having a new season. From the list, I noticed: 24 (series 2), The Simpsons (14th season), Malcolm In The Middle (series 4!), The West Wing (Season 4), The Jamie Kennedy Experiment (2), The Osbournes (2nd series expected but not signed yet), Six Feet Under (Season 3!), Will and Grace (3), Friends (9th and final), Smallville (2), Sex and the City (5), King of the Hill (7), Buffy (renewed to 2003), Sopranos (4 and 5 renewed), Frasier (2004) and ... Scrubs (2). Yay!

It's kind of comforting to know there's all that great TV to come :o). I'm hoping the end of so many shows recently might mean more time to blog and read books. I'm currently reading the Frank Skinner autobiography and highly recommend it. He's just been talking about his first trip to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and it's reminded me that I've always wanted to go. Anyone else fancy a trip to Scotland in August? ;o)

I'm the president, who are you?

Apparently I'm the President :o).

Which West Wing character are you?

Bloginality

I've just come across the Bloginality test. This is a superb little four question survey to approximate your personality types. It then tries to guess your blogging style using this information. I'd highly recommend everyone tries this. It makes for interesting reading if you follow it all up (it provides the links). It also links to blogs of people with a similar personality types. Could be a good way to find like-minded bloggers!

For the record my Bloginality is ENTJ. Where ENTJ stands for Extraverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Judging. This, apparently, makes my primary focus on Extraverted Thinking with an Introverted Intuition. This is defined as a NT personality, which is part of Carl Jung's Rational (Knowledge Seeking) type. I'd say that it's analysis was a 95% match. Impressive for just four questions! The result also tallies with similar ratings I had from my Psychology studying days.

Bluetealeaf solution, Geek and Blogger Code, Mental Age

This morning I managed to find the answer to the hidden puzzle on Simon's Bluetealeaf blog. I was feeling quite chuffed until Simon and Stuart of Bingobowden fame put me on to the Epscilon page. That one's got me quite stumped at the moment!

Following on from Simon's puzzle, I now have my very own Blogger code: B1 d- t k s u- f i+ o x-- e l- c I've also created a Geek code for good measure: GCS/IT d- s+:++ a->a C++ UA$ P+ L>+ E--- W+ N o? K- w O- V- PS+ PE Y+ PGP- t+ 5>+ X+ R@ tv+ b+++ DI++ D+ G e++ h- r+++ z+++ Useful, huh? :o)

What's your mental age? Mine came in at 23 which made me feel surprisingly young. Felt sure I was gonna get 50 odd with some of the answers I had to give :o)

Who's oin, Translation, Squodge

Just a quick blog today, after the previous lengthy and excited one :o). I thought I'd expose myself a little (oooer), so I've stuck a little personal info blurb in the sidebar.

I'm still quite new to the blogosphere so I'm flitting from one blog to another most of the time. However, one site I keep wandering towards is Bluetealeaf. A top blog with a great layout. So Bluetealeaf is the first stranger to make my blog links. Welcome. One thing I liked was the translation links. I've extended this idea to provide direct translations of my page thanks to the lovely Babel Fish. For the flag icons I'd like to thank Edward Mooney, Jr. and his site, Mooney's MiniFlags part of the Flags of the World group. I believe some international communication between bloggers would be a good thing in these times ...

Some good news today: my lovely wife Tammy has started her own blog. Cool! To see how lovely she is you could check out our wedding photos. It's the only thing we've managed to get on our homepages, excepting the blogs of course :o). BTW You might notice that the template is a little familiar ;o). I'd just like to point out that that's born of speed and simplicity. We're not the sort of couple that wear matching anoraks :o).

BTW I managed to catch the 1st half of the match at home and then saw the second half in a pub near work. I missed the first 20 minutes of the 2nd half but it sounds like that was the most boring bit so quite a result :o). Not the most exciting game but it was enough to get England though the first round, unlike Argentina and France the two favourites!

Pepys, Daypop, Google Bombs and Whacking

What a night this has been! I went out for a few beers with friends (Happy 30th Steve!) and had a top time. We got back quite late and I thought I'd have one last go at getting my Blogger template uploaded. I've been trying to do this regularly over the last two days but Blogger just didn't seem to be interested in "saving my changes" :o(. As you can imagine, since I've only just started blogging, this has been particularly frustrating. I was on a pretty rough "starter template" and had all these cool bits and bobs to add (YACCs comments, Pepys Project, Bloglet, Site Meter and GBlogs). OK so this template isn't perfect but I'll tweak it in time :o).

