Pretty awesome picture of the UK yesterday from Space. Spent a while working out exactly which bit of whitish-grey was Derby. Click on the picture for the full-size (3MB) version.

From NASA

Happy Christmas Everybody!

Went to Spain and Portugal recently to visit some of the major battlesites and sieges in the Penninsular War. I finally got some time to sort out the thousands of photos we brought back so here are a few…

Went to Dorset in July but only just managed to get the photos sorted.

This was emailed to me by a friend.

I managed to spill hot chocolate on my netbook on Friday. That’s the first time, and hopefully the last time, I’ve done that.

Fortunately it only went on the mousepad and the keyboard. I managed to get the mousepad working this morning but have had to order a new keyboard for it from ebay.

In the meantime I can use a usb keyboard.

Got my first birdie recently on the 6th hole (par 3) at Brailsford Golf Course.

Here’s a picture:

I climbed Glyder Fach and then Glyder Fawr yesterday with my Dad and some of my brothers. We drove down to Wales the previous evening and arrived at 1am on Wednesday, grabbed a couple hours of sleep and then started the climb at 4:30am.

We finished at 10am and then went to Bangor for lunch.

The power’s just come on after a 4th power cut in the Computer Science building in as many days. There were two on Friday while I was in the building and one just after I left. We’re not sure what the cause is or how many happened over the weekend but my suspicion is that the department is trying to get us geeks to take breaks from sitting in front of our computers 24/7!

This one lasted about 10 minutes and Jonny got stuck in the lift for the duration!

The picture is of my first shot from the 13th hole at Brailsford on the 23rd. Unfortunately my birdie putt stopped short so I could only manage par, however as that’s a rare occurrance at the moment I’m pretty happy with it!

The incredible Wolfram Alpha computational knowledge search engine has gone live today to the public. It has answers to pretty much anything you can think of, and although it may not be able to explain the meaning of life or what you ate this morning it can still tell you that the temperature in Antartica when Kennedy died was -38F. Make sure you visit as it is amazing!

Elsewhere on the internet I came across (via everyjoe.com) a webpage with a few really impressive images comparing the earth to the sun, the sun to some bigger star and then the bigger star to the REALLY bigger stars. Makes you feel small but it definitely worth a look. The world we live in is truely amazing!

Of course you can get some interesting facts on these things from Wolfram Alpha here…