Photo by Simon Willison
I find it hard to keep a blog sometimes (microblogging via Twitter is far less painful!) , but there’s a little project I want to do that should hopefully give me something interesting to write about. I want to take a photo a day for a year. I know that it’s nothing new (jeez, hardly anything is new nowadays,) but it is something which I think will be good for me to aim towards. I think the ideal time to start this will be on April 13th*, which will give me enough time to get the site prepared for it, and it coincides with Abbie having endured 6 years of being with me (poor girl!)
Good news about University. I have two more assignments (each 2,000 words) and then I am officially finished, done, and through with education. Don’t get me wrong, I love learning, we learn new things everyday, that’s our nature. I’d just rather learn things in a less artificial environment, and start learning practically.
I feel this year will be a challenging year, entering the real world where you don’t get financially bailed out 3 times a year with a nice student loan. Getting on the housing market seems damn near impossible with the current conditions, I just hope that things start to calm down and even out sooner rather than later!
*Edit - How can this be in the past? I meant to write May 13th, stay tuned.
In amongst finishing off a few client projects, I am drafting a redesign for this site… there’s a sneak peak here if you want to see how it’s coming along.
Twitter and Flickr will also be integrated into the new design, and maybe if I get serious about vlogging, I might have a bit of Qik or Bambuser integration, but that might be a long way off yet. If all that just went over your head then I’m glad because I did it on purpose (Because I’m mean, and the only way a geek can have fun is to bamboozle people with stupid phrases.)
Twitter is a short blogging platform (140 chars) used to update your status. Very much like your Facebook status, which is why mine are integrated.
Flickr is a photo publishing service, where I keep the majority of my photos organised. What I like about Flickr is that there is a great community of people, and a great platform to get your photos more widely recognised. There are thousands of groups of enthusiastic people, all with one common interest, photography, and some with niche interests such as wildlife or photos of UFO’s.
Qik and Bambuser are essentially the same. They are a live video streaming service which you can do straight from your mobile phone. However, you best make sure you have a WiFi phone otherwise you might get hit with a £250 phone bill (It’s happened once, and never again!)
Look out for the new design in a couple of weeks time!
Unfortunately I have cancelled my order for the eeePC I previously wrote about! There are 2 main reasons which I cancelled:
- The eeePC is so hugely in demand that ASUS aren’t able to meet the demand of them. Currently only 30% of the people that want one actually get one delivered. I have been waiting now 4 weeks for one since I ordered, and there are still no guarantees about when they will be delivered.
- The eeePC 900 is coming out in a few months time. The main difference being the 9 inch screen, and higher resolution which will make the eeePC easier to work with and more productive. Also at very similar size and weight it will be better for on the go entertainment such as watching movies when travelling.
Hopefully I’ll get over the disappointment of not getting the initial eeePC, but maybe it will be a blessing in disguise; as they say: patience is a virtue, and the newer eeePC will hopefully be a far better purchase!
Having been using Vista for around a year now, I have very rarely experienced any glitches which weren’t easily solved. However, I have come across a problem with the system tray icons (the Volume, Network and Power icons in the bottom right) not appearing after Vista has been started up from being completely switched off.
Normally you can just turn these on by going to the Task Bar and Start Menu properties, then selecting them in the Notification area. When I have tried this these options have been grey and I’m unable to change them. After digging around I have found a solution for this bug. If you have also experienced this problem I will explain how to remedy this with a few screenshots.
The problem as highlighted above is that the System icons do not load up. We first start by opening the Task Manager, either by CTRL + ALT + DEL, or by searching for “taskmgr” in the Windows search bar.
Once we’ve loaded this, we want to kill the process, “explorer.exe”. As shown below, right click on that process and choose to end it.
As this process is critical to the operating system, we need to run the process again, simply by clicking “File” in the top left, and choosing New Task (Run…).
We then simply create the new process “explorer.exe” and click OK.
Then, as if by magic, your icons will be restored in their rightful place and you can then check them and uncheck them as you would normally in the Task Bar and Start Menu properties.
Unfortunately this bug hasn’t been squashed by the Vista dev team in the new release of SP1, but hopefully there will be a permanent fix in the future for this.
