A YoMe is a fun character that you can create to use as an avatar for Miniclip games and your Facebook profile, you can also share your YoMes with friends and take a look at their YoMes too.

My YoMe created using YoMe Creator

We’re planning some cool new features in the future so give it a go and have fun, you can install it from http://apps.facebook.com/yomecreator/!

It’s not often you get the chance to sit back and relax while looking over the marvellous skyline of the City of London, and there certainly aren’t many places where you can see the whole thing all at once.

There is much debate about the historic London views that will be ‘ruined’ by Mayor Ken Livingston’s deregulation of the planning rules in the Capital, however, while the historic buildings are known the world over and are an important part of London and English Heritage in general, in my opinion people come to London to see Buckingham Palace and St Pauls Cathedral up close, not just look at it from a distance.

London, like every other city has changed over time, I’m sure the same was said about Canary Wharf back in the late 80′s when it was being constructed, but like it or not the need for more and more buildings and the limited amount of space available means that there are going to be trade-offs, a more developed skyline is one of them.

I’m looking forward to the new buildings, there should be a few good photographic opportunities.

While I was conducting the move of my site recently I started thinking; What would happen if I lost all of it all?

My blog represents about 2 years of my thoughts, feelings, stories and rants, it contains the story of my pre university struggle, my post university struggle, post about my time in America and all the things in between. While I do have backups these only consist of 2 database backups and a handful of written post backups in various documents scattered around my hard drive.

Then there is my gallery, this too contains photos from before uni, during uni and my time in America, and while I do have the originals, it has over 1700 photos, it would take a huge chunk of time to re-upload and sort them out again. Just the move alone has taken hours to do and even now there are problems with some images not working.

This got me thinking even more, out of all the photos I have taken, over 4000 in America, a few hundred of Kingston Uni, and a few more thousand at various other events and occasions I have hardly any backups of any of them, I have no regular backup process in place.

What would happen if all of my photos were deleted in some crazed act of nature never to be viewed again by man nor beast?

Usually I’m paranoid when it comes to backing up and saving things, if I’m working on a document I usually save it ever 5 – 10 seconds, but for some reason when it comes to the things that require more than a 2 button combination I seem to put it off and forget about it.

I know of others that also do the same.

There was no real point to this post only to illustrate that sometimes no matter how important memories are, not even those are safe.

Problems seem to be a regular side effect of breathing lately, if it’s not people messing things up and loosing vital information it’s people messing things up and loosing vital information….they deserve a promotion…no really, they do.

As you can probably tell from the title I am writing this post under duress, the Queen of the Underworld made a request, dare I say ordered that I posted a blog because my “frequent” posts weren’t frequent enough, my only response is how frequent are they supposed to be?

The embassy experience was just that, an experience. After 4 hours of waiting just to see 2 different people for a total of about 5 minutes the only up side was you get to sit back in a crowded waiting room full of 200 or more people and quietly contemplate your impending fate…Just maybe not that quietly.

The amount of paperwork that’s needed for something like this is pretty large, banks, doctors, embassies and universities all want their half of the Amazon rainforest in order to make these things happen. It makes it 100 times worse though when records of things like injections haven’t actually been forwarded to your GP by the school that you had them at, for the most part this is just something that we’ve learned to deal with (just read all of the past posts about A-Level results) but it’s still surprising that even a year after leaving things still manage to get messed up.

With little over a week left till moment zero, it’s still hard to believe that everything is going to change, everything seems quite surreal. I’ve used the analogy before but it’s like a speeding train, you only get hit by it after you’ve stood and stared at it in shock for a few seconds.

My last few posts have been of a more serious nature so I think I should break the trend just in case they start to become boring (which I’m sure isn’t the case right?) plus I’ve had a few people (Shane being one of them) telling me that I should just post something and have done with it, so this is going to be one of those lame update posts that I hate writing but for some reason are a necessary evil in the world of blogging.

It looks like Lloyd is going to be blogging a bit more now he has his blog back up and running, if you go and read his latest post you’ll also know why I’m writing about it (is that enough cross promotion, or do you want more?)

Over on Shane’s part of the internet he talks about Mondays not being out for a while, I know what you mean, what’s up with that, there’s been nothing on franklins blog about it either, I know they don’t make any money out of the show but come on, listening to them just bounce stories back and forth would be good enough, I’m starting to wonder if there will be anymore but with any luck there will be, I think we should start a petition to get ActiveNick back, bring back shows 9 and 10

So I guess the next thing to think about is First year results. For the past god knows how many years it’s been the same, you endure a year of education, doing the same thing as you usually do, doing all of the work the night before and still managing to get a decent grade, then you have a bit of a break, your mind wonders off onto other things, and then out of the blue it all hits you again….

