When I said today, I actually meant tomorrow. Sorry…It’ll be up first thing.

BBC TV and radio have this week been running their Organ Donation campaign. Every night there’ve been shows highlighting the problems faced by the people both relying upon and running the donor lists, while Radio 2 has been discussing the merits of adopting an opt-out system for organ donation, rather than the current method of needing to ask relatives’ permission.

Despite the large amount of media coverage, I only found out about it today. I’m not sure how I missed it, but figure that if I did, others may have too. The campaign boils down to this:

Put your name onto the NHS Organ Donor Register. Just do it. Do it now.

I’ve just filled in the form, and it takes perhaps a minute. I can think of no reason why you would not do this. With sixty seconds of effort, you could save somebody’s life. You’d turn a personal tragedy into something truly wonderful - that’s a hell of a legacy. If you have inhibitions regarding dead bodies, just think about the people whose lives you’d be making infinitely happier - isn’t that more important? If you’ve religious issues, I suggest you seriously ask yourself how helping people not die could ever be a bad thing.

There’s a huge shortage of donors, so please add your name if you haven’t already. It’s not pleasant to contemplate, but if you sign up now you needn’t consider it again. Please do.

There are rumours that Opera is to go ad-free in the near future. Despite having bought a license, I really hope this is the case. I far prefer Opera to Firefox, which I find clunky and inelegant, and was very happy when version 7 came out with much needed improvements to the rendering engine. Version 8 is even better imho, and I’ve been using it happily for months. I’d say that anybody using an alternative browser is looking for the most productive software, and aren’t wedded to one application. Opera’s major disadvantage are the adverts in the free version, and despite their being fairly unobtrusive it’s understandable how people could be put off. I honestly think people would prefer Opera to Firefox (with the below caveats) and anything that would attract people can only be a good thing. Removing the ads is undoubtedly the move that would catapult Opera into becoming a major competitior, although the following would help too:

• Get Gmail working fully. It doesn’t currently support the HTML editor or new windows for composing emails (which breaks mailto links).
• Maybe allow third-party toolbars. People can currently customise everything about the browser except for this.
• Promote the User Javascript (equivalent to Greasemonkey) feature more - perhaps make up some great extensions to demonstrate what can be done.

The view from my desk

Just watched episode 4* of Lost on C4…Did anybody see that coming? I thought it was very nicely done. The signs were all there, too. This show just gets more and more intriguing.

*or 3, depending on how the double-length premiere is classified

Having mentioned Google Talk this morning, it’s only fair to point out the quiet release of MSN Messenger 7.5. The most interesting new feature is ‘voice clips’, which allows you to send a 15-second clip of ‘HEY, I’M LOOKING AT PORN OVER HERE!’ to your dearest friends. According to mess.be, 7.5 will only run on XP.

I’m having a very busy time at the moment. The Big Exciting News (coming tomorrow, btw) is taking up a fair chunk of my day, and I’m also working with Ben to get the computer network here upgraded and working properly. I decided it was time that some of the five year old hard drives were replaced, and that lead to trying to quieten some of the machines a little, and that lead to…Well, the whole thing is being revamped, essentially. Which is fun, and is the perfect opportunity for me to upgrade my machine. The new hardware’s on its way, so that’ll take up most of my weekend, I’m guessing.

Feedlounge has been down for the past two days, and I feel lost without my RSS feeds! I’m having to visit the websites manually - and that’s so 2004. Hopefully I’m not missing anything exciting…:-)

Rumours started circulating yesterday morning regarding a Google instant messaging client. It was spotted that talk.google.com was responding and running a jabber server. Today (well, last night, for me) Google Talk has been launched, and very interesting it is too. It’s an instant messaging program with built in voice capability. As it runs on Jabber, it should be possible to link into AOL, MSN and ICQ networks, although that’s currently not available. It’s heavily linked into Google’s gmail accounts, and in fact you need an account to sign in at all. Gmail has today become fully open in the USA (via cellphone id confirmation) while everyone else is still on an invite-only system. If I type your email address into the ‘add friend’ box in Google Talk you’ll receive a Gmail invite, so that’s not a big issue.

I’ve just installed it, and first impressions are good. Very smooth, very clean, and no ads If only I knew somebody else using it! I’ll be interested to try out the voice capabilities. I shouldn’t think Skype are too worried currently, but if Google start ramping up the features, such as voicemail and normal phone network linkage then this could become a serious competitor. There’s a decent preliminary review here.

Jabber was conceived as an open-source way of instant messaging, and Google’s entry into the fray should stir things up a bit! The major hurdle with jabber has been the nature of the distributed servers. Yes, that’s great for redundancy / privacy, but it’s confusing and a pain to configure even for people who understand the behind-the-scenes workings. Google’s server must be the largest in the world and they’ve stated that any jabber client can connect to it, as well as wanting to keep everything open-source. If they turn on the links into MSN / ICQ / AOL, I think things will get very interesting indeed.

