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…

My application to upgrade my BCS membership from Student to Professional Member was accepted today so I am now a full member of the “leading body for those working in IT”…

On another note, I’m still working on the CAF+LAG player program. For those of you who haven’t fallen asleep after the double-barrelled  use of acronyms… …a CAF describes the data for a lesson and a LAG tells the computer how to display it… sort of. At the moment I’m working on turning a basic .lag file (like this one) into an XML representation (like this) for easy manipulation in the rest of the program.

I’m currently working through the examples on this page to make sure that I’m covering the syntax and grammer properly.

Looks like our European masters have decided to do April 1st two months early as the European Parliament decides that “Parents should have a “red button” to disable a game they feel is inappropriate for their child” in an official press release.

Here’s an easy way to stop people nicking your sandwiches…

Recent findings show that the credit for being the first man to draw the moon while looking through a telescope doesn’t belong to the Italians but the English. Although Galileo was a pioneer in astronomy, he wasn’t the first to make a map of the moon using a telescope.

Thomas Harriot beat Galileo to that title by a couple of months in July 1609.