Cnet is reporting that NASA is looking to take on astronauts for training in 2009 onwards. They are looking for between 10-15 candidates who have a bachelor's degree in engineering, science or maths and three years of relevant professional experience.

I have a bachelors degree in computer science but unfortunately only one years experience in relevant work (well my experience in. The job gives you the opportunity to drive moon buggys, fortunately I currently have a clean driving licence.

One of the requirements of the job comes from this money quote:

"Frequent travel may be required"

I always wanted to be an Astronaut when I was growing up, perhaps this is my opportunity - application is open until next summer!

On Wednesday Apple updated their entire iPod line. The shuffle stayed the same shape and design but got new colours. The Nano got a new wider shape with rounded corners, a bigger screen, video playback capabilities, higher storage capacity and an updated interface. The iPod (or classic as its now known) got an updated design ( including rounded edges), an updated user interface and a choice between 80gig or a huge 160gig of storage.

Apple also unveiled a new device called the iPod Touch which is basically an iPhone without the phone. The device is only 8mm thick, incorporates Apples multi touch interface and comes in 8gig and 16gig models. The really cool part of the Touch is that it contains Wi-Fi, Safari, YouTube and the new iTunes WiFi Store. This makes the iPod Touch like a PDA meaning that where ever there is wireless Internet you will be able to check your email, news, Facebook and use all those other cool iPhone app on your iPod!

The problem this leaves me is do I sacrifice being able to carry all my music around with me on an 160gig iPod (I have about 45gig of music, 10gig photos and 30gig video) to be able to use the net in WiFi areas (as the Touch can only carry 16gig of music/photos/video)?

Before it was a simple choice to go for the iPod with the most features and storage, now the iPod with the best features doesn't have the most storage. Anyone else with a similar hard choice between iPods? All the new iPods can be found on the Apple Store.

Google Pack (

) has recently added StarOffice 8 the Microsoft Office alternative. In 2000 Sun Microsystems released StarOffice as open source which became the foundation of Open Office. Google Pack now comes with the following software: Google Toolbar for IE Firefox with Google Toolbar Picasa Google Photos Screensaver Google Desktop Realplayer Spyware Doctor Norton Security Scan Adobe Reader StarOffice

ImAFish previously covered Google Pack in October 2006 and recommended it as a valuable way to keep useful software up to date. From Google System Blog: "StarOffice 8 is a full-featured office suite that contains a word processor, a spreadsheet tool, applications for presentations, databases, math formulas and drawing. It has support for most Microsoft Office formats (except for the formats introduced in Office 2007), but it can also export documents as PDF out of the box. The software normally costs $70, but it's available for free in Google Pack. It's worth noting that StarOffice has a huge installer (more than 140 MB), so you should download it only if you have a fast Internet connection." StarOffice 8 usually retails at

**The rest of this post has been corrupted**

I was given this Sony Vaio laptop from our local LUG, it has Ubuntu on but I needed it for my accounts so dual booted Windows XP with the license stuck on the bottom. It's been a while since I've had a Windows laptop as I'm used to OS X on my iMac.

Most my friends chat on MSN messenger/Windows messenger/MSN/Windows Live Messenger (or whatever it is branded now) so I installed the Windows version. A few years ago the program was just an instant messenger for chatting to people, now it's so bloated I had to write this blog to highlight its problems.

As you can see almost 50% of the application interface is taken up by elements that have nothing to do with instant messaging! (Tabs can be hidden in the options but this is not default).

Compared to the Mac version there is so much bloat that detract from the original idea of the program.

Even though there are no search boxes, tabs or adverts the Mac version of the program remains highly usable and easy to use and look at.

I did a quick redesign in Fireworks of the Windows version to make it look better.

I've basically cut out all the crap - the program is back to its roots - for chatting to people online. All it needs now is some brushed aluminium.......

So I was browsing Digg.com last night when I came across this post about the 69 best tech blogs, it has all the big commercial players including Gizmondo (1) Tech Crunch (3) and TUAW (31). I'm scrolling down the list seeing how many I recognise when I come across number 26 - I'm A Fish!

