Just seen an interesting video on YouTube of the TNT 737 crash at Birmingham Airport in June. For those who aren’t aware of the details, a TNT cargo 737 departed from Belgium to Stansted, and due to undercarriage problems made an emergency landing at East Midlands, but had to go around after landing, leaving its right main landing gear on the grass beside the runway, eventually ending up landing on runway 33 at Birmingham. There is also an article from the BBC.

The video is from the West Midlands Police helicopter which is based at Birmingham.

It’s slightly alarming to see the aircraft touching down with only the left main undercarriage, then having to lower itself onto the right engine. Look out for the sparks! Good bit of piloting to get down safely.

Unfortunately the aircraft sustained irreparable damage and was written off. It now sits parked on runway 06/24 waiting to be dismantled for scrap.

After much fiddling I’ve just updated the permalinks for my blog. They are now in the form /blog/year/month/post-name which I thought makes it look better and maybe easier to find posts for all visitors, whether human or search engine. I hope the search engines manage to update quickly, Google is usually pretty quick at finding new stuff because of the sitemap.

In my quest for good Google ratings and an effective permalink structure, I have come across some good SEO tips specific to Wordpress. They are all pretty easy to implement, but could potentially be quite effective. I have also found a post about general blog search engine optimisation. Most of them focus around using effective post titles, permalink structures and good content.

Been trying a bit today to update the permalinks for my blog. Instead of each post being linked to by something like index.php/?p=200 I want it to look like /blog/year/month/day so it is a bit friendlier. I’ve just recompiled apache to enable mod_rewrite but haven’t managed to work out how to put the rewrite rules into the .htaccess file yet, never having used it before. I’ll have to leave it till sometime after Christmas when I’ve got more time to read through the Wordpress manuals.

Just a short note to say Happy Christmas to all. Hope you have good fun, drink plenty booze and eat loads of yummy food.

Here’s a Christmas song to get you in the mood, recorded by my brother and his friends.

Finished Uni for Christmas yesterday. Officially the term doesn’t end until Friday, but there is only one lecture on Thursday as the rest of the courses have finished, so there’s no point going for one lecture really and I have Fridays off anyway. I’m going to spend the rest of the week doing not very much before I have to make a start on the pile of work I have to do for next year.

Less than two weeks left ’till Christmas! I haven’t done any shopping whatsoever. Might get round to it eventually.

Went to the snowdome this afternoon with my brother to make sure we can still ski before we go to Austria next April. We’ve been waiting for a chance to go for a while to get the cheap deal – it cost me £15 for two hours on the slope, including ski hire on student prices. Not having done any skiing for some five years I started off slowly and only went part way up and after a few runs was going the whole length. Great fun!

It must be like riding a bicycle, because all the movements came back pretty much straight away which was good. It wasn’t too busy either for a friday afternoon so we managed to do several fast runs. Must try and get there again very soon, its real good fun!

Just thought I’d alert everyone to the fact that the latest version of openSUSE is due to be released this Thursday for download. SUSE is my favourite linux distribution for desktops, and I’m finding myself using it more and more because of the numerous advantages it offers over Windows.

From the OpenSUSE website: The openSUSE project is a worldwide community program sponsored by Novell that promotes the use of Linux everywhere. The program provides free and easy access to openSUSE. Here you will find a community of users and developers, who all have the same goal in mind – to create and distribute the world’s most usable Linux.

Just two weeks left till I finish uni for Christmas now. Getting scarily close. Unfortunately, Christmas isn’t going to be much of a rest though as I have quite a bit of work to be getting on with: 2 business essays, one of which is a group project, 3 assessed worksheets and my major research project. Hmmm.