General

For my 21st I was taken away for a surprise holiday to London, have wanted to visit the capital for a while but never really had the opportunity. Got to see all the main attractions including Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, Madame Tussauds, Tate Modern and the Apple Store Regent Street (yes main attraction ;)).

I found the Tate Modern especially interesting though it’s a shame you cant take photos in there as some of the work is quite inspiring and might have been worth drawing influence from.

http://flickr.com/photos/pwhite/tags/tate

Madame Tussauds was especially cool and I got my photo taken with a lot of famous wax works including Simon Cowell, Chris Tarrant, Tony Blair and the Pope.

http://flickr.com/photos/pwhite/tags/madametussauds

I have a special "political"? section for all the friendly politicians/dictators.

http://flickr.com/photos/pwhite/tags/politics

We visited the Apple Store on Regent Street; it’s a lot bigger and better than the one in Birmingham.

http://flickr.com/photos/pwhite/tags/applestore

A full gallery of all the photos can be found at:

http://flickr.com/photos/pwhite/sets/72057594081085498/

Would definitely go back and may even consider living there if the job was good enough.

I’ve been looking into various ways to backup my data for a couple of weeks now. Call me paranoid but I’m sure anyone else would be annoyed if their hard disk died and they lost all their documents and music.

I have to start my final year project in the next couple of weeks that I have to work on until the end of Easter. If my hard drive died in that time it could be catastrophic to my degree.

I have looked into various methods for backup but the best-suited one is just to backup to another hard drive. I looked at online storage but you either have to pay or you don’t get a lot of storage space. Even the ones you did get a lot of storage it would take you hours initially to upload everything.

DVD’s were another option but they don’t really hold enough data and I wanted something more automated than having to burn stuff to a DVD. Finally I have settled on a program that automatically synchronizes my data with an external hard drive every night.

Its still not ideal as if my iMac was to die I wouldn’t be able to do any work but at least I would not lose any data.

Its really easy and it works (has been on the BBC), all you have to do is sign up for a free offer and you get a free Ipod - simple.

http://www.freeiPods.com/?r=20444787

Sign up there.

I did the offer to sign up to sportingbet.com and i put some money on the grandprix and i won - so was worth it just for that.

I just need 5 people to sign up through that link to get a free Ipod - so even if you don't want a free Ipod sign up through that link anyway so I can get one.

thanks - pete

A break down of my exam results for anyone who understands.

In a nutshell I did well :D

215IS Professional Skills and Group Project
Coursework (Cw) 91
Module Mark (Mm) 91
Grade (Gd) Pass

217IS Database System Concepts
Coursework (Cw) 70.30
Exam (Ex) 66
Module Mark (Mm) 68.15
Grade (Gd) Pass

225CS User Interface Design
Coursework (Cw) 67
Module Mark (Mm) 67
Grade (Gd) Pass

232IS Multimedia Systems
Coursework (Cw) 73
Exam (Ex) 72
Module Mark (Mm) 72.50
Grade (Gd) Pass

241CS Computability Resit?
Coursework (Cw) 71.70
Exam (Ex) 51
Module Mark (Mm) 61.35
Grade (Gd) Pass

245CS Computer Communications
Coursework (Cw) 65
Exam (Ex) 59
Module Mark (Mm) 62
Grade (Gd) Pass

262CS Commercial Programming
Coursework (Cw) 79
Module Mark (Mm) 79
Grade (Gd) Pass

268IS Information Systems Engineering
Coursework (Cw) 55
Exam (Ex) 45
Module Mark (Mm) 48
Grade (Gd) Pass

Put a load of my holiday photos online, took over 150 so have had to be slightly selective. The gallery can be found here

I especially like the following photos:

If anyone wants to do any photoshopping on any of the photos send me the results or put them on the forum.

January has been quite a slow month it seems, not a lot has happened and I'm just looking forward to going home in reading week (mid Feb) now. Second year of uni seems so different to the first, in a way its almost boring. I'm not sure why my motivation isn't as strong this year it just isn't.

I'm looking forward to next year, getting a house in particular should be good. Advice to anyone who thinks its a good idea to stay in halls in your second year then don't. You realise how much more work you have and how much money you don't have so you just end up by being woken up by drunk people in the early hours of the morning and watching countless hours of TV shows.

