According to the BBC, smoking in enclosed public places will be banned in England from 1 July next year. In my opinion, this is excellent news. Why it couldn’t have been implemented earlier, I don’t know. How well it will be enforced is yet to be seen. I imagine there will still be the occasional few people who flout the rules and light up in public, hopefully these will be a minimum.

I’ve just been playing and have managed to implement the photo gallery into the rest of the website. It should work with all browsers, but if you browse to the gallery without maximising your browser window, it could look strange due to a restriction in the coppermine software. Due to the way the template for the gallery works, it will take a lot more work to put the random photos in the top left into the page - might get round to it at some point.

If you have any problems or it looks weird in any way, let me know!

It’s the end of week 8 today. All is still going well, but the work is starting to mount up. On the Chemistry side, it’s mostly assessed worksheets which contribute altogether 25% towards each module, and on the Business side I have a group project to work on and another essay that will wait till over Christmas. Oh, and there’s all the day-to-day work to keep on top of too. Only 3 weeks left now!

Have a good weekend.

I’ve just made a few updates to the right sidebar.

1. Google search. I think this is quite cool. You can search this website or the whole of the web, and the results will appear as a page on this website.
2. RSS. If you are into your RSS, then you can stay up to date with my blog posts by subscribing to this feed. You should see an orange box in the address bar (Firefox), or to the right of the home button in IE7. If you use Thunderbird for your email, you can have posts appear as emails. For more info on RSS and its uses, see this article.

Happy Birthday World Wide Web!

Today, the Web turns 16. According to the W3C, “the first web server was nxoc01.cern.ch, later called info.cern.ch, and the first web page http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html. Unfortunately CERN no longer supports the historical site. Note from this era too, the least recently modified web page we know of, last changed Tue, 13 Nov 1990 15:17:00 GMT”

I’m now over half way through the semester - only five weeks to go! For the next few weeks I have 11 hours of lectures a week, which leaves me with Wednesdays and Fridays off. Three day week, can’t be bad!

I had my first meeting with my research project tutor last Thursday. He was very helpful showing me what I need to do, where I need to look for information and some other general guidance. Now all I need to do is get stuck into the wonderful world of superconductors and learn what it’s all about before starting the actual write up. I need to get a first draft in by after Christmas which seems a long way off, but it will quickly come round.

Welcome to my new website!

I have been working on this design on and off for a few months now in my spare time. Recently, the release of Internet Explorer 7 spurred me into action to get it finished, as my old site didn’t work very well at all in it; it would have required a complete redesign to fix anyway. So here you are, a design that works well in IE6, IE7 and Firefox. It should look the same no matter what browser you use, which is pleasing.

You will probably have noticed the blog menu down the right hand side of the page. This contains a monthly archive listing of all my posts - it goes back about two years at the moment, I’ll open up the rest soon (all the stuff from my old LiveJournal if you remember it, which was added as private for some reason). There is also a category list so you can browse by category if you wish.

I hope to integrate the photo gallery with the rest of the site at some point, but until then it remains a stand along section. Might take a considerable amount of time, which is something I don’t have a lot of at the moment. I also plan to add an RSS feed at some point once I have learnt a bit more about styling them.

Let me know what you think of it, all comments appreciated!

I was invited to a meeting last night about setting up a youth council in Wombourne. Basically, it is intended to set up a committee that will serve the youth of the local area, campaigning for youth issues etc. It’s something I’m really interested in, as I think it’s long overdue and something needs to be done to sort out the lack of facilities for young people in the Wombourne area. Hopefully it will all take off and we will see some changes in the area soon.