Mind reading over the web
I figured out how this trick was done - can you? Follow each step in turn, then click on the little guy inthe bottom right to proceed to the next step. In the final part, you have to click on the box and type in your answer, you won't see a cursor there.

Web hacking
Interesting paper on Web Application Exploits I found. In Adobe Acrobat (PDF) format, so you'll need Acrobat Reader

[Listening to: Mad Max - Amberstar End [Amiga] (Nectarine Demoscene Radio http://www.scenemusic.net) ]

Best viewed with most browsers
Tested how this page comes out on other browsers - most of the common ones seem to work fine except Opera 6.05 on Windows 2000 and Explorer 4.0 on Windows 98. Given the huge number of browser/version/OS combinations out there, I'm not too disappointed. I reckon the page will be readable by 90% or more of the visitors to this site - you can see the results here

[Listening to: sll - guardian dragon (Nectarine Demoscene Radio http://www.scenemusic.net) ]

CSS made easy?
Nice little tool for making simple, cross-browser CSS layouts - I know at least one frenchman that will find this useful!

[Listening to: Skaven - Hold Me]

Free holiday
Thanks to my efforts in harassing the powers that be (and Graham's too!), we've been given two extra days free holiday at Christmas. Yay for whinging!

[Listening to: Jochen Hippel - Astaroth]

Web bugs fixed
Thanks to the author of BBClone, Olliver Wichmann, I have fixed the little bug in the PHP script that manages my site visitors statistics. Hopefully, it won't produce an error message and mess up the screen now (especially when trying to view or post comments).

Speaking of the comments, I also fixed the comments script so that archived blog posts retain their comments (and the ability to post comments to archived posts). Still got a few more things I want to change with the scripts, but those are for my benefit, and won;t affect how you see the site.

[Listening to: DJ Brisk - Come and have a go if you think you're hardcore]

Quirky Cartoons
Odd little cartoons of monsters, with a caption. Fresh ones served every day, but browsing the archives is cool too

[Listening to: Plummet - Damaged (Trance Remix) ]

Western Union Money Transfer Litigation (again!)
The number of hits my page gets as a result of Google and other search engines continues as people for search for the above phrase. My original blog post about it is gonna get auto-archived soon, so here's a link to the the archived copy

[Listening to: Chavez - A bear called osto]

Kill David Blaine!
Go on, you know you want to. Succeed and you'll see a cool (but bizarre) ending.

One for the geeks out there
Interesting article on font rasterizers for DirectX - aimed at C++ but might be able to convert it to C#

[Listening to: Elwood - Experience]

New RSS feeds
Yeah, you wish.... somebody show me how to get RSS from my site without me having to upgrade from Blogger to Blogger Pro (hint : I got PHP here) and I'll try to put it in. There might even be a beer in it for you

[Listening to: Deejay Karlblau - Missing You (D I G I T A L L Y - I M P O R T E D - European Trance, Techno, Hi-NRG... we can't define it!) ]

The best get-rich-quick scheme ever?
"A young man asked an old rich man how he made his money. The old guy fingered his worsted wool vest and said, "Well, son, it was 1932. The depth of the Great Depression. I was down to my last nickel. I invested that nickel in an apple. I spent the entire day polishing the apple and, at the end of the day, I sold the apple for ten cents. The next morning, I invested those ten cents in two apples. I spent the entire day polishing them and sold them at 5 pm for 20 cents. I continued this system for a month, by the end of which I'd accumulated a fortune of $1.37. Then my wife's father died and left us two million dollars."

[Listening to: Skip - Planet Potion part 2]

In case you were wondering...
...why Bill Gates is richer than you

[Listening to: bright eyes - bright eyes - ] God this tune is infectious!!!

This should prove to be a controversial game
Hmm... not sure about this game

[Listening to: Lluvia and Radix - Tournesol (Nectarine Demoscene Radio http://www.scenemusic.net) ]

Too much television?
Bought a new home entertainment centre from Currys last week, and its due to be delivered tomorrow morning. It will be replacing the system I've been renting from BoxClever for the last 10 years. A brief calculation (with a bit of rounding) showed that I've paid out around £7200 to them over the last 10 years, whereas I've bought the new system (which is better equipment too) for just £599.

However, while the new stuff arrives tomorrow, BoxClever can't collect the old stuff until next Saturday. So for one week only, I've got two TVs, video, DVD and hi-fi. Good job my living room is big enough for both!

Web bug in blog
Just spotted some PHP script errors in my blog which means that the screen gets messed up when you view blog comments. Also, the archived pages don't let you see/add comments. Will fix these bugs over the weekend if I can.