I was more than a little surprised though it's great to see another site recognising us in such a list. In an updated post today the site explains how he came up with the list and the time and effort that went into it. The list is in no particular order though still is good to be in the middle!

Kudos to Micahville!

With so much information about the iPhone being generated over the past week here is a run down of the various reviews and information we have been getting about the iPhone.

Reviews Walt Mossberg on the iPhone. One of the first iPhone reviews and goes into quite some detail about the various functions of the phone. This is a good starting place to find out about the iPhone. The New York Times iPhone Review. By David Pogue. Again another good starting place to find out about the iPhone. David Pogue's iPhone review. (video) He really doesn't like AT&T's Edge network. Cnet Australia on the iPhone vs the Nokia N95. Compares thickness, screen size, display surface, Wifi, talk time, internet use, video playback and audio playback time as well as a range of other criteria. The iPhone scorecard from reviews so far. The iPhone seems to be scoring highly so far.

Engadget on comparing the iPhone to the Blackberry. Essential read if you are thinking about an iPhone and are a business user. Wireless Info iPhone review. Says the iPhone is attractive to business users and is revolutionary in some ways but only evolutionary in others. First impressions for Daring Fireball. Splits the review up into the different parts of the phone, not as long as some reviews but has some very good points. Howard Forums on the problems with the iPhone. Points out some useful things that you might expect on other phones but not on the iPhone.

Engadget iPhone review. Detailed review about the various features, comes to the same conclusion as many other reviews though states that productivity with the iPhone could be better. TUAW with real world iPhone experience. Dave Caolo has fallen in love with the iPhone as he puts it. iLounge iPhone review. Ten pages of indepth iPhone information saying the phone is great but the two year contract sucks. TUAW initial thoughts on Mail and SMS. Generally positive about using SMS but as he admits he doesn't send a lot of SMS messages. Pocket-lint iPhone review. Great phone but still with it downsides, they are not convinced on the two year contract.

Hardware TUAW with some iPhone pictures and first impressions. Fixit on dismantling the iPhone. (Someone was going to do it sooner or later) PC World on the iPhone stress test. (Video) Engadget on the iPhone using an 620mhz ARM CPU. Potentially made by Samsung. Business Week on how much the iPhone components cost to make. Discusses some of the possible manufactures of parts and how much they cost. TUAW on the iPhone battery replacement warranty. Apple Insider on the internal components in the iPhone. Parts from Samsung and Intel.

Engadget on the iPhone not looking so cool. Nasty crack in the top of the iPhone from the edge of a table.. AnandTech on dissecting the iPhone. Lots of pictures and detail about what is inside the iPhone. How Stuff Works on how the iPhone works. Good detail of the touch screen system and features.

Rumours Engadget on a 3G iPhone for Europe. On Vodaphone and T-Mobile in the UK.

Apple Insider on how the iPhone could be updated for Leopard. Apple Insider admit they are not sure about this rumour.

Applications Lifehacker on the top 10 iPhone applications. Some useful apps and some not so useful apps. Hackintosh on the iPhone system restore image download. Download straight from Apple. Joe Hewitt on Firebug for the iPhone. Debugging software for the iPhone. 25 Top Web Applications for the iPhone. Includes iPhone Chat, Google Reader, iPhoneDigg and OneTrip Shopping list. iPhone Source. Good website on iPhone applications.

Activation Engadget on the iPhone costs. (All American costs, no European costs available yet). Apple Insider on porting ineligible numbers to the iPhone. TUAW on how to get a contract-free iPhone. More on prepay from TUAW using 999-99-9999 as your social security number.

Interface Apple video on the keyboard interface. Official video from Apple about how to use the on screen touch typing. Think Secret with high resolution iPhone interface screen shots. Some nice pictures of the phone if you have not yet seen what it looks like. Gizmondo on touch typing on the iPhone. (Video) Engadget video on iPhone interface. Available in high definition. The iPhone Root Password. Ged Blog on setting the iPhones wallpaper. Useful if you want to put pictures from web sites onto the wallpaper of your phone.