I hate results day, even though nothing (so far) has gone wrong….oh wait

Here’s My Experiences

Ok, scratch that, I just hate results day

And can anybody blame me?

I now have a new toy, a nice sparkly Acer TravelMate 8104WLMi. I have to say it’s a very nice machine, the feature I especially like is that it has a built in smart card reader, so now I can look like James Bond when I have to access my laptop with a snazzy smart card verification system, and a prat when my nice sophisticated verification system fails to allow me into the machine - stopping me from gaining access to whatever file I need to get to before the entire world collapses under a huge thermonuclear explosion – or not.

Looking ahead to the beginning of the Kingston timeframe, there are a few things that me, Lloyd and Shane have got planned – one of them being a very nice idea stolen from the guys over at Microsoft (not really stolen, more inspired).

I have finally decided to pull my finger out when it comes to some of the website development that I promised myself that I would do before I left for Kingston. The Crossways and Sea View 2005 Redesign has nearly been completed, the only things left to do are a few little tweaks to the design and just general content padding. This release isn’t going to be as refined as I had hoped - I did have grand visions of extensive CSS use that could be swapped out to enable differing designs and greater accessibility, but as my knowledge in this area is still somewhat lacking, and with the time silently ticking away in the background I had to drop nearly all of the grand plans that I once had in order to get it out the door. Browser compatibility is still an issue despite the supposed ‘compliant’ code that took me an age to perfect, but that is an issue that can be dealt with once the site has gone live.

My portfolio site is also hopefully going to get a make over in the very near future, again minus the big features that I had planned, however I will be able to use the new design (which is still in pre alpha stages at the moment) as a building block for the future improvements that I want to make.

I will hopefully have something soon for you all to marvel over, but please, don’t quote me on that

In keeping here is a picture taken of the lake thing that they have, notice the sign, apparently deep water….all 3cm of it, an example of over cautious Health and Safety officers perhaps?

Tune in next week for the next instalment of ‘The Tourist Attraction Crawl’

And that’s what we did, the best thing about it was it was free (no we didn’t sneak in past he extremely high security that had been implemented to protect the site from such an attack that would make it incapable of serving the millions of people that it provides entertainment every day)

Normally I’m not really a zoo type of person but I figured what the hell, so of we went.

One thing that struck me while we were out in the wilderness was that they obviously haven’t come across the concept of defence in depth….or indeed defence at all, as you can see from the photo below, there is a 10 cm high fence (for want of a better word since it can hardly be called a fence) protecting the Rhino area….these things can just walk over it, providing little or no protection from the wrath of Rhinoness. Imagine something like this being deployed somewhere like Jurassic park, can you imagine the carnage that this type of anti-security would cause, there would be raptors all over the place, the world would be doomed for all eternity under the ruthless ruling of these tyrannous beasts. There’s a lesson to be learned here everyone….If you’re going to build a fence, at least make it big enough to keep the nasty animals in.

Anyway, that’s all I want to say about that for now, this post is big enough, however, look for a very deep post coming in the next few days….

For those who don’t know, the main problem is cables!

The visions a while ago were visions of wireless and paperless offices and homes, but just look around you…how much paper and how many wires are in the immediate vicinity…I’m guessing quite a lot…so we can confine that vision to the dump.

Connecting MP3 devices to something like a stereo system is a pain, personally I don’t like trailing cables everywhere, and I certainly don’t like to have to walk to the other side of the room every 4 minutes once a song has finished (this interrupts my workflow far too much).

So what are the solutions?

Well there are a few, the first one being just to put up with it, the second thing is to get yourself a wireless audio system, that allows you to transmit audio signals via wi-fi and listen to them over a normal stereo system. The problem with these is the size, it’s not the most portable of devices (unless you have Dr Who’s Tardis, in which case you probably wouldn’t be worrying about wireless audio anyway)

The third thing, and the most favourable for me, is the AudiaX DGT-201 this little device allows you to wirelessly transmit the output from ANY MP3 device via FM to any stereo system, and its portable. The only drawback from this is the quality, because it’s transmiting over FM, your never going to get the high fidelity sound that you would from a regular cable, however, for the purpose that I want to use it for it will do nicely.

Edit: I bought it at AQSound