With the forms now well on their way to their intended recipients, the only thing left to do is sit and wait for the clock to silently tick down to 0.00 - Dooms Day.

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

Well, in keeping with our ‘Tourist’ tour of Devon, a week or so ago (yes, this is over a week late) we went to Woodlands Adventure Park (we being Me, Lloyd, Chris and Lee). I’m not sure where this idea that we would go around some of the local tourist attractions before we leave for bigger and better things came from, but it’s quite fun, and what makes it better is that it’s all free.

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’

“Hey, lets go to Paignton Zoo sometime this week”

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….

So for those of you who have portable MP3 players (and there are a few) you will be aware of the limitations that the current generation have.

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

OK, so after a period of much distress today, I think it’s time to crack on with this remaining work, one problem is it’s nice weather outside and I can’t really be bothered….but then again, I can never be bothered.

So let me ask this question: Since when did windows media player start showing pictures????

So let me get this right….Windows media player now supports viewing images….WHY? What would somebody want this feature for????

Doesn’t windows come with an image viewer….