Dan Price’s blog
Weblog of a cyber-geek

Can this really be true? Well I’ve just listened to the recording myself on the BBC’s iPlayer service and it is genuine. It is strange that a man who declared “we’re bigger than Jesus” and “Imagine a world without religion” believes strongly in Christ’s teachings and even said that the Beatles were essentially a Christian band trying to push a Christian message.

Of course, this is somewhat watered down Christianity. While Lennon obviously admires Jesus’ teachings, he doesn’t say anything about accepting Him as a personal saviour and also said he follows Mohammed and Buddha. It’s certainly reassuring that Lennon admits he’s not against God but against the hypocrisy in the Church: “…the hat wearing and the tea parties…”.

I feel a bit daft now, given my rant about Lennon here!

According to a new study referenced in a BBC article, yes.

“We have strong perceptions about first names and associate them with success, luck and attractiveness, according to new research. And our perceptions can have very real consequences in everyday life.”

I find it quite fascinating, and I would certain believe such a statement. I know that I often associate names with stereotypes and this quite possibly has an effect on the decisions I make therefore influencing someone else’s life and changing their future.

I’d be quite interested to know where my name comes on the list (not that it would change anything though!)

Today has to be one of my worst days in a very long time - what can be worse than having a hole bitten through your fairly new contract phone (2 months into the 18 month contract), having a dog tear a hole in your jeans, having to see your dog limp around in pain as well as attempting to talk sense to an arrogant, self-righteous creep who won’t accept any blame on his part?

That’s been my day, pretty much. In brief, I was walking my two dogs, Bingo (an 8 year old black and white border collie) and Tim (his 2 year old son) on a regular walk I do through a local woodland, when I saw 2 small dogs, probably terriers, running around in a field next to the wood. They were quick to notice me and my dogs and soon enough were coming up to them and sniffing them (as dogs do). Then things got violent and they began attacking each other. Tim was on his lead at the time and hence couldn’t actually escape from the terriers, who wasted no time attacking his underside and his private areas (ouch!) (more…)

Student governor results

I’m sure you’ve all been eagerly anticipating the announcements of the results of the student governor elections that I stood for at my college - if you haven’t, then I’ll announce them anyway. The waiting is over!

The result: victory!

Yep I won the student governor elections for the college so now comes the real part - actually doing the hard work.

Open Source search

I’m sure you’ve at least heard of this, if not been bombarded with it already. Wikia Search, currently in Alpha, is the hot news right now. It’s attracted a lot of criticism by bloggers and the tech industry however. The concept of the site is that it is open source, meaning that the code and algorithms behind the search engine can be viewed by anyone. This is a clear contrast to Google which keeps a lot of the information regarding it’s algorithms secret.

The idea does seem to be jumping on the Web 2.0 bandwagon a bit and I’m unsure whether it will catch on among the non-techie crowd who make up the majority of web users. However, if the site can prove that it’s search results are of a better quality to Google (which is asking a lot), then it may be able to compete successfully with the giants (Yahoo, Ask, MSN as well as Google).

Half of the people on TV last night didn’t have any when asked - I still feel I might as well write a resolution that I’ll break after a few weeks since that’s just the good old tradition of New Years Resolutions.

Well, mine are:

1. Complete web site projects that I start, and try to do it as promptly as possible rather than letting them go on forever with countless redesigns……
2. Try to keep the uptime of my server above 99.9% every month (difficult considering several recent outages involving the firewall….ummm best not to mention all that!)
3. Work harder at college generally and attain merits in all topics (bit of a nerdy one that is!)
4. Learn PHP to an advanced level and take a look at Javascript.

That’s it folks!

I was told once that on average, we use 1% of our brains - that seems ridiculous now I’ve read this BBC News article saying that the belief we use on 10% of our brains is untrue - how could I have believed we use 1%?!

Anyway, the article follows a recent study to discover the truths behind a number of medical myths. These include the myth that reading in poor light damages eyesight (which seems a bit logical it has to be said) and that hair and nails grow after death (who would even be watching then?!). Well worth a read.

Inactivity - I’ll start off by apologizing for the long period of inactivity since my previous post. This is mostly due to a lack of enthusiasm to do anything worthwhile, serious boredom, a hectic few weeks at college and the transition to a new server for my hosting company. Anyway, I hope I’ll be able to blog a bit more now as college winds down.

Programming - I’ve been busy doing a bit of programming recently at college for the course. We’ve focused on Visual Basic.NET since it’s supposedly one of the easiest languages to learn and fairly easy to code in (since you don’t need to focus on hand-coding the GUI). (more…)

This is a hilarious article I found when I was browsing around the net. There are actually people that ARE this annoying!

MSN Messenger users will agree with me that people with connection problems that sign in 10 times in about 10 seconds is also a great annoyance. There are probably hundreds of other things I could list, but it’s nearly 11pm and my brains turning off!

I was once a staunch supporter of Windows - I stood up for the brand against the better Apple Mac computers and the much cheaper Linux experience. More recently, my loyalties changed as I bought a Macbook and every use of my PC after that seemed slow, cumbersome and boring. After yesterday, I’ve had enough of Windows altogether!

I was part way through a game (for those of you who MUST know, it was Age of Empires 2 - not exactly a great game, but I don’t claim to be a gamer). Suddenly, the screen froze and before I knew it, the blue screen of death had flashed before my eyes, and then the PC restarted. This is was really random, but it has randomly restarted before a few times, so I just thought I’d have to wait the extremely slow 5 minutes for the computer to start up, and then restart the game. (more…)

Some days, you just wake up and after a quick inbox check, you know it will be a spam day! Well that’s it’s like for me.

Hotmail spam is the worst. The junk mail filter is supposedly advanced and can sort out spam from real email. Not so for me. My hosting company, Whym Web Hosting, seems to have woken up on the wrong side of the spam filter, while annoying ‘confirmation’ emails bypass it on a daily basis. Is it just me, or do other people get these “Please confirm your flight to Hawaii” or emails from the “Confirmation Dept.”

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