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The views and opinions expressed on this site are those of Michael 'Murray-Mint' Smith and not those of any other person unless otherwise stated. Design, original images and PHP code © Michael Smith, December 2004.

News

Here's some free and simple advice for everyone. If you have a digital camera that isn't waterproof, don't get caught in a rainstorm with it. After a couple of days of trying to get it to dry out, I've had no luck.

Photos from Seaworld on Day 2 are on a normal camera which I'll get developed at some point. Meanwhile, my photos from Day 5 are of the Electric Water Parade. This happens every night at all the hotels around Seven Seas Lagoon.

The plan for the next few days is:

• Thursday: Islands of Adventure/Universal
• Friday: Behind the scenes tour of Epcot, Hollywood Studios and Magic Kingdom

As for Saturday and Sunday, well I have no idea! We've literally done everything else, the parks are just empty! After fighting with Gallery2's archive upload plugin for an hour, I gave up and have gone back to using my own gallery. You can find the photos from the Florida trip there.

I will be adding basic slideshow features at some point when I get bored. Anyhow, off to Seaworld now! Well I'm checked in now to the Best Western Lakeside in Kissimmee after a flight that turned up an hour and a half late. Quite uneventful, nothing much happened. The flight was actually empty though! 200 spare seats in Economy, To the extent where some people (Mum included) were led across the 4 seats in the middle, sleeping!

Security at Orlando was fairly quick. Queue at immigration was short but took a long time, and the offsite car rental place was great! Now it's just getting used to driving on the wrong side of the road! Very unnerving having to be close to the white lines on the left side of the car.

Anyhow, off to Wal-Mart to stock up on supplies! I'll upload photos in a bit.

Well it's fun and entertaining in the departures lounge at Gatwick. The flight has been inexplicably delayed until 11:30, despite this it's still not boarding yet and the monitors just show it as delayed.

Once I'm on-board it's free drinks courtesy of Virgin, so I can't wait! The next post will probably be from the US in about 10-11 hours!

I'm currently sat in a room in the Gatwick Travelodge staring out the window at the end of the runway where planes are taking off and landing. So close to leaving for a lovely 10 day holiday in Florida!

My plans for checking in online earlier today were thwarted when the Virgin Atlantic website refused to let me check-in. Anyhow, after a 3 hour drive to Gatwick, I decided to take advantage of Twilight Checkin. An entirely empty checkin area at Gatwick, and we were able to get checked in and get our boarding passes within 10 minutes.

All that's left tomorrow is to go to the terminal and get through security. Happy 2008 to the non-existant people who read my site. Sometime this year I aim to redevelop the site into something better!

Coming up next however, is a holiday to Florida! Pictures will be uploaded as and when I have them! Flying out from Gatwick on the 11th January! Everyone else on the Internet is spamming the HD DVD Decryption Key, so I thought I'd join in:

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

• Source: http://www.squaresphere.co.uk/2007/05/02/09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0/
  

So tonight I've realised that this site is over two years old. I started and finished it in December 2004, so it's starting to get on a bit. I also turned 22 yesterday and this has made me reflect.

In the 2 years since this website was created, the Internet has changed a lot. Web 2.0 has firmly arrived and been embraced, with the numerous trivial blogs, myspace, youtube, tags, AJAX and faded gradient headers. As for this site? Aside from being XHTML 1.0 and CSS compliant, with FCK Editor for entering pages, it's still firmly 2004.

PHP has been surplanted from it's pinnacle as the chosen language of the Technorati. Ruby on Rails has taken over. No-one has a personal website, they have a blog. The Web 2.0 bubble is here, and isn't bursting yet.

As for me? When I started this site in December 2004, I was in University studying Computer Science. Since then, I've left University in my first year and gone out into the IT industry. 11 months at an Internet Service Provider as a network operator and then I started working for Prizefight.

The very embodiment of Web 2.0, at Prizefight I'm a Network Administrator and Junior Developer. In the past 9 months at Prizefight, I've learnt ASP.Net, C#, Ruby, Python and also professional practices, using source control and how to deal with suppliers. I've moved out of home and now live with some great people in Croydon and I have a great circle of friends in the UK LAN party community.

