But i am told i can drop the BTEC course down to a Double (2 A Level instead of 3) which would make it easier, which i will most likely do unless of course i get as obsessive with it as i do with other computer stuff which i hope i do!

So i sorted this out, with “Roger” who really likes the word “bud” one of those things, flicking through the book of courses trying to find something easy interesting… to do for the next year of my life… and I have this guy i have never met using “bud” as a period (full stop). I mean I’m happy for people to have words like that they use but i mean he used it A LOT! sometimes mroe than once in each sentence.

Im going off on one here, so yea talk to this guy get my courses sorted get my free “can” of drink… which turned out to be a juice pouch… “Hey! Welcome to New College the place where you will get treated like an adult… Have a juice pouch. Look like your FIVE! theres a good boy O.O… and the lady by the tuch shop thing where I got it from must have been paid extra to keep that smile on all day.

So you go over sit down waiting to get my photo taken for my ID… eventually get to sit on a stool have the picture taken from the device which looked like a eye on a stick, i saw my picture and just knew instantly I am going to regret this moment for the rest of my time i have a college ID with that photo; And of course i go that looks awful to the girl manning the computer, while in my head im screaming going o crap i look stonned, drunk and asleep ALL at the same time! NO! And I get that “O Everyone says that” … I couldn’t be bothered to argue, i had been up since 7am with only a few hours sleep because i had been at the station (Swindon 105.5) all day before this (from 8AM to 3.30PM)… its not a good picture, then again not many of me are!

So eventually you get walked up stairs to the computer room, which i happened to have done a “Gifted and Talented” Web Design course in… but i wont go into detail. So i sit down to take this enrollment test, to basically make sure i have a brain. Now bare in mind i was half asleep worn out and had to sit through some crappy flash application to test my Numeracy and Literacy skills, the first question for numeracy was something like “Whats 8 - 6?”, i re-read the question to be sure… it did get more difficult as the test went on, and i ended up with a Level 2 - 3 for numeracy, which supposedly was where i was supposed to be. The Litteracy one however… not so good, i ended up with Level 1 (which of course i was told was where i was expected to be) but what seemed like hours of, On our leaflet we have made 3 spelling mistakes grab this crappy cross and place it on all the spelling mistakes… JUST USE THE BLOODY SPELL CHECKER… Now before i have someone comment about good spelling, and how it’s important etc etc, I know. Its just it gets tedious when you are looking at a tacky looking Flash Application, and just wondering if they would wake you up if you went to sleep on keyboard not generally a good mix

So after 50 minutes and 46 seconds taking the Literacy assessment and 35 minuutes and 52 seconds for the numeracy, i was finally FREE! (ish) now i moved into yet another waiting room (and some how managed to lose my card thing with my Student ID number on the way >< ) then i go to meet what i think was the Physcology tutor who basically went over everything and looked at the score.  yay now i can spend another 15 minutes walking back to the studio!

Bottom line, im both excited and also dreading college, excited something new hopefully much more advanced than the rubbish from Greendown, and meeting new as well as old friends. But then I have that but look how much i have done being off all day! I am going back to having less time to manage my business, and projects and Swindon 105.55.

But I hope i can manage, should be fun, and will probably end up spending more time at studio so can get moe involved with the radio - at the moment im learning the system a little more to be Tech Op, would really like to become deeply involved with the Tech side and also will hopefully getting a show together and running, and besides the fun and hope to get more listeners that just friends and family, it always looks good on your CV!

Just a note, i will be posting a tutorial soon about retrieving and displaying cPanel server status on a normal webpage for users so you can expect that and the script soon too!

Cya.

Dan

Okay the ten gadgets below are not in a particular order of top ten,  they are my favourite ten vista gadgets all are helpful in some way to me and makes it all a bit easier!

The UK Radio Player, is a great little gadget, you can add any online radio feed, and its just nice and easy to use, just have it in the corner and click play when ever i fancy some music. (and I’m not already blasting it that is!)

I came across this gadget the other day, and it is helpful to me, as i am a web host to keep tabs on my server, simple little gadget pings my server every few seconds to check its still online, so if it isn’t i can do something about it, only thing i can complain about is it only allows up to 5 servers, and the height is fixed, so when you have one server it still has a huge gap, and my gadget space is valuable to me!

