Happy new year to y'all.
As we're now into 2007 I thought it was about time I updated the look of my site. Drop me a line and let me know what you think.




View a graphical representation of the links on your website... quite good fun.




I came across this article on the BBC News website today about this guy who has just spent £56,000 of REAL money on a virtual space station in the computer game Project Entropia.

If you've got that much money to spend on something "virtual", you really shouldn't be allowed to have that much money in the first place, especially when there's so much poverty in the world

Rant Over :-)






Vancouver is apparently the best City to live in according to a survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit. It also lists the bottom 10. The thing is, i'm wondering where Baghdad is in the league table?! You can read more about it here




I've done a bit more Flash OOPing and have come up with those bouncing dudes as you can see above. You can download a screensaver of those bouncing dudes. In the zip file is a screensaver for both Mac and PC, thanks to Margaret for making it into a screensaver!

If you're curious as to why i've written the word blimey into the screensaver, I attended Flash Forward 2005 conference back in April, and met up with some really cool guys, and as I was the token brit in the pack they were amused by my british phrases, with "blimey" being their favourite.

Therefore, I created this screensaver for them and distributed this screensaver through our mailing list aptly titled blimey@........

Some people have been having problems with the mac version of this screensaver, Margaret, has kindly provided me with an updated version for the mac which you can download here




OK, so, after visiting Flash Forward 2005, I got the impression that Lynda.com was
a site worth checking out. Flash Forward was co-run by the Lynda.com team and Lynda Weinman herself.

lynda.com is an online learning website, where you can view numerous training videos (quicktime, looks like camtasia or something similar) on virtually any software tool out there. So I decided to sign-up ($25 for the month) and have been suitably impressed.

Joey Lott (who presented at Flash forward) does an excellent series of tutorials on Flash MX 2004 Actionscript, which i'm currently struggling through.

After going through a couple of tutorials on the basics of Flash object oriented programming, i've come up with the life of a dot as you can see above. Minimal code, and under 3kb! Pretty pointless, but it looks ok(ish)!

It's good to geek every once in a while.





The fabulously quirky site Mail Order Chickens has been launched by wefail.com. Spend an enjoyable time checking out the chickens, and who knows, you might even want to adopt one.





An old school friend of mine, Stephen James, packed up his job in blighty, bought a round the world ticket and is now spending an entire year globe trotting.

Have a read of his exciting blog. I want to go travelling again!!

Luke McGowan has finished his final year project, and here it is. Check it out: AudioXchange Audioxchange is a new chatroom currently under development which enables users to create their own online identities and interact in a variety of chatrooms, each one dedicated to a different musical genre. You can also share or promote your own mp3s with other music fans via the online jukebox system, which protects your tracks from direct downloading. It's a great way to find new music, bands and friends online. Check it out!

With this being my first opportunity to get my blog up and running again, I'm already 3 days into this trip.
Suffered severe jet lag when I first got here, but after a good nights sleep totally recovered.

Day 1 was cloudy and rainy. Spent an afternoon in SFMoMA. An excellent museum, not as big as the NY MoMA but it is half as cheap! Only $10 and they've got an excellent photography section. Plus some some great artwork by a British chap called Simon Evans

Day 2 involved exploring Fisherman's Wharf and a trip to Alcatraz. Alcatraz is very thought provoking place. You can imagine the dire life of a typical inmate in such a place. Small cramped cells, and if an inmate misbehaved, a torturous time spent in solitary confinement awaited them. No wonder, some went mad. Fisherman's wharf is a tad tacky. Bit like a more up-market Weston-Super-Mare with nice weather and blue seas.

Day 3 was full of adventure. Got up at the "crack of Dawn" and hired a bike. Cycled across the golden gate bridge, stopping to take some photos from the excellent Vista point. Then headed onto Sausalito for lunch. Bumped into 2 girls I met on the plane over here, small world. After getting lost trying to find some Redwood trees ended up in Tiburon and got the Ferry back to SF. Ass was most definitely sore at the end of a solid days cycling.

And then it got exciting.

On my way back to China town to check out of my hotel, I notice numerous people carrying placards. I decided to follow them and there I am slap bang in the middle of a protest against governor Schwarzenegger's policy of cutting funding for public services - hospitals, fire dept, pensions etc.

There I am standing around right outside the Ritz Carlton where Arnold is due to turn up amongst 100s (if not 1000s) of protesters all shouting either "shame on Arnold", "recall Arnold", and any number of other phrases. TV camera crews are there, helicoptors flying overhead. Police officers are everywhere walking and on their Harley Davidsons.

The roads are entirely blocked by protesters, the limousines can't drive up to the hotel. Out jump the men (and some women) in suits surrounded by police officers, and are then promptly greeted by boos and jostling from the protesters. A couple of scuffles ensue, one man next to me says something to 2 officers, who promptly get out their nightsticks and bundle this guy away whilst everybody chants "let him go, let him go".

I couldn't help but find myself being caught up with it all and started booing myself.

Then up comes a police officer saying repeatedly to various people including myself, "either move to the sidewalk or get arrested." Unsurprisingly I move to the sidewalk with numerous other protesters madly taking photos the entire time.

Check out my photo galleries for the protest pics.

A very interesting day.