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They did it, well done the Greeks! I am well pleased Alex even sort of got into it.

I have to say they well deserved it. They have played brilliantly all tournament. Who would have thought it though - a team that had never won a match before in major tournament have now won it - well done.

See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/euro_2004/3860105.stm

Today I have had a quiet busy day. I managed to send about 40 emails to various people relating to the FAS Convention, I am really enjoying my time on the FAS Council and hope I can be part of it for many years.

As for work my progress has been slow, I am going to get into hopefully tomorrow and make lots of progress. Unpacking wise again this is slow but at least it is going somewhere.

I was sent this link http://astrosurf.com/rondi/venus2004/index.htm the other day and wow you have to take a look at some of the stunning pictures of the transit - unlike us they had some damn advanced equipment.

I have to say cleaning is never fun but it definitely is satisfying. I am almost at the point when I feel going into the bathroom is a safe thing todo. After continually bleaching the area I feel that anything that was alive is now dead and after scrubbing hard it is looking almost sanitary.

As for Kerrang, I have to say I love this radio station - especially now I have my radio connected up to my desktop. To listen to it just move that dial to 105.2 FM within the west midlands or so.

Today I got up late and felt better. I was eager to go and decided to stay at home to work on web stuff for my Uni observatory project. It went well, I got bored so sorted out some FAS stuff. Unpacked, tidied, went the shop - well all I can say is well not the most inspiring days - oh and I put a network cable through to Katherine's room. Wow, interesting day.

Today I completed the setup of the PPS (Poynting Physical Society) website, http://www.ppsbham.co.uk. I am pleased with the final setup, just need to add some content. I have an ok day overall, I got the next step of my lab manual done and got IRAF to work on an area I was having problems with. It has been a nice day, the weather has been good in Brum and I have to say I like the fact of looking out my window through a huge tree.

Today I started my task to try and reform UFAS, I don't know if we will be successful but I hope some progress will be made because I believe that this sort of collaboration will present lots of opportunities for member societies.

Well I have already had one bounced email, wonder how many are to come?

On other things, I had my parents around earlier who kindly brought over some stuff for me (including parts so I can fix our loo seat!).

Oh this is also my 300th entry into my blog, wow!! I remember thinking I don't know why I am installing this software, will never use it.

Last night was quite embarrassing, I couldn't get into Snobs because I was wearing tracksuit bottoms, the things I have worn every other time I have been to Snobs. All the can say is forget Snobs. They said they have had a dress code for ages, yes I believe they have but well I didn't see what I was wearing on there. I guess my trousers were tracksuit style but come on they are smarter than most peoples Jeans and I have worn them into there so many times. They are just trying to become trendy. Forget that, I don't go to Snobs to look good. I go to listen to good music and have cheap beer.

Instead me and Katherine went to Eddies (Edwards No.8), which was fun. It is heavier at Eddies but it was different and I was good to have a few drinks so it meant the night was not pointless.

Only problem I have the term "tracksuit person" attributed to me by Katherine at the moment.

Well sort of. I have spent most of the day either working on my Uni obs lab or arsing around trying to get some form of image gallery working for the PPS website. I thought I had but nope the software does actually deal with the images. So I tried my favourite, the one I use for my site, guess what? It didn't work, I need to install some perl modules. I had to do this before but on this server it seems impossible. I have contacted the help desk, hope they can help.

As for the wider world: "Brown axes 104,000 civil servants" - see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3887053.stm, what is he thinking?! OK I can understand getting rid of some civil servants as I believe we have too many, but to sake over a 100,000 people is ridiculous. That equivalent to roughly telling 10% of the populace of Birmingham proper (not including suburbs) that they have lost their jobs! One word = NUMPTY!

Astronomers do come up with imaginative names, the latest being Cloverleaf Quasar (a.k.a. H1413+117). I guess at a push the image produced by the Chandra telescope looks sort of cloverleaf shaped (see below).

NASA/CXC/Penn State/G.Chartas et al; Illustration: NASA/CXC/M.Weiss

I am not very convinced by this name, well I guess you have to come up with something and heck it is still a very cool image, especially when you think why it is being caused. For more see: http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2004/h1413/

You may or may not know if you type man followed by a command (e.g. man ls) at a Unix command line you get the manual for that command. This afternoon I speculated if there where woman files, but I guess all the would say would be "forget about it love, I am a computer leave me alone"! Well if I have offended half of the people out there I am sorry, I just thought that comment seemed funny in a completely sexist / egotistical way - have I paid back for my crime yet ;-) Anyway's I blame Matt for that comment since he brought up the whole topic of man files.

