I went into Nottingham with Lizz’s brother, Phillip, yesterday to meet Francesco at Broadmarsh bus station. Unfortunately our bus was to Victoria bus station, and it was late. After a quick walk through Nottingham we finally arrived about 15-20 minutes later than Francesco.

We headed to the square at the centre of Nottingham before going to see the castle. A nice man let us in for free because we could prove we were from Nottinghamshire. Francesco, quite wisely, stayed very quiet. We took in the view over Nottingham, then went inside to look at the museum and art gallery. There’s some really interesting stuff in there. Also some pretty strange things.

After the castle we walked by “Ye Olde Trip To Jerusalem”:http://www.triptojerusalem.com/ which claims to be the oldest pub in the country. From there we went back into town for a little while. We all had some nice roast chicken pastry things from Gregg’s. Phillip lied, very unconvincingly, about his age in The Social, so we went to The Hog’s Head instead. It tipped it down with rain outside, and then the ceiling began leaking. Leaking is really an understatement because it wasn’t just a few drips, it was a constant stream of water. They had to turn some of the lights off because water around the power is not such a good idea. We had more food in there and then headed off to the Victoria Centre.

We went into the indoor market for a couple of minutes where we saw lots of hair for sale, and lots of meat. We bought strings for guitars in the music shop where we were entertained by an 8 year old boy playing the piano like a pianist in a hotel lobby. He was annoyingly good, and he wanted everyone else to know about it.

We bought some American cans (Mountain Dew and A&W Cream Soda) from a sweet shop, then headed back to Mansfield on the bus. Lizz gave us a lift half way home as she was driving past us anyway. We got some pizza delivered, watched 300, and spent most of the rest of the night trying our hardest to come up with the most brilliant web invention ever to secure our millions. We didn’t come up with a lot.

Today we’ll be heading back to Nottingham so Francesco can catch his next coach up to Edinburgh. That’ll be quite a long journey. It’s been cool. 🙂

Today I am going to meet “Francesco”:http://flevour.net in Nottingham. It’s always cool to meet people you’ve known for years but never met. I’m going to show him around the castle, and some of the other interesting bits of Nottingham (if I can find any).

It should be a good day. 🙂 Shame about the weather. It’s really misty, but not properly raining. It’ll just stay like this all day. 😐

I got fed up of spammers again this morning. They’re always posting annoying comments on my blog. Well, not any more. To prove that you’re human you’ll now have to do some really complicated mathematics (2+2) to post a comment. The answer’s 4, by the way.

I’ve been pretty busy recently, I guess I forgot to update at all.

There was a barbecue here on Saturday night. JonP, Marc, his girlfriend, Emma Carroll, Paul, and Pete came over. It was a good night. We watched some interesting films, played on the Playstations and Emma’s DS for a bit. I ended up going to bed at some time around 5AM.

I planted some beans in the garden today. It’ll be good to eat something I’ve grown in a few months. 🙂

This video is the funniest one I’ve seen in quite a while!

That’s hilarious. A helicockter.

I had the idea of doing IT Workshops as videos uploaded to the Internet so anyone can access them. 🙂 I know some already exist, but these ones will be for use in the college on specific topics using the software we have. They will be available for everyone, but I don’t know if they’ll ever be that popular or anything.

Here’s my first one. It shows how to create a Gantt Chart in Excel 2003. 🙂

Online Videos by Veoh.com

Here comes my Star Award!

Oh yeah, I’m going to see The Prodigy tonight, for free. Thanks Gordon! 😀

Believe it or not the easiest way I have found to create a “Gantt chart”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart in Microsoft Excel is actually by downloading and installing “OpenOffice.org”:http://openoffice.org creating one in calc, and saving it in Microsoft Excel format.

That’s ridiculous! It’s a good ad for OpenOffice.org though. 🙂

I’ve got to go to my course tonight for an entire 15 minutes at 19:25. Unfortunately I’ll be turning up at closer to 17:25 to avoid messing Lizz around with dropping me off and picking me up. The reason for such a short class is that I’ll be having my professional discussion with Barbara. The topic we’ll be discussing is equality and diversity. As I’m sure you know this is pretty much the least interesting topic (for me) on the entire course.

I think I should be able to manage a 15 minute discussion of the topic quite easily. Once that’s over and done with I only really have a few things left to do on the course. I’ve got to hand in proof (signed off by line manager) of my 30+ teaching hours this year, write a 1000 word essay on equality and diversity, and be observed twice in September when classes are easier to change.

I was going to try to cram in the two sessions before the end of term, but it’s not really very practical. The students wouldn’t appreciate wasting a week on some rubbish topic when all they need to do is finish their portfolios before they can go home for the summer.

I suppose I’ll use my time waiting for the course to start by making a start on my essay or something. I’ll be glad when all this is done.

I’ve been using betas of Firefox 3 for the last couple of months now. The main thing preventing me from switching to it already has been the lack of Google Browser Sync for the new version. Well, today I discovered a little addon (and more) called “Weave” hosted by Mozilla. It will probably be able to manage everything Google’s offering could in a little while. There will be additional features to come afterwards. This is possible because the project is open source. 🙂

when I was looking around on the Weave site I chanced upon another addon called Personas which is pretty much the same as a theme. It’s a bit more basic in some senses, most notably the user-end is easier. It’s also a lot more interactive in that different parts can be dynamic using HTML, Javascript, SVGs and wonderful technologies like that.

There’s a lot of scope for most of the designs to be really tacky, and poorly thought-through, but it’ll be worth it for the decent ones that get made with some real thought put in. 🙂