For me at least iTunes crashes during the transmission of Genious data to Apple, stopping this process with the “X” that appears in the notification area resulted in an immediate crash, if it was left it would simply crash a few minutes later.

If you really can’t wait for Apple to fix this issue and aren’t really bothered about using Genious then the most obvious solution would be to turn off the Genious feature until a fix is released, unfortunatly for me the Store > Turn Off Genious option was unavailiable so here is how I managed to get round it:

1. Go to your iTunes folder (mine was in C:/Users/Myles/Music/iTunes but yours may be somewhere else)
2. Find “iTunes Library Genius.itdb” and rename it to something like iTunes Library Genius.itdb.old (Make sure you can see file extenstion – if not untick the “Hide extensions for known file types” option in the Folder and Search Options Menu)
3. Start iTunes
4. iTunes will still try to generate Genious Data but after renaming the file you should be able to stop the process by clicking on the “x” in the notification area at the top without it resulting in an immediate crash.
5. Then Select Store > Turn Off Genious from the menu at the top

For some reason that seemed to sort the problem for me, or atleast long enough for me to disable the Genious Feature, it may not work for anyone else, but its worth a shot – iTunes has been running for about 10 minutes so far and no crash as of yet.

Hope this works for you!

EDIT: Didn’t realise this fix had already been suggested on the Apple Support Forums, you can follow the discussion at: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1938223&tstart=0

So I took it home to my underground laboratory and started the pain staking procedure of recovering the data from the card.

After analysing the card it turns out that the card didn’t have a file system structure, something must have corrupted it, I tried Ontrack EasyRecovery Professional but it only found 5 of the photos and could only find 7MB of unpartitioned space on the card. So I pulled out PhotoRec and scanned it. If you need to get photos off of a camera memory card PhotoRec is the app to do it, it works like a treat and has earned a place in my arsenal of applications.

It took about 30 minutes to scan the card fully, all 115 photos that Kim took were recovered, but here’s where the weirdness starts, along with the 115 photos I expected to be recovered there were also 50 or so photos of people I’ve never seen before at Goodrington and other locations…

The sealed SD card bought from the London Camera Exchange contained OTHER PEOPLES photos and videos!

Obviously they had been wiped from it previously, but even though it had been formatted, a low level scan of the data revealed photos in the sectors that hadn’t been overwritten. Below is one of the photos I found on there…It looks like someones holiday snaps.

One of the photos on the SD card

Looking at the EXIF data they were taken between April and May 2007 on a Nikon Coolpix S6 Camera, I have no idea why they were on the card and I have no idea why the London Camera Exchange sold a card that was sealed and apparently ‘new’ but obviously wasn’t.

It just goes to show what these companies get up to, recycling what is probably a useless card that had been returned into something they can sell again.

But privacy and how Google may or may not be able to use their power to take control of the world is not what this post is about.

Google indexes my site, which is what Google should do, but because it indexes my site it allows me to login to the Google Webmasters Tool and look to see exactly what Google has indexed, as well as my page rank and other pieces of information that can be quite useful at times.

One of the pages on the Webmasters tool allows you to see words that Google has associated with your site, even casual readers will be aware of the vast topics I cover in my blog, apparently Google shares your sentiment, here’s a small list of some of the 200 words Google thinks relate to my site.

• Torbay Council
• Louisa Lytton
• Embankment
• Mobile
• Payroll
• Audit Commission
• Internship
• Sorry
• Girls
• Caprice
• Crowd
• Memories
• Maximillion
• River

These are just some of them, others are seemingly random ones like 29th and barrel, I have no idea what logic Google uses to mine keywords but I sure do have a diverse range of them.

Here’s what me and Lloyd have learned: Don’t try and melt chocolate in the microwave….it isn’t as safe as you may believe…

A picture is worth a thousand words…

But don’t worry, I’m not going to invest in a fallout shelter and stockpile tins of soup waiting for the world to come to an end, instead I’m doing the next best thing….

The government have bunkers deep underground to protect the people that are crucial to the countries running, the military have underground command stations from which they can launch a full scale attack on wherever they want, I on the other hand haven’t got access to this level of military hardware so I’ve had to improvise…

Announcing my very own Mobile Command Centre

This thing has it all, a desk for the mountain of paperwork that needs to be done, a map in case the GPS says to take a right into the Thames.

Office line so I’m available to make all of those important office type calls

A discreet cupboard to provide me with lots of storage for my paperwork

A Board room for the many meetings that are held – this is where the grown up stuff goes on

A clock so I can see when I get to have some of the soup I stock piled

A productivity meter, as you can see it must have been lunch…

A reading light for those late nights…

Fully functional alarm system…

And finally a panic button, if banks have one I don’t see why I should go without

And before you ask…no

I’m not selling it…..