I have been meaning to use crontab for a while now. This allows me to run tasks on my server at certain times, the beauty being I am able to backup my data without having to interact with any programs. When I initially installed my forum I was going to do this so that I could dump mysql database. At first I had no luck and then I just decided to do it manually, this was still bugging me and so decided to wait till I had time to give it another look. I started having a look into it yesterday and got it to work really quickly, something I am very pleased with. I have to say that if you are interested in doing this, as it is very powerful, take a look at: http://www.theprojects.org/tutorials/mysqldump.php , which shows you have to dump you database and http://www.faqts.com/knowledge_base/view.phtml/aid/1005/fid/436 which is very useful for the crontab stuff. One thing I should add is (it is only mentioned in the website about crontab stuff) you should change the default text editor, if you have no experience with vim, to something like emacs otherwise it can be hard to edit the crontab file see: http://ralphie.perlmonk.org/mosix/cron.html for more on this.

I have had a few surreal moments over the last 24 hours. It all started by me walking into my bedroom last night to go to sleep only to her this rustling noise over by Alex's fabrics. At first I put this down to her having just moved the plastic bags in which the fabric is kept, so I started getting ready for bed. Then all of a sudden the sound was back, well I wasn't having any of this time to investigate. What did I find but a huge moth trapped in one of her bags and flapping its wings. I got it out but not being sensible got it out in the room, should have done it outside. The next surreal moment happened straight after and that was me chasing this moth around the room with a huge green plastic bag and a roll of wrapping paper - don't ask my mind was tired and I thought this would be a good idea. My intention was to catch the moth and then place it outside. This did not happen and after a few minutes I gave up.

The next surreal moment came in my dreams. Having surreal dreams is nothing shocking for me but this was quite strange and I think from what I remember involved me meeting Ash's front man Tim Wheeler at my old school and I think the White Stripes. I am not entirely sure what came next but recall waking very confused.

How did I manage to get to Uni? This is a question I quite often think, the only thing I can put it down to is a combination of luck, hard work and my parents. I definitely don't think it was down to my school, apart from the few inspirational teachers (of the Mathematics and Science kind) I really don't think that my school helped me get where I am too much. My main understand always occurred outside of the classroom. The reason I have been thinking about this is I came across my School's OFSTED report for 1999 and the breakdown of results over the last few years on the BBC website (see: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/education/03/school_tables/secondary_schools/html/330_4083.stm).

It is shocking, my old school is ranked 3485 out of 3579 for GSCEs national - just 94 off bottom! All I can say is: bloody hell! Well I am shocked, I knew my school was bad but not that bad.

I looked up Alex's school, Cox Green Maidenhead in comparison her school is brilliant, coming in at 1774 out of 3579 nationally. I will not even mention Katherine's which was something like 700th and had negligible unauthorized absences!

Wow I was shocked this morning. I had just got up expecting a long wait before I would get that knock on the door with my delivery but instead of a huge wait I had a very short one. In fact the delivery was early. I can not believe it, my hats go off to Argos which on both occasions recently have been very punctual. Now I just have the awful task of putting up a flatpack bed! :-(

I think it is a good idea to act about Child pornography as it is sick and disturbing but I am twisted by my beliefs of freedom of speech. No I don't mean freedom of speech to show child porn, I mean more along the lines of ISP's installing software that blocks websites. I personally don't think blocking is a good idea, yes it works - but only in the short term. These people can always setup again with a different site. What is needed is action against them directly, i.e. by tracing the source and getting the people behind it. I don't like the idea of blocking websites, especially since the same technology could be used to block other sites, for example anti government sites, or say pro Al-Qaeda. You may say that yes they should be blocked but surely we live in a democratic society and people are allowed there opinions. Heck we have a political party that is basically a racist organistaion (they claim not to be, but I am allowed my personal view) in the BNP so surely we should allow freedom of speech to everyone.

Oh back to the child porn, well done BT you are actually doing something - maybe you should do some actual development of your company as well!