The Top Process gadget is really handy, it shows the Top three CPU and RAM hogging programs, so i can easily see whats using what without having to open Task Manager, great easy gadget, could be improved if it had the ability to end task as well, but I am not sure how that feature could be added.

Volume control: I used to use another volume control gadget and when i re-installed the other day, i lost the gadget but when i went to re-download it from the Gadget Gallery instead i found this one which looks much nicer and has a few more features.

CPU Gadget, this definitely had to be the most “used” gadget, always handy to check how hard I’m working my system, helps me know when i need to easy off a bit to avoid problems.

RSS Feed Reader, Only recently have i started properly using this great little gadget, its one which comes default with Vista, and is nice and simple, you subscribe to a thread (through IE) and they show up, you can select to show 10-100 items, select a single feed of just one, handy tool to keep up to date with goings on, I started to use it to try and learn a bit more and be more in with whats going on with the Web, and also an attempt to get more ideas of things i can talk about both on my blog, and on my Radio show.

Notes, yes this is a simple little gadget comes with Vista by default like the CPU monitor and RSS feed reader, its a Handy note pad on your desktop to jot something down to remember later, i was (and admittedly still am) guilty of having a desk covered in little piles of yellow sticky pad notes, most of which are in unreadable handwriting or just end up lost and forgotten. So in that sense it is a handy little gadget, also means i don’t have quite so many random .txt files on my desktop with random things in. However a bad note (no pun intended… okay that’s a blatant lie.. anyway) is its quite a small area, and would be a very handy if you could extend the note pad so you don’t have to scroll down the note o read it all however i am not sure how easy this could be done on Vista Gadgets, it would be good though if it was possible.

 Weather Gadget, never bother to use it before the other day, but its pretty good does a variety of weathers, and it does my local area (Swindon) so I am happy.

Calendar again one of the pre-installed gadgets with Vista, but its something which i use daily, much easier to give it a glance and see today’s date etc in nice big letters, without having to faff about hovering over the clock like i used to especially when i am busy working on scripts or working with clients. 

Clock, okay this really doesn’t need a description of any kind, but i have to admit having a nice easy to ready clock on the right hand top corner of my first screen is a lot easier to read than a small time in the corner. So again it is a basic gadget which can really speed up little things you do when on the PC.

Okay that’s it that’s my Top Ten Vista Gadgets, all helpful all great.

Now when looking through the Vista Gadget Gallery I have seen literally thousands of gadgets which all have almost identical gadgets which do the same thing, and there are a lot of “Search” gadgets, like YouTube or Google and when i first got Vista i tried them and soon realised for me at least they were more annoying than there were useful, i almost always have a webpage open, and it is much easier to manually open the page than to use the often ugly gadgets which just waste my Desktop space.

 So here’s my first of what will hopefully be many Top Ten lists, hope you enjoy and find it useful.

Dan

No matter what you say to myself i always sit and eat am all in one day, so i warn you all! STOP think.. buy one.

If you thought about it logically surly it is worth the extra few pence in order to not eat 10 times your daily GDA in sugar and bad things

Dan

And you can’t help thinking, wow people SUCK, is no one dependable?

I now only have one exam left, which is tomorrow morning at 9am and I will have done everything for my secondary school and would have completely left.. a free agent until enrollment at college at least, and im left now realising how we have been off for a few weeks all the people which you always see at school at lunch and say hi to in the corridor, and realise you haven’t seen them for weeks, and you kind get that feeling, I am now both excited and dreading college in September, most of the people i like and call friends are going to the same as me - New College, so that’s good but there are still a few which its nice to talk to every now and then which are not, and of course there are a lot of “people” which thankfully are NOT gong to same college as far as i know and i hope to escape them! yay!

But deep down i know… there will be more at college

So far i am signed up to be doing a BTEC Computing (programming and development) course which will get me 3 A levels, which is a huge two year course which i cant wait to do, love computers and hopefully (HA!) it will be easy i seem to be a fast learning with computers and i hope to be able to develop my programming even further.

I am also signed up to do.. French GCSE… and i have no clue why. i don’t really know any french.. just fancied learning it so i think I’m probably going to be changing it to something like Media as i have recently realised how much i want to get into it, mainly through my involvement with Swindon 105.5 a local radio station, and i would really like to get much more involved with the tech side as well.