[UPDATE]Oh, and some of the icons are the wrong size on browsers other than IE

[Listening to: The Future Sound Of London - Papua New Guinea]

Customising Windows XP
Bored with the standard Windows XP bootscreen? Try some of these replacements by Swissboy

WARNING! not for people that don't know what they are doing, since installing them requires techie stuff! Don't blame me if you screw up in other words!

Lies, damned lies, and statistics
The new and improved stats on who visited my page are going well - so far I've seen people come in from Brazil, Germany, Belgium and Australia, as well as quite a few search engine robots. I can also see where people came to my site from, hence quite a few Google referrals. The best thing about those ones is being able to see what they were searching for when they found me. So far the search terms "Exploding phone chargers" and "Western Union Money Transfer Litigation" seem to be popular.

Yeah, I know, I'm just being a geek looking at this stuff (and writing about it!).....

[Listening to: Perpetuous Dreamer - The sound of goodbye (Armin Va]

Linux Reloaded
Having another play with Linux (or pseudo-Linux at least) on the laptop. I already have Cygwin on there and I'm trying to add KDE over the top, although the KDE build for Cygwin is still a beta release.

[Listening to: Wild Cherry - Play That Funky Music White Boy]

Panic at work
All hands on deck today at work as we demo our work to the top brass. Lots of bugs to fix and test! Aaaargh!

Recovering kitty...
Pixel, my cat, is recovering well from his little operation this morning at the vet, and should be back home this afternoon.

[Listening to: Jurgen Vries feat. CMC - The Opera Song (Brave New World) ]

Weird mail day...
Got a weird letter in the mail today. The outside of the envelope said "Western Union Money Transfer Litigation". Now, I don't know about you, but the word litigation in my post makes me nervous...

Turns out that the US District Court for the Eastern District of New York is filing a class action suit against Western Union for alledged misrepresentation to customers about the money they make from their exchange rates. It all sounds a bit complicated to me, but since I have sent and received money via Western Union, I'm part of the class bringing the action (and I did it without even knowing!). From what I can work out, if the suit is successful, I'll get some coupons to redeem against my next Western Union transaction.

You can see more about this whole thing here

Counter reset
Just a wee geeky post - I changed the script that counts visitors to my site. Should count unique visitors rather than page views, so should be a bit more accurate. I'm just curious to know how many people read this stuff

[Listening to: Hallucinogen - Alpha Centauri (P O W E R S H O U T ! ! ! ! Psychedelic Goa Trance) ]

Another kind of Chopper!
Get your Choppers out again! Not bikes this time, but see how you do flying the little chopper.

Did somebody fix the NHS last night?
Hmm...that's weird. Phoned the doctor this morning to get an appointment, expecting the next available one to be in 3 weeks time or something stupid like that. I was told "we don't do pre-booking any more, you just need to phone on the day you want to come down".

Not entirely sure that would work for me though - I normally leave the hose 2½ hours before they open, so I would basically need to take the morning off - what if I do that and they turn round and say "no sorry, we've nothing available today" ?

[Listening to: Mathias andersson - Commando high score (Nectarine Demoscene Radio) ]

Exploding phone chargers
SonyEricsson have issued a recall on phone chargers for their recent models. Apparently they explode. Nice to know, isn't it....

[Listening to: Acidline - Atari 800xl (Nectarine Demoscene Radio) ]

From the retro computing department....
For those Atari ST fans out there, I found a 20min epic megamix of all those classic game and demo tunes we used to love. You can pick it up right here

[Listening to: Scavenger - TCC'93 invite]

Coke

The following comes from AlienSurgeon

1) Almost all canned sodas contain 6,000 parts per billion of aluminium per can, water contains as little as 25-30 per glass.

2) Aluminium toxicity has proven to be one of the major causes of Alzheimer's Disease.

2) You can put a T-bone steak in a bowl of Coke and it will be gone in two days.

3) To clean a toilet; Pour a can of Coke into the toilet bowl and let it sit for one hour, then flush clean. The citric acid from Coke removes stains from vitreous china.

4) To remove rust spots from chrome car bumpers, rub the bumper with a rumpled up piece of aluminum foil dipped in Coke.

5) To clean corrosion from car battery terminals; Pour one can of Coke and bubble away the corrosion.

6) More than 70% of pre-teen children drink no water at all, guess what they consume instead.?

7) The active ingredient in Coke is phosphoric acid. It's pH is 2.8. It will dissolve a nail in about 4 days. Phosphoric acid also leaches calcium from the bones and is a major contributor to the rising increase in osteoporosis.