Also take a look at this picture:

This picture is from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3786527.stm. This is the article about BT introducing their blocking software. Anyone see something wrong with the picture? Yes the fact that the person is plugging something in the serial port, gosh, that must have been taken 10 years ago when serial ports might (not sure if they were - maybe for the modem) have been used for internet communications.

I am in the process of learning LaTeX, my latest endeavor to increase my computing knowledge and help me with my summer project. It is going well. I am currently installing MiKTeX so I can use it on Windows, I could do it on Linux very easily but I do like to use windows still. This is mainly so I can just have a game when I want a break from work and the fact that I am still very new to Linux. To help me with learning LaTeX I am using "The Not so short introduction to Latex 2E" (pdf version here), this is quite funny with comments in it like "Real Men Use Unix"! (see page 22 of the pdf file). Anyway back to it I think.

Last night I was convinced by Steve to go and play rugby - something I haven't done in a long time. I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed myself, well up till the point that I pulled my hamstring. Since we were only playing touch rugby my usual charge and hit the deck tactic does not work, it is more a question of speed. SInce it is about speed when I got the ball in a very attacking position instead of charging through I tried to increase the pace, I managed to do it but at the same time by over extending my hamstring, ouch! I scored, I was happy - then in agony - bye bye rest of game. It was lots of fun - even just watching was.

Hawking has backed down about his ideas of information being mangled within black holes and possibly being sent to other universes. As he even said this is bad news for the sci-fi fans out there (Hawking: I’m sorry to disappoint science fiction fans, but if information is preserved, there is no possibility of using black holes to travel to other universes."). No!!!!! bye bye the sci-fi dreams.

For more, see: http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996193

At last if you type in "samuel george" (click on the link for the exact search string) on google.co.uk (the worlds best search engine) you get me! I am so pleased, it means that people actually come here! :-)

I am very pleased, I wonder how long it will last.

Cassini is getting "up close and personal" with Saturn and recently captured some wonderful images of its rings, well I will not describe them (that would be stupid!) - go view them! see: http://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA05421 or look below:

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

If you go and download the high resolution it is wonderful the pixelisation is tiny and I bet they have even better photos.

I have gone 3G! Yep that means third generation mobile phone. I have got the NEC e313, and I got it for cheap - well it was cheap but it was a gift of my mom, so a big thanks to her. It is brilliant, some of the features are wow - especially my cool video camera - expect many posts to now contain dodgy pictures taken by this. You may not think great, but I will. I always see things that I would like to comment on whilst I am out but alas no camera - that's all changed now.

All I can say is I hope Three's service is as good as the cool gadgets!

Today I played around with my new phone more than I did work! Well that is not quite true, I got quite a bit done. After a chat with my supervisor I now know how to insert pictures in LaTeX - actually I think I did all along I just think I am having some sort of problem with MikTeX. I am going to figure that out at some point - not now since I have access to the Astrophysics and Space Research server.

Oh and look at this beautiful Hubble image just released:

Credits: NASA, ESA, J. Blakeslee and H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University)

See: http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2004/21/

5-1 now that's what I like to hear. I think that can be considered a little bit of a pay back for losing to them a few years ago in the UEFA Cup. Djibril Cisse looks like he might be as good as he is supposed to be - he scored twice.

Courtesy BBC Online

Liverpool for the Champions World Series!

See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/3928583.stm

All I have to say is wow! I love some of the X-ray images, they just have such a cool contrast, I am not entirely sure what it is but something really appeals to me.

Credit: NASA/CXC/Northwestern U./C.Law & F.Yusef-Zadeh

For more about this take a look at: http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2004/quint/

As a typical Brit I am now complaining, not because it is wet dank and cold but because the thing that we always complain we don't have is here. Yes that's it, the warm weather. I have to say I prefer the winter - at least then I can turn up the heating. The summer has its benefits but I just hate it when it is so humid. This weather gives me a huge headache - well that probably isn't helped by using a computer all the time!

At home we have many pets, I have to say I miss not having pets around - well we have a hamster but they aren't the most entertaining of pets. Probably our most entertaining pet is our dog, Max (otherwise known as Maxwell, Mac, Maccy, Macca and various similar terms). Ok by now you will be thinking why the heck is he going on about his pets? Fair enough question but there is an easy answer. My mom was moaning that I said I would put some pictures online of our pets and I didn't, so here you go: