The BBC News Technology website is something I check at least once a day, just to make sure nothing major happens within the web industry that will affect me. This is done with the use of a trusty little tool in Mozilla Firefox which puts RSS feeds into the "bookmarks toolbar".
One story that caught my eye today was
'Cancer link' to heavy mobile use' mainly because over the past few months I have also come across:
+ Mobiles 'don't raise cancer risk'
+
Mobile phones 'safe for brains'
+
Mobile phone cancer link rejected
and numerous news articles that state mobile phones wont and will give me testicular/brain cancer. This is an issue I am bothered about. As at some point in the distant future I do plan on having kids and don't want to have the consequences of my mobile phone use to affect them or me for that matter. I also never go anywhere without my phone.
I went through a stage a while ago where I didn't like putting my phone in my jeans pockets as I was worried about the unproven speculation that that microwaves being emitted from my mobile phone were slowly cooking something/s down there. But where else do you put your phone? In your jacket pocket? But then it is sitting a few inches from one of the most vital organs in the body (your heart).
It's a loose/loose situation. Unless all of this scare mongering is a load of rubbish. Just like WIFI has been banned from some schools because parents think it's giving their kids headaches. A more likely cause of a headache would be the mono-tonal teacher that has been teaching the same content for the past 20 years in the same mono-tonal way.
I now have given up paying attention to any of these studies and just get on with my radiation fueled life. We are always surrounded by radiation, toxic fumes/chemicals, computer screens that are damaging our eyesight and there is nothing we can do about it.
The iPhone dock is useful though as it provides a seat for my phone whilst I am at the computer, that at the moment is most of the time. If any of these unproven theories are ever proved at least my body is getting a bit of a break.
On another note I have been playing about with parsing RSS feeds into PHP driven sites over the past few days with great success especially with using YouTube user feeds to keep video sections on website up to date. Only a small eregi_replace was required to change the URL from a hyperlink to a flash video link.
The following few days have taught me the true value of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) it is cutting my development time and thinking time down a huge amount.
It's flat out here at the moment with work hitting me from all directions and no sign of it slowing down. The store build for Golddigga is slowly coming together but still an uphill race until the payment system and stock management system integration is complete.
I have spent most of today replying to emails and organizing my time for the next 6-8 weeks to ensure all my clients work is complete before deadline and to the high standard I expect of myself within all of my work.
University deadlines have been added to the iCal after getting an email through informing everyone on my course that the deadlines are set at 10th April for the Dissertation and 1st May for our final project. This is a lot earlier than previous years due to examination board restrictions which puts a great amount of pressure on all of us to juggle all of our work.
From speaking to my tutor, with the grades I got from last semester I am on track to get a 1st as long as I put the work into my assignments and ensure they all get 75% or greater. Easier said than done though as I found out for my final project planning document that weighed in at 60%.
The annoying thing was before I looked at the comments I knew where I had lost pretty much every mark and it's not a mistake I'm prepared to make again. From now on it is going to be complete commitment to getting the best possible grade.
A few months work for a piece of paper that will help me my whole life is a small price to pay. (Well a few months and the £10,000+ dept this degree has put me into)
My 3rd BTHomeHub has arrived and is now all plugged in and setup. I proceeded to spend most of Thursday night on the phone to BT technical support whilst some poorly trained IT guy clicked things on my laptop via a remote desktop system they have implemented.
He spent the first 20 minutes opening command prompt and running ipconfig /release and /renew. After this he looked at the amount of wireless networks in the area and said he is going to get rid of them from my list. I know this is not possible because I actually understand how windows works and have been using it since 3.1 was around. Even logic tells you that removing the networks from the detected networks list isn't possible unless you have a large amount of led to put into the walls. Or there is the cheaper option of turning the wireless off and not having a wireless connection at all.
The next 20/30 minutes consisted of clicking random settings in the BTHomeHub control panel including turning the SSID off, changing the channel (the most logical steps he took). Finally after a hour or so of playing I got back my wireless. But after a few hours both the wireless and ethernet seemed incapable of holding an ip address for more than a few minuites. Still even after reinstalling the drivers the same problem occurs.
Wether this is a faulty dhcp on the router or a software/hardware issue with the router I do not know and more research will need to be done.
On another note I am currently in a lot of pain after going go-karting with nzime yesterday. We had 4 15min sessions with a 2-5 minute break in between. I came 4/6 over all which isn't bad considering it was my 3rd time karting.