It has come to my attention over the last few days and weeks even that the number of people on my blogroll who are making regular posts seems to have declined. While I might be guilty of having the odd few days, even a week, where I don’t post anything I soon catch up at the end of the period by making all 5 or 6 or so of my pending drafts complete and public.

This doesn’t seem to be the case for everyone else on my list, except for perhaps Chris, but even his posts seem to lack their usual zing. Apart from the Easter break, is there anything else thats happened recently to stop people writing a few lines? If so, perhaps someone could kindly let me know. Oh and if you don’t have an excuse, get blogging folks!

I have done a quick update to my calendar plugin to include a CSS drop-down description when you hover over an event. This can be styled according to taste in the same way as the rest of the calendar. You can see this revised operation running on my calendar and you can grab your updated copy on my programming page. If you haven’t yet tried this plugin on your WordPress powered site, now is an excellent time to give it a go - you won’t be disappointed!

I can across this hilarious video in the course of me trawling the internet and just had to share it with everyone. I’m not quite sure how the stuntman managed to do this, but it was certainly worth the effort! Enjoy folks

I’ve really been playing about with my camera a lot recently, as such I’ve got lots of various pictures to share in my photo gallery and have linked to them below

• In and around St. Albans
• Boat work sunsets
• More Hyde Park sunsets

I also took a load of pictures when I went out with friends to Tropical World in Leeds, so feel free to check these out as well. If you have any comments about the pictures, particularly if you are into photography yourself then please post up. I’m still trying to get to grips with working out the correct f-stop and shutter time settings without resorting to the auto features of my camera and I’ve already noticed that some pictures have turned out slightly under or over exposed so I’m hoping to improve on that. If you have tips about this aspect or any other of my pictures then feel free to share!

Its a restaurant I’ve walked past many times when I used to live in Clarence Dock, but I’d never actually eaten there. Until yesterday that is. Its actually a superb little place. The service is quick and the food is excellent. I ordered a reasonable size portion according to the menu but it was huge when it arrived and very tasty. There is also a huge range of food on offer, with a nice selection of specialities extending into drinks and deserts as well. I never thought bowls could be made of ice and that green tea makes good ice cream, but I was mistaken!

The prices were not cheap, but as a place to go and enjoy good food and the relaxed atmosphere in the company of friends its the ideal venue. We all enjoyed ourselves and I’m sure we will return at somepoint in the not too distant future.

On the outskirts of Leeds, in Roundhay, there is great place to spend a day out - Tropical World! For Chris’ birthday we headed out there as a group and spent the afternoon looking at all the amazing creatures they have there. A fair few photos were taken by us all too, you can catch my contribution in my photo gallery.

After our visit we grabbed a pub lunch and then as most of the group got things ready for snacks and drinks at Chris’ place, myself and Norm went to the pub with Chris and sunk a few ales. It was nice to chat to Chris and Norm over a few drinks as its not something we’ve really done before outside of a group setting.

After we’d got ourselves nicely tipsey at the pub we went over to Chris’ house and had a nice evening chatting with everyone, and for me, catching up with what had been going on while I had been away down south. It just proved to me how great a group of friends I have here and how much fun our gatherings and days out really are. Oh and if you haven’t yet heard, Sarann got really rather drunk

Working like a dog might be a figure of speech but it certainly seems like that is what is required of me now I’m back in Leeds. I’ve got 4 programming type courseworks on the go, not to mention a few websites to launch and some programming to do for a couple of clients. I’m making progress already but I never thought I’d say this I’m actually looking forward to the beginning of term when I know I will have completed all of these assignments.

One particular thing that I will be working very hard on over the next few days will be my SE24 group project. James in my group has been doing some truly sterling work on the GUI and I really have to take my hat off to his efforts. All that is required now is for me to make some serious inroads into the database and logic code so that the nice screens actually do something in the context of the application! Still, it will all be worth it in the end I hope.

After a while of downtime which various blogging policies were sorted out, SoC Gossip is back up and running again. If you’ve forgotten what it looks like, want to see whats new or want to get back writing for the site I advise you head on over there now.

Hopefully it will become a useful resource for the school of computing once again. I certainly missed it during the downtime and look forward to writing a fair few interesting articles for it over the coming months. Keep a look out!