If you feel like chatting, my gmail account’s there on the right…

I’m sad. I just finished watching my Firefly box-set. I rationed myself to one per week since my birthday, but it had to end some time
Firefly was a US TV series created and written by Joss Whedon - of Buffy and Angel fame - and it was screwed by the networks. Despite it being a developing story, it was shown in the wrong order, and promoted as a show of a very different style. It didn’t get the ratings, and was canceled after only 11 episodes, ironically ending with what should have been the first episode. Despite this it gained a cult following, and for months its name kept popping up on all sorts of websites that I regularly frequent. So I asked for the 14-episode DVD box-set for my birthday, and haven’t looked back
It’s a sci-fi show following the crew of the Serenity, a smuggling vessel that travels through the fringes of space. The story is great, the dialogue a joy, the characters fascinating (I have a crush on Kaylee, but that’s by the by) and it’s often laugh-out-loud funny. I highly, highly recommend this series to anybody who enjoys good stories. Although I’m not the best to judge, I’d think it’s very accessible for a sci-fi show, so don’t let that put you off…

Despite the series ending in 2002, there’s still hope. The fan backlash at the cancellation was enough for Joss Whedon to get funding for a movie, which is to be released on September 30th in the US. I’ve put off watching the trailer until I finished the series, and Holy. Hell. Like the writer of Penny Arcade said, I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited in my entire life. As he also said, in his enviable prosaic style:

Those gifted with prescience or whatever, the ones who will caper and exult in the preview theaters, I hope they understand that there are some secrets propriety demands they hold until the film is actually released. I mean it. If you come up to me at San Diego and tell me “so and so is a robot” or some shit I will buy a bat’leth and I will cut you in fucking half. They sell things like that at the convention, legendary weapons, and believe me when I say that being rent stem to stern by a Klingon warblade is probably the least exotic death I could manufacture under the circumstances.

I don’t know how much of a release Serenity will get over here, but I will travel as far as necessary Damn, now I have to get to sleep…

As hinted on Sunday, there’s some big exciting news coming very soon now…I hope

My del.icio.us links have died because, I think, of an API problem. So here it is manually See how good I am to you…

• Quake 3 Source Code Released - Woah! The Q3 engine is still pretty damn impressive, imho. People could make some excellent games with this.
• Drink-soaked Trotskyite Popinjays For WAR: Booooooooooooooooooooooooris - Why would somebody do that? Why? Oh, the humanity…
• BBC NEWS | Ocean bug has ’smallest genome’ - A completely self-sufficient organism with only 1,354 genes.
• BBC NEWS | Swazi king drops sex-ban tassels - The king fined himself a cow for breaking the ban by marrying again.
• BBC NEWS | Jazz singer Peyroux ‘disappears’ - “It said this was not the first time she had vanished, spending seven years busking in Paris after the release of her debut album.”
• World of Warcraft Forum Post - Made me laugh; read down to #5

I’ve played with light guns on consoles a few times, but never anything like this:

I’d like to try one out!

Cover for the ‘print edition’ of my blog. Created using Flickr Magazine Cover, which I originally found via Boing Boing. It’s strangely fun!

Edit: Hmm, just spotted that I mis-remembered my own tagline. Oops

Ok, so my Big Exciting Plan of last October crashed and burned. It was meant to be a big success and proof I could accomplish something, but not only am I now not planning to go to university, my attempt to fix my major regret from college - the D in Maths - resulted in nothing at all! In hindsight, I didn’t work as hard as I should have. I allowed myself to be distracted far too often, and paid for it.

I have a choice now: I can collapse into depression and wait for the combined efforts of everybody around me to pick me up again, or I can throw myself into something new. Clearly, I want to go with the latter.

Today was unpleasant as the news was full of success stories, and it’s no fun at all telling people who’ve been following your progress for nearly a year that you failed. But, when you look at it as a whole, it was just 10 months. It’s not like I’ve lost a decade of my life. I tried something for 10 months and it didn’t work. If I pretend I did nothing wrong then I’ve learnt nothing, but I’m not going to. I know I messed up to an extent, but I understand myself a lot better for it. Anyway, I did get the C in physics, which isn’t to be sneezed at!

I’m listing some accomplishments of the last 10 months not to show off, but for me to look at if I start feeling down:

• I learnt a lot of fascinating physics, and got an A-level out of it
• I did get a good grasp of at least some of the maths (I got a B in the Pure 1 exam)
• I made some new friends over the Internet
• I wrote a lot for this blog, and enjoyed doing so
• I admitted that I wasn’t coping very well in general and got some help, which improved things tremendously
• I started playing the guitar
• I learnt to dance ballroom and latin (is that phraseology allowed?)
• I became much more confident when on my own
• I took some photos of which I’m quite proud
• I wrote, and had ‘published‘, two non-murder mysteries
• I discovered that being open with the world works better for me than keeping things private
• I watched some truly excellent television, saw some truly excellent films, read some truly excellent books, and heard some truly excellent music.

And, sorry to be immodest, but I don’t think that’s at all bad for 10 months. I’ve spent the day flitting between utter despondency and planning for what’s next. Hopefully the former will disappear before too long.

So, what’s next? Writing, for sure. I’ll give myself a few days to calm down and come up with a proper plan. I’m currently thinking about going on holiday, then launching into fully cut-off-from-the-world-during-the-day writing time until christmas. But that may change; who knows

Well, that didn’t go well. C in physics but failed the maths. Failed! I knew I’d done badly, but didn’t realise the extent - I wasn’t expecting that at all. I apparently just don’t have a mathematical brain, which means my interest in the sciences will only ever be just that.

Feeling a little sorry for myself at the moment, but hopefully it’ll pass. After all, I have a physics A-level! Wooooo. 6.5 A-levels isn’t that bad a figure, with 5.5 of them A-C grades. Wouldn’t get me into Oxford, but thankfully I changed my mind about that