So I connect and start off by checking my mail. As usual the dreaded spam starts rolling in but then there was one from Mike Brown, the guy behind the Pepys Project. I have had the audacious cheek to become their 1000th punter! What a superb, if entirely random, piece of good fortune! I feel a little cheeky "winning" the 1000th position since I started blogging just days ago. There's some great bloggers to be found amongst the other 999. I'll post links to some of these once I've settled in more. In the meantime you could try the Top 10. As I said in my reply to Mike, his site is "one of the blog-related pages that encouraged me to get involved in the blog community". So thanks very much to Mike for that and for being the first person to comment on my blog. A double honour indeed.

The fact that Mike had been able to comment was superb in itself. Somehow Blogger had finally sussed that I wanted to change my template and the YACCS comments etc. had all magically appeared. What a result. Had my mobile not died I would have known earlier, thanks to an SMS from snowcat. BTW Cath's enthusiasm for blogging was one of the other reasons I was encouraged to start down this road. Thanks to you too. While I'm at it I'd like to sing the praises of Ev. for giving us Blogger and making this blog not only possible but beautifully simple.

In another Email I found out that my Counter Strike clan is playing a game on Sunday. More of which, another time I should think :o). It's been like Christmas come early! After all that I just had to gush excitedly on my blog! Briefly, while I'm typing, here's a couple of snippets from today's Web encounters:

I've just come across Daypop. Looks like a handy way to search blogs and news for up-to-date content. Very nifty.

There's a superb article on the relationship between Google and blogs at Microcontent News. Goes nicely with the follow-up on Google Bombs.

Got some spare time on your hands? Got a browser? How about some GoogleWhacking? The trick is to find any two dictionary words which when typed into Google return just one result. I found this strangely amusing. Sticking to a few words I thought unlikely to be common let alone related, I was constantly amazed how many results came back! When I tried being more cunning the results just dropped to zero. The quest continues ...

Well that'll have to be it for now. It's gone 2 a.m. and I need to be up at 7 a.m. to watch the England match. For the record I'm normally pretty non-footy. I only have a vague understanding of the offside rule and I could probably only name a dozen footballers (half of which featured on Panini stickers in the 80s :o). I can't help but get into the World Cup though. I've even been known to watch the odd Euro match!

Night!

2 Hagrids, Supercooled Liquid and God's Blog

Did you know there were two Hagrid's in the first Potter movie? It's fun to hear the wonderful comedian/actor RobbieColtraine described as "the small one" :o). More importantly the same article reveals that Peeves should appear in the next movie. It's a shame the new book, "Order of the Pheonix", isn't out till next year. Those seeking consolation may be pleased to know the trailer for the next movie could be available on the official site tomorrow. (Cheers to CountingDown for the updates).

Thanks to Metafilter I learnt something new today: glass is not a supercooled liquid. It's rare I learn something new. That's not 'cos I know a lot. I just don't remember much :o). Mind you, even clever people can do stupid things. Even God admits to the odd oopsie in his very own blog (BD) :o).

Welcome to Bloing!

Thanks to snowcat's persistent suggestions, I've decided to creep my way into the blogging community. It's all a bit basic right now but it'll give me somewhere to pop links of interest.

I've got a couple of days off of work right now so I've had a chance to browse good old Metafilter. As usual, lots of interesting bits and bobs there including:

Moebius is to make a movie based on his own work. I can't wait as I love his cartoons. If Moebius is new to you I recommend this bit of background. Unfortunately the official link for the movie seems to require authorization :o( It's got to be real though - it's on the fabulous IMDB.

The Bilderberg group is meeting near D.C.. I'm intrigued by the Bilderberg group following Jon Ronson's cracking book "Them: Adventures with Extremists" and the TV series that went with it. I wouldn't go the whole New World Order bit though. I kinda figure powerful people will meet up one way or another. I'm sure that sometimes good things happen although I dare say that the odd decision is made that doesn't improve the lot of Joe Public :o).

A quick message to any body reading this who does have political power. I'd like it to be known that I'd rather get my kit off than chuff it ... unlike some.

A quick update on the from the Live E4 Big Brother (UK) broadcast: Nothing of any interest has happened, all day. It's amazing how much coverage there is given how little is happening. In a startling development they have actually got out of bed :o).

My first blog. Ahhh, how sweet...