Not even to you!

How do you stay awake for a very long period of time without needing to go to sleep?

A lot of people would suggest Caffeine or a Coke based product, this is good but it doesn’t give us the length we’re looking for, being as strange as we are and also being uni students we sometimes need to stay awake for days on end – either to wander about campus in the middle of the night or to do the odd bit of work that we are given every now and again.

This presents a problem, since the human body can’t store sleep, I mean it’s not like we’re camels and have lumps on our backs to store sleep in so we have to improvise. My original plan was to have Liquid sleep that could be drunk whenever you have to top up but this didn’t seem to go down well, perhaps a little bit too far fetched.

This morning though, while waking up at the insane time of 7am I started to think, instead of liquid sleep, why not just sleep in a bottle, it’s not liquid but it is in a bottle, does this solve the problem?

I’m sure there will be some commentary from the Ice Queen that resides in my comments so i’d check them out, she does want to become the cancerous lump on my blog after all.

For shane this means buying skittles….’cause it’s fruit right???

I hate packing, I’ve never been one for packing days in advance because of 2 reasons, the first is that I might need some of the things I pack, and second I can’t be bothered to do it till the last minute…like so many things.

One of the reasons I hate packing is because I have a lot of things that have cables attached to them, after a while of getting things tangled up and just having a mess around me I tidy everything up and put all of the cables in neat and tidy places all tucked behind things and hidden from my view, this means that every time I have to go somewhere I have to derig everything, ad this is what I have to deal with…..

Not only am I going to have to decipher the mound of cables now, but I am also going to have to redo it when I get back…..and then do it again 3 weeks later when I leave for the summer….

So even thought I am going to be back home for 3 weeks it’s not all good news for me

Usually I would be describing something out of my own personal biography of dumb, but fortunately for me and probably much to your disappointment this small tale isn’t one of them.

It all started with a faulty projector, for some reason the projector in the lecture theatre has a few quirks, some of these include overheating, randomly turning itself off and making strange animal noises admittedly this might not be the projector.

The complete refusal by the projector to work meant that our lecturer gave us a 10 minute break, such breaks usually allow us time to breath and think of new and elaborate ways to kill ourselves before the next half of the coma inducing lecture and also to reflect on various chunks that we just plain don’t get. Others use this time for a quick liquid rejuvenation stop or for a quick liquid jettison stop.

Being a lecturer must be strange, it’s like going to lectures, only being on the other side of them, in these intervals they usually answer questions from some of the more confused students and then resume again once it looks like a few of the 10 or so people return for the second half, but on this occasion ours didn’t.

Instead they decided to go for a quick trip to the toilet, unfortunately leaving the microphone turned on…

Once we (all 20 of us that were in the room at the time) had all picked ourselves up off the floor and stopped crying the person in question came back in, we informed them of the blunder on their part…and even though the noise was just the taps running it just goes to show how careful you have to be when your mic’d…

The moral of this story?

If you at any point in your life come in contact with a microphone, please make sure that it’s turned off before doing anything that you could be embarrassed by.

Ever since the dawn of time the sun has set in the west and rises again in the east a few hours later, between this period, sunlight usually shines down on the ground providing a phenomenon commonly known as Daytime.

After this regular event, what is commonly known as Night-time starts, marking the time where the sunlight crosses the other side of the globe giving other continents the feeling of such a phenomenon. During this time, over generations, people have found themselves in a state of hibernation, which later became known as sleep.

Sleep is a magical and mystical state of mind in which the human body is in a state of statelessness but at times the mind can be in a state of activeness, leading to Dreams.

Dreams are unconscious thoughts that our minds all think about during the seemingly useless ritual that we go through every night, some people have happy dreams, these include but are not limited to saving the world, flying into outer space and falling in love with a beautiful woman, but others have nightmares, these would be something like dreaming your face is being eaten by a spider or other things that are equally as weird.

Most of the people that inhabit this world need some sort of regular sleep pattern, one that looks more like a nice gradual curve rather than the twin peeks.

This is what a normal sleep pattern should look like

This is not….

Perhaps it’s the aura that Seething Wells exudes that makes its inhabitants evolve into nocturnal creatures of the night and as much as it pains me to confess it would seem that even I have been put under this same spell, as I find myself being less and less able to sleep with each passing night.

What really amazes me is that no matter what time it is, be it 1am or 5.30am there is always someone wondering around outside, undoubtedly trying to find the marbles that they dropped out of their window in a fit of foolish movement, and then it hit me, some people are aliens and just don’t need any sleep.