Had my last lecture today! Thats it, all done. Nothing left now but exams. I’m going to have one last read through my dissertation tonight, and hand it in at some point tomorrow. We have to submit it online, so I don’t even have to bother going  in. Its quite scary really that the end is now so close. This last semester has gone so fast and now theres only six weeks left till exams. I might even have to start looking to get a job!

Just got my exam timetable. First one is in six weeks! Oh no! Most of them are spread between 14th May and 21st May, with only the Friday off, then there is a week gap with Corporate Finance on 31st. So overall, they have managed to spread themselves over three weeks, with the majority concentrated within the first week. Officially I have 9 exams, but 6 of them are really the same module but spread across two semesters, but they give us two separate exams for them.

Got my graduation ceremony day yesterday as well - Tuesday 17th July. Exactly one week before I go on the Jamboree!!

Haven’t posted anything for a while, so thought I’d let you all know what I’ve been up to. I’ve been rather busy the last few weeks with general stuff. A lot of it uni work, with my dissertation being due in by the end of term in two weeks time and various assessed worksheets to keep up with. I’ve mostly finished it now, just need to tidy bits up and see what my supervisor thinks of it when I finally get to see him. I’ve also been working hard getting the Wombourne Youth Action Team set up. We had the first proper meeting on Thursday just gone which went well, so everything should progress a bit easier from now on.

Looking forward to going skiing in two weeks time. I’ve got all my bits and pieces I need for that had some last minute practice at the snow dome a couple of weeks back. We’re going to a (hopefully) nice resort in Austria called Wildshonau, a collection of villages in the Austrian Alps. Hopefully there will still be snow there when we arrive. Reports currently range from no snow in the village we are, to 50 cm in the surrounding villages. Fingers crossed it snows in the next two weeks!

Went on a trip to London yesterday with KOSSMIC for a tour round the Houses of Parliament. We left at 8.30 and got there by about 11.30. We went on a tour round the Cabinet War Rooms first of all as our visit wasn’t scheduled until 3.30. This is the secret bunker where the Cabinet spent a lot of time during World War II under Whitehall. They had all sorts of offices and rooms for the Prime Minister and his staff to work during air raids. It is also the home of the Churchill Museum which was opened in 2005. Both a very interesting visit if you are ever in that part of London.

At 3.30 we went over to the Sovereign’s Entrance to the Houses of Parliament and had our bags checked and started the tour. After walking through the door, there is a huge hall on the left which is the oldest remaining part of the Palace of Westminster. Don’t think its used much any more. Then we went down a corridor to the Main Lobby, which is the part you see on TV when they do interviews etc. From there there are two corridors leading off; one left to the House of Commons, and right to the House of Lords. Turning down the left hand corridor, there is another lobby area which has pigeon holes and other information for the MPs and statues of some Prime Ministers of the 20th Century, the most recent of which is the statue of Margaret Thatcher which was unveiled earlier in the week. Around the outside of the actual chamber is another corridor which is the Voting Lobby where votes are taken. We then went into the chamber itself. On first impression, it is much smaller than I expected it to be based on what I have seen on TV. Apparently there are more MPs than seats, so if every one of them turns up some will have to stand.

We then went out across the main lobby to the House of Lords. It is obvious the difference in the status of the two houses - this side was much more elegantly decorated with carved wood, and a huge gold wall at the one end with the thrown where the Queen sits on the opening of Parliament day. The seats here are red as opposed to the green seats in the Commons. Again, the chamber itself is very small and there isn’t enough space for all of the Lords to sit if they were to all turn up, which rarely happens.

A very interesting day out. If you ever get the chance to visit the Houses of Parliament, it is an absolute must see - the home of all democracy and law making in the country.

OscarTorrents invites you to download all the movies nominated for Oscars this year and then rate them, giving a view of what the Internet thinks is the best movie of the year. Contains links to hard-to-find Oscars nominations on existing trackers.

“OscarTorrents is the Oscars as it should be — everyone can download the year’s nominations using the popular BitTorrent service, watch the movies, then use our rating system to choose their favourites. To download any film up for an Oscar this year, you’ll need three things: an internet connection, a computer, and a BitTorrent client.”

I’ve just added a new page to the left side menu - What I Dugg. Hopefully you will find it interesting to see what stories I have “dugg” on digg.com. If you haven’t discovered Digg yet, see how it works. I hope you will find it interesting to see what news stories I have been reading.

All the articles come from a neat little feed provided by Digg. It involves simpy adding a line of javascript to fetch the data, and adding three css classes to style the list. If you would like to have a similar thing on your website, take a look at the digg tool. Its quite customisable.

2007 is the centenary of the Scout Movement. 100 years ago in 1907, Scouting started with an experimental camp held on Brownsea Island in Dorset led by war veteran Lord Robert Baden-Powell. Prompted by his famous book “Scouting for Boys” published in 1908, Scout groups were set up throughout the country, and quickly expanded to other parts of the British Empire.

In 1920 the first World Scout Jamboree was held in 1920 at Olympia in London and was an inside exhibition of Scouting. The second, held four years later held in Copenhagen was the first international Scout camp which set the tradition of Scout Jamborees.

Today Scouting has twenty-five million members world-wide (not counting Guides) and is still growing. Approximately four million of those are from the United States, the largest single Scout Association. There are 155 countries with internationally recognised National Scout Organisations. There are more than 28 million Scouts, youth and adults, boys and girls in 216 countries and territories. More information on the history of Scouting can be found on Scoutbase UK.

This year, being the centenary of Scouting there are numerous events being held worldwide to celebrate the largest organisation for young people in the world. The largest event will be the 21st World Jamboree held in Chelmsford, Essex, UK. The World Scout Jamboree will be a gathering of Scouts from around the world for 12 days from 27 July to 8 August.

Please sign this petition to the UK Government to increase the awareness of the centenary of Scouting.

Just found an interesting site that tells you some fun facts about the day you were born. According to it, I was born on a Sunday 7,545 days ago in the Chinese year of the tiger and the Egyptian month of Mesore. I share my birthday with Marilyn Monroe, Alanis Morissette and Bob Monkhouse (never heard of the other apparently famous people). Want to know useless stuff about your birthday? Of course you do, check it out.

There is an article on the BBC at the moment about moving our times in line with Europe, moving them forward an hour. According to the article, “the UK would cut crime, boost tourism, improve health and reduce accidents, according to House of Commons research.”

I would just like to register my disgust at this awful suggestion. There is no way I can believe having an ‘extra hour’ of light a day will stop 450 deaths a year. I don’t know about everyone else, but I have headlights on my car for night driving.

The whole world bases its times on UTC. UTC is the world standard time. If Europe wants to be on the same time as Britain, they can change!

Another big argument is the costs of doing business between Britain and Europe because of the time differences. I personally don’t see how +1 hour is going to make much difference. What about those who do business between Britain and USA or the far east? Do they want the them to change their time systems aswell?

Stop wasting your time Government and come up with some useful suggestions for once!

[edit] Looks like they ran out of time.

Just finished upgrading my blog to the latest version of Wordpress, which was released two days ago. Some notable features include spell checking for posts, updated spam catcher and much more efficient database code. Hopefully you should notice the whole site loads a lot quicker now due to these database optimisations, it seems to from my end anyway. Aaron Brazell has written “10 Things You Should Know About WordPress 2.1″ with even more details on the changes that come with WordPress 2.1.

I’ve also updated the feed URL due to some fixes and also I think it looks better. My new feed URL is http://henrycleaver.co.uk/feed/