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.

Just been playing trying to get rid of that annoying blue band that appears for you internet explorer 6 users (get firefox). Turns out I accidentaly deleted the float: left line in the css file. Proper browsers rendered it as intended, but as always IE6 had problems.

Just got back from a long weekend in the caravan in the Peak District with my family. We stayed on a site just outside Ashbourne called Callow Top which was very nice. The site had it’s own pub/resaurant, nice toilet facilities and an outdoor swimming pool for the summer.

On Friday we went cycling along the Tissington trail, which starts in Ashbourne and runs for about 13 miles. It’s kind of like the Staffordshire railway walk that passes by Wombourne, not sure if it is an abondoned railway line in the same way or not, but there are some nice views and it is pretty flat most of the way. After about 8 miles, we stopped for lunch at about midday and it started to rain slowly, slowly getting harder. We decided to carry on for a while to see if we could get to the end, but at 1.30 we turned around and went back as it wasn’t slowing down and everything was soaked through. For the last few miles the rain stopped, but there were still loads of puddles on the track so by the time I got back to the caravan, I had mud all up my back, my face was covered, my shoes soaked and my trousers were brown instead of blue. Into the shower I went!

Saturday we walked from the caravan site, about 15 km to Dovedale and back down the Tissington Trail to the site.

We arrived at Dovedale at lunch time and made our way back. Fortunately, the weather managed to hold and stayed rather nice today so it was slightly more enjoyable than yesterday.

Here is a photo of me sitting on a stile in some field somewhere. Click for bigger picture.

I installed MS’s latest ‘browser’ offering this morning, Internet Exploder Explorer 7. On initial looks, it scores quite highly. The interface has been totally overhauled and is now much more user friendly and better looking. The implementation of tabbed browsing is pretty good aswell, bringing it into line with the likes of Firefox 1.5 and Opera. One of the first things I tried in it was looking to see how some of the websites I look after behave. My website was strange, IE now seems to respond properly to the css float: and positon: properties, so a small fix was made there to correct it. All in all, most of the sites I have made displayed relatively well with only a couple of changes required. Hopefully they will still look ok in IE6 aswell.

On the security side of things, I haven’t really noticed anything but the phishing filter but I’ve heard comments of some background things that have been changed to make it more secure than IE6.

So, if you haven’t already, I recommend you update to IE7. Download it here. I believe it is due to come out in automatic updates sometime during November. It’s about a 14 MB download, and install should take less than five minutes. I guarantee you will like it!

Found out what research project I have been assigned this morning: “n-type Superconductors: Synthesis and Characterisation”. That was my second choice, but I couldn’t make up my mind between the first two so I am happy with that. I got a book out the library to give a bit of an insight before I see my project supervisor hopefully next week for some guidance. Hopefully it is something that will remain interesting ’till next April when it is due in.

Just finished the second week of uni! Only another 9 to go until end of semester.

This week I had to decide the title of my third year research project. Everyone had to submit up to six titles, and one would be chosen so everyone in the year was doing something different. My four, in preference order were “Chemistry of Fuel Cells”, “n-type superconductors: synthesis and characterisation”, “Mercury Based Superconductors” and “The Chemistry of Large Scale Hydrogen Production”. I chose those four because they appear to be quite interesting and I think I could find enough material and past research to string together up to 6000 words. Should know some time next week which one I have been assigned to, hopefully it will be my first choice!