Humour Stephen Colbert on the iPhone. He doesn't actually have one but has the next best thing, an imaginary one. Punking an Apple Fanboy on iPhone release week. Some people have too much time on their hands, funny though! The Joy of Tech Comic.

Other Gizmondo on what the iPhone doesn't have. Songs as ringtones (seems an obvious thing to have), games, flash, MMS (seems obvious too) and video recording to name a few. BBC on the iPhone making it into stores. Includes a video of Google CEO Eric Schmidt showing off his iPhone. BBC on the iPhone creating a stir at launch. Selling over 500,000 units in its opening weekend. Three accessories that won't work on your iPhone. Won't work as a phone when docked into speakers, no stereo Bluetooth and your headphones may not work. Think there is something missing from this list? Contact me.

On Sunday evening I finished writing an article I had been preparing for a couple of weeks. It was full of my own experience and careful research into the area of OS X optimization, I compiled in total 52 tips. Once publishing on Sunday I submitted the article to around 20 top Mac news sites thinking that a couple might pick them up. Luckily some did and by late Monday it found its way onto Digg.com, where it got promoted to the front page early Tuesday morning. I've never had an article on Digg so was quite surprised to find someone has submitted it and that it received over 1500 Diggs. The traffic increase had quite an effect on ImAFish so I'm going to try to evaluate whats happened.

Visitor Stats

The graph is from ImAFish's Google Analytics and shows unique visits. As you can see from the Graph the huge traffic spike on Tuesday, this is when the article made it to the front page of Digg. The flat line represents around 200-250 visits/day.

The table below shows total number of hits from the week for the various locations. What's interesting is how this balances out over the individual days - 20,000 off the Digg hits come on the Tuesday though the StumbleUpon traffic is spread quite evenly over the week. It will be interesting to see how this traffic will taper off over the coming days/weeks , one of my other popular articles still has a constant traffic stream even though it was written over a year ago. I thought it was also interesting to leave the 'average time on site' stats in as the StumbleUpon average is double what it is for all the others. I thought this may be because there are more comments nearer the end of the week for Stumble visitors to read however 99% of the lifehacker.com visits have been in at the end of the week. Why are StumbleUpon visitors spending twice as long on the site and viewing on average 2 pages? I'm not really surprised about the low pages/visit as being a Digg user myself I rarely look further around a site unless it's been Dugg a number of times in a short period making me more interested. The browser stats shouldn't be of any particular surprise considering it's a OS X based article so I was expecting a higher rate of Safari users than usual. 70% of the visitors used OS X, 27% Windows and 3% Linux. Over the week I used 35gig of bandwidth, mainly because I hosted all my own images for the article. Adverts My advertising revenue was better than usual however it did not increase at the same percent that the visits did. It's pretty well known that Digg users don't click adverts and I could have done more to optimise the adverts to be in better positions however my main goal of the article was not to milk it for revenue. On average for the week page click through rate has been at 0.19%, which is down considerably from usual.

Server

I was quite surprised with my hosting in the fact that it didn't go down at all. I just have a normal shared hosting account. Its not unusual to see websites that have gone down because of the Digg effect and with the volume of hits I was getting I was expecting the worst. I'm not sure the exact reason on the server staying up but I know its not overloaded with accounts, is a reasonable speed and is run by some very good techies. My articles blog runs Wordpress 2.1 with the WP-Cache module installed which I can imagine also helped. Response The response to the article was in general very positive and its created quite a debate for some people, one person has even copied my list and written responses to all of them, its a bit patronising and he doesn't add anything useful to my article. Though I have to give credit to him for being able to spin my article into something that has also brought him traffic and for not censoring all the negative comments it has given him. Its been good to see a range of comments on ImAFish and I thank those people who made corrections or added to the original article.

Content Evaluation There are some parts of the article where I should have been more clear and this unfortunately led to some confusion for some people, in future I will have to make sure any points made are obvious. Overall though its been a very positive experience and a very interesting week, hopefully I can repeat it again with another article in the not so distant future. I'm off for a week to Egypt on holiday so will bring another holiday review the week after.