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Had my first ever evening driving lesson this evening, Kev and I went to Seaford and back again over the course of the lesson, using some national speed limit single carriageways and some town driving. Had a slightly hairy moment when I decided to change lanes while going round a roundabout, actually scratch the “slightly hairy”; it was down right dangerous. My mistake was; I had this image in my mind that if you are going straight on at a roundabout you go round the out side… what I had not got straight in my head was that if you are in the right hand lane stay in the right hand lane, all comes down to Mirror-Signal-Manovure. ...

No, I haven’t taken up free running I have just been playing a little more Call of Duty 4 over the past week, I was encouraged to look back at it by a friend some time ago. Only just got round to trying it again. Since I last played there has been another patch, that includes new maps (I thought there were four maps, however I have only played three. ...

The day I purchased AudioSurf was the first day that I even saw Steam, sure I had heard lots of people talk about it, many people praising its loveliness and many more complaining that it was evil. I had never had the need to install it, I owned Half Life (never finished it) and had played a bit of Counter Strike 1.6 in my time, but I had never felt the need to take it any further and buy Half Life 2. ...

For my regular day job I am a Systems Administrator, my team and I manage a network with 7 servers and approximately 600 workstations, 200 laptops and 2500 users. All clients are Windows XP SP2 or SP3 and all servers are Windows 2003 SP2 or Windows 2003 R2 SP2. I am sure I am not alone in knowing least 5 commands that I use day in and day out to manage workstations or servers on the network. I thought I would take the time to share some of these with you now. ...

One of the many RSS feeds I subscribe to is Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Over the weekend Alec Meer posted an article about a game called AudioSurf. Essentially you feed in an audio track in one of several popular formats, AudioSurf then analyzes the music and generates a racetrack. On this racetrack ride several coloured blocks. These blocks can be collected in a grid, in much the same way as Connect 4. Once you have collected three or more of these blocks of the same colour in a connecting pattern you will score points based upon the number of blocks and the colour. ...

Breaking my streak of 11 blog posts on the day of my driving lesson… I had a driving lesson yesterday. Strangely enough I feel that my driving is getting worse, I don’t think it actually is getting any worse I am just getting more confident and trying to do more things at once, at which point Kev steps in (literally) with the foot break. Interesting experience today as we were driving round in the pouring rain, it was quite disturbing at first as the windscreen wipers were distracting, however once I got over that I was more or less ignoring them. The main issue I had was large blobs of rain obscuring entire cars, again once I got use to checking a bit more carefully I got over that too. ...

I am sure almost everyone in the whole world will have seen this as I got told by two friends, my RSS feeds and my wife almost simultaneously, which was a disturbing experience in itself. Google has released their own browser, Google made a rather amusing and informative cartoon too. There is pleanty of coverage from all of the usual suspects such as Lifehacker, Lifehacker (Again), Official Google Blog and The Register. I am making the commitment to use Google Chrome for the Google Web Applications that I use, from what I have skim read about the product it is probably more suited than my add-on rich Firefox install (I do a fair amount of website coding, and even more debugging other peoples code - for which Firebug is a must, and now part of Firefox Developer Tools). ...

Had quite a break between lessons this time, found it much harder to get into the frame of mind after an 8 day break, came back quickly enough. Kev has been trying to get me talking through what I am doing to improve my concentration and awareness of the situation, I am still struggling to get junctions and roundabout quite right, I still tend to come up to the junction to fast not giving myself enough time to get into position, change gear down and look. ...

Apparently this was released sometime last week however I had missed it completely, Mythic and its Electronic Arts overlords have decided that they will not be crediting former staff members in Warhammer Online. I really don’t understand it, Ryan Shwayder put it across better than I can. Everyone who contributes to a project puts something in, even if their product is not explicitly included in the final complete product they are part of the process. Not including someone’s name in the credits of anything be it a game, a film or a TV show is a giant slap in the face. As a programmer I would be gutted to think that I had been excluded from the credits having put years of work into and then moved on to better things a few months before launch. ...

Catherine and I put on a barbecue this weekend, in theory it was a housewarming party, however we have been here for 16 months - so not really a housewarming. One of the things that we didn’t have to put any effort into was the music, and that was down to something called Grooveshark Lite. Groveshark is a Florida start up company who’s business model is basically to allow users to upload their music collection to Groveshark’s servers, registered users can download the music (at a price), of the said price a cut goes to the artist, a cut to the person who uploaded the music and presumably the rest goes to Groveshark. ...