The reason i say i am also dreading going to college is not because i think i will find it hard or anything like that, it is just with the spare time i have realised how much i have been able to get done online and i am going to miss that, i am hoping to be able to get all my sites full functioning and running well for September, to make it nice and easy to manage, i have been working quite hard on my hosting and web services business and website, and have also bitten the bullet and brought a decent control panel which is costing me a nice sum a month, and i am still making a healthy loss of almost 600% of my monthly earnings so its looking up! lol.

So basically i think life is getting a little better, all i need to do is get a job to get some real money!

Have fun all, This is Dan signing off for the night!

Dan.

I am now slowly piecing together bits for a eco themed site project.

The site will (eventually) have a forum, blog (to the standard of wordpress), a custom made catelogue type system for items and possibly more (once all thats done).

Now its easy enough to install a forum (im opting for MYBB as its the best/most advanced which is free/open source) a blog and then write your own custom script.

But making them

a) look the same and blend well austetically.

b) use the same user system

c) JUST WORK!

is alot harder

At first i was planning to make the whole system completely custom made, and it soon became aparent to build a forum to the kind of spec like what is required just wouldnt be possible or feasable on my own.

So now i have the Mybb forum installed and im going to try and make everything else work on top of that.

I would like to use a wordpress blog and have it merge into it all, but that seems darn near impossible with out me recoding the whole thing (and then making it so i couldnt upate it easily when there is new wordpress updates.

But unfortunatle it looks like this is exactly what i will have to do… or just create own blog, and “borrow” some snippets for the layout and design etc from word press.

 Wish me luck!

I mean come on, its very very simple! Do whatever  you wanna show first make sure everything works, shut down all your other rubbish thats running! Then click record!

Its a very simple process…

Okay im gonna go try and find some decent software to make some youtube videos of a crap and hopefully amusing nature.

Cya

DAN!

Why is it that the evil organisations put their logos on everything?! I mean they want to keep a “low-profile” and yet when you look at it their secret logo is on everything they do.

Any access card, EVERY floor has some huge mural or pattern on it in the shape of the logo, every wall ceiling and vehicle.

I mean WHY!!

Random though

Part 1:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=qI3-Gda4cdw

Part 2:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=nQmmLiHO1Zs

Part 3:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=duK1cD4N7kI

Part 4:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=F5XWN2sOB9E

Part 5:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=XTS8CwdOguA

Part 6:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=F0CmK2vkcN0

Part 7:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=xcLGmI5kNO0

Part 8:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=_vh__BQR6l4

Enjoy

 - DAN -

So the name “Dansgalaxy” has been bugging me a little for a while name as its a bit too personal for business, which is why Dansgalaxy is now my Personal domain and XDnet.co.uk will take over as the main business one.

Because of the new domain its also given me a boost to get the hosting site finished, I have my plans set up and im working on the order system and customising the online help.

Hopefully once im done (yes i am… im making my own billing system - I just like to make it myself :)) it *should* do the usual collect info, direct to payment (paypal), direct back on sucessful payment automatically set up the account with the users details (which of course were checked using Ajax when they enterded them initially to check that the username wasnt taken etc they get a nice looking welcome email. telling them its all set up and welcome to “Personal UK Web Hosting From XDnet.co.uk” and how to contact support etc if there are any issues.

And of course the whole user area will be created with the account so they can view invoices etc…

… I can see this having to wait a little while as i have so much on at the moment.

So thats one of the things im focusing on at the moment… as well as only having 2 weeks left of school … but thats not as important of couse. [Note: this is sarcasum, i do take my education seriously, no matter what people think ]

Well im signing off on this post.

Bye X

I produce a local radio station show with some friends and we reviewed a film this is what i thought of it…

On Monday we saw ‘Meet The Spartans’ at Cineworld.

Synopsis from website:

After successfully skewering Hollywood’s scariest movie   (as two of the writers on “Scary Movie”), romantic comedy franchises (“Date Movie”), and Hollywood blockbusters (“Epic Movie”), writers/directors/producers Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer now set their sights on “300.”

The heroic Leonidas, armed with nothing but leather underwear and a cape, leads a ragtag group of 13 – count ‘em, 13 – Spartans to defend their homeland against the invading Persians (whose ranks include Ghost Rider, Rocky Balboa, the Transformers, and a hunchbacked Paris Hilton).