So if that's the previous two years, who can tell what the future will hold for the Internet and for me. We've finally set up a blog for the Prize Fight Dev Team. The blog uses Wordpress (unlike this site, which for the time-being uses my own software, however, this may one-day change. Hopefully there will be more posts and insights added into the Prize Fight dev team, which some people may find interesting.

• Prize Fight Developers Blog

I've been following development on this game for a while now. Defcon, published by Introversion - the makers of Uplink and Darwinia, is global thermo nuclear war. Heavily inspired by the filme Wargames, you are in constrol of one continent and can build ships, submarines, bombers, radar domes and missile silos in a retro-futuristic interface just like the film.

Why am I posting this? Well, someone has released some videos of the gameplay onto the net. The videos are short, less than a minute each, but they do demonstrate a lot of the game. It's worth bearing in mind the game is still in beta testing, so it's not the most polished at the moment and I'm sure there will be improvements.

• Video 1 (38 seconds)
  
• Video 2 (47 seconds)
• Video 3 (45 seconds)
• Video 4 (1 minute)
• Official Site

At the end of July was CentralanUK #13. This is a LAN Party in Stoke-On-Trent which I am Network Administrator for. It was a great event and I've made a timelapse video from all the webcam images.

This is only the first draft, I need to get some more images, add titles and update the music, but as a rough cut, it does seem to convey the event quite well.

• CentralanUK #13 Timelapse Video
• CentralanUK Homepage

I've now started using FCKeditor on my site. This is used on all the admin sections for editing the news and content. It uses XMLHttprequest stuff, copious amounts of Javascript and PHP in order to provide a WYSIWYG editing environment inside my browser.

This solves a lot of the layout problems I had been experiencing when writing news posts, and should help a lot in the long-term as it makes adding content as easy as typing in MS Word. Got a great new game to play, it's available on Steam. It's called The Ship and the premise is that you are a guest invited on a luxurry 1920's cruiise liner by the mysterious Mr X. Once on the cruise you are forced to hunt down and kill your fellow passengers using an arsenal of weapons found laying around.

It's really good fun. For more information, check out the official website and you can find me most nights on my own server.

•  85.236.09.31:27015

• #mpuktheship on Quakenet

Well, I am leaving Star Internet and going to a new job as Network Administrator and Junior Developer at Prizefight. I'm starting on the 9th May and it's going to be so good ;). Currently though, I'm at Multiplay's StratLAN 27 LAN Party. 90 people, one bank holiday weekend and lots of gaming. I'd like to thank a good friend of mine, Chris 'Cheez' Stretton. He's just turned his site into a blog. It's a good site and his blog is one of the best I've read.

• irc-junkie.net

You should go there now!

I really should update this site more often, anyway, this is a simple post to say that I have YET ANOTHER new design. Although it looks almost identical to the old one - this one now works in IE. The images have been updated, the CSS has also been rewritten. The gallery also now works in IE and Firefox.

More stuff will be coming to the site soon... My apologies for a lack of updates, it's been very busy for me. Firstly, I have a job now as Network Operator at Star Technology. This is taking most of my time now.

I have also now got my own server hosted in Redbus. It's a Dual PIII 1.3Ghz, 512MB RAM and 20GB HD running Server 2003. It is now hosting this site, my emails and various other stuff. The server is colocated with Multiplay UK who are one of the best hosts around.

Soon I will be running a LAN in the Gloucestershire area, more coming soon on that on it's own website coming soon. The new, standards compliant design is implemented, and it looks great in Firefox, Mozilla and Lynx. Internet Explorer is having some issues, but I am working on these and hope to have them resolved.

Anyone who's watched Series 1 of the excellent comedy series, Look Around You may remember the song 'Little Mouse' by Jack Morgan (BSc). The BBC have released this MP3 on their websitem but it's a short abridged version. The DVD of Look Around You contains a music video with the full length version. I have encoded the audio of the full length version and it is available here. Thanks to Pumpkin, the server admin, the mail form is now working again. As mentioned, the server was configured not to allow apache to send email, to prevent spam. This has been fixed, and you no longer have to open a mail client to send me email. How excellent. Thanks to a good friend of mine, I'll soon be replacing this design with an identical one compliant with XHTML 1.0 Strict, CSS and WAI specifications. It looks very nice in any browser.

Thanks to Cheez/Chris/Moredhel for the CSS/XHTML.