I'm looking forward to my holiday in the summer with Laura to Spain, it should be good. As for the rest of the summer its too far ahead but I do intend to go away again at least once. Can anyone say group holiday? It may be hard to organise but could be good fun, even if it was just to butlins.

On the Switchweb front things are going well, we have recently expanded some more so should be able to take many more orders!

My last article on ImAFish covered legit music download sites in the UK. This week Apple's iTunes store launched so I decided to take a look. The program is basically a download extension to Quicktime with a couple of nice ways to order and store your music.

Tracks come more pricey than their American equivalents - they get songs for $99 (55p) while we have to pay 79p however this is better than OD2's and Napster's 99p price tag.

I thought iTunes had some nice content but was still lacking much of the stuff I was interested in. However there is a radio section which does include a link to digitally imported radio.

Hopefully I will do a follow up article in the coming weeks as its quite a popular subject.

I carried on working on the Switchweb site today and gave the shopping cart a big well needed overhaul. Hopefully I will get the rest of the site done over the next week or so and add some of the features I have planned, thats as long as I don't forget them!

I'm home from university now which is a bit of a shocker as I didn't quite realize how much stuff I have. Most still lies on my bedroom floor waiting for a home over the summer.

Just if your interested this column entry comes from my new PC in my room - yes I'm currently sitting in bed updating my column - how sad!

I keep reading how writing web-logs such as this have changed peoples lives, while I'm uncertain as to whether my "blog" is life changing for anyone else or myself it hopefully will be something to look back on in years to come!

Until next time the comfort of my bed is calling for sleep - night.

My exams have now finished as of yesterday! Which means my first year of University is now over. Went out last night for one last big piss up before going home this saturday.

Was a good night, lots of dancing, meeting new people and drinking. It seems a bit sad leaving everyone at uni for the summer but looking forward to next year living with Ben, Luke, Chris, Wayne and 1 random person!

Going to spend the rest of today and tomorrow packing all my stuff (to which there is a lot)!

Hopefully next week I will get some time to work on the switchweb site. After reading [url]http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3793825.stm[/url] today it looks like we are in a good market and hopefully a new design and a bit more marketing will increase our profitability even more.

I have been using SuSE Linux 9.1 over the past couple of weeks, most of it seems good though I'm having problems with media players atm. Will be sticking with Winblows for a bit longer. I tried out the MS Longhorn beta last week which is still pretty poor.

Anyway until next time - Laterz

Im now nearing the end of my first year and university and with less than 1 week to go and only 1 exam left I have started looking back at the past 9 months.

I have been trying to think what I have gained or lost? I have met a lot of cool people and have lots of good friends however I have drifted away from certain people back home and lost my girl friend. I keep thinking that we might still be together if I had stayed at home instead of going to uni but I would have missed out on so much.

Then there is the more phyical stuff, I now have a second PC, 2 printers (which im very proud of ;)) and the foundings of what could be a quite sucessful hosting company.

So do the gains out weigh the loses? Well in some aspects yes but in others unfortunatly its hard to replace with whatever you may have gained.

Either way life goes on for the summer then another year at uni! Should keep things interesting.

Pete

While its a shame I have to post something so negative on our new shiny columns there's some things I need to get off my chest.

For those of you that know me you will most likely be aware that I split up with my girlfriend recently who I had been with for over two years. I wont go into the reasons she gave me but it did come as a bit of a shock considering I didn't think things were going that bad between us, I couldn't have been more wrong.

When we split up I thought a break would do us good, all of my friends reassured me that everything would be fine, we seemed fine around each other and things weren't generally going too badly. However at the weekend she tells me that she has got together with one of my best mates. I had brought it up about their friendliness in the past but she always stated that they were just friends and that I should "trust" her that nothing would ever happen.

While you may say that we are not going out any more so she is free to do what she likes it has only been just over two weeks - which seems a very short time to get over one boyfriend and to move onto the next. Over the past two years we had spent a lot of time together, done many things and shared many experiences, to forget and give up on our relationship so quickly can't help but make you feel that this may have been going on longer than since we split up.

While I would like to be friends with her I cant see how after what has happened, to find out that one of the only things to cause problems in your relationship is the reason you split up is not the nicest of moments.

What hurts the most is not that she is with someone of who I thought to be one of my best mates but the last year (possibly more) of our relationship has been a lie just so she can get close to him. Its a shame things ended like this but I cant see myself forgiving her for a long time, if ever. Maybe we can be friends one day, I don't know.