8) To carry Coca-Cola syrup (concentrate) the truck must use the hazardous material place cards reserved for highly corrosive
materials.

Free Food!
Opened a bag of crisps (thats Potato Chips to you Americans) today and won a free Indian or Chinese Meal! Yay for Walkers Crisps

[Listening to: Plastic Boy - Twixt (D I G I T A L L Y - I M P O R T E D - European Trance, Techno, Hi-NRG... we can't define it!) ]

Serial Killer or Programming Language Inventor?
Decide for yourself here

[Listening to: Trauma Child Genesis - Traumatique (Nectarine Demoscene Radio) ]

More retro computing!
Oh, and this was my first ever computer. Check out the 4kb of memory and the 3.58MHz processor! Whoosh!

[Listening to: Maktone - Polly was a cracker (Nectarine Demoscene Radio) ]

Retro computing again
Got myself an Atari Falcon to mess about with. Just gotta wait for it to arrive now.

[Listening to: Xtd - Desire (Nectarine Demoscene Radio) ]

½ day at work
Taking the cat to the vet this afternoon. Stupid thing got fleas again. Also got an interview with the local Rotary club to see if I can go to Alabama next year....

STRIKE!!!
Steve sent me a link to a great little bowling game, written in Java - cheers for that one mate!

Another fun-filled Friday
Trains were all messed up again last night, so I got back late. Didn't end up getting somethign to eat until around 11pm.

Going for a Japanese meal in London tonight with Alison and some friends, at Satsuma - I'll let you all know what it was like some time over the weekend. Saturday, we're having a sort of "telescope-party" to take a look at Mars, cos its the closest to Earth it will get for 60,000 years. I know the best time was last Wednesday, but its still plenty close now, and with this special telescope someone is providing, we should be able to see dust storms, the terrain and the polar icecaps. Sounds fun.

[Listening to: Tao - UMD 8730 intro ]

Golf anyone?
Nice little online minigolf game

[Listening to: Skip - Planet Potion part 2]

Patent ruling could affect entire web
Joël pointed out an interesting article from MacUser detailing a recent court ruling that states Microsoft Internet Explorer infringes a patent held by Eolas. Maybe now Microsoft won't be so keen to vote for software patents....

[Listening to: Smash - Garbage (Nectarine Demoscene Radio) ]

Where's the warez?
It wasn't me guv'nor. I had nothing to do with The Rough Guide To Warez, honest....

Today's cool site
Tired of this ridiculously long website addresses when you have to send a link to a friend in email? I'm talking about links like :-

http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?map.x=302&map.y=156&map
data=afbX8DbyAoesP8oMVXE9yH15Yqfri%252f0FnbmKKpfMbrjLn0o8BLJ
1%252bTQRc5bB8ZoqtlOeDdZwlJtHLgfMIVHUWlmPWw8uDAvn6M%252bkyj2
OhU7lZS%252fzgR6gc6Gc6UR0nFUKiKZ%252fUA1FA7i4GoxVbNUmI3sVoXm
LsVCjdi1tcAxjLEEXFdAvuJU%252bwjYfFeWO15n%252fiFsgXNxKDxWULBF
tyxoa65AuWb0a5SU%252ftWdT4P7e8CtC9acf37axZa%252fI2MWC7g54TPL
6YB%252bwcKdZuh60N%252fb83BrfUSLSD%252ffK1nJ16Ma8D%252fc%253
d&click=center

With the help of TinyURL you can reduce them to much more manageable links like

http://tinyurl.com/6

which is much more useful. You can even add a little toolbar button to convert the page you're currently viewing into a TinyURL.

[Listening to: Tommy - Fm Demosong (Nectarine Demoscene Radio) ]

Cool thing of the day
Coolest thing I seen on my PC for a long time, courtesy of those clever chappies at Farbrausch, is FR030 : Candytron.

You'll need a decent PC and graphics card for this one, but its well worth it - just make sure to turn the sound up

UPDATE You're gonna need DirectX 9 installed too it seems

[Listening to: Mc Laser - Destroya (Nectarine Demoscene Radio) ]

On yer bike mate (Part 2)
More bike-related purchases today, as my new SPD shoes arrived at the shop.

[Listening to: Tommaso De Donatis - Heart and Soul Vol. 6 June 2003]

Down in the dungeons
Well, we moved office over the weekend from the 5th floor to the Mezzanine floor. So no more nice views for us. Spent most of this morning trying to get reconnected to the network - as it turns out, they'd given me a duff network cable. I plugged in the one that I rescued from upstairs before we packed up, and presto!

[Listening to: Dj Jamie - Release (P O W E R S H O U T ! Pure Trance!) ]