Livin' the life...

Variety, she is the spice of life!

Therefore, for this week's thought, I'm including the Tim Hughes- Here I Am To Worship video. It's a lovely song, and I think this video was excellently put together - it's based on The Passion.

I hope you enjoy it, and also that you have a beautiful week.

This is more of a note-to-self, but if you use Gnome, check out these nice desktop icon sets.

Microsoft officials have confirmed that the company is to introduce a way for users to surf the Web anonymously.

As part of the upcoming Internet Explorer 8 release, Microsoft is incorporating 'inPrivate' - a mode that will not record visits to the user's history and will not allow sites to place cookies on the user's system. Apple currently offers a similar service with its Safari browser. ...

There have also been questions raised over the helpfulness of the latest release, which could make it harder for police to track Internet users that are viewing harmful or illegal websites. ...

Obviously the new Internet Explorer will have pros and cons but my question to you is: Should the Internet be completely private or should our movements be traceable? (Full story)

This debate should be quite interesting. Although with Safari already supporting this feature, I guess the real concern about it now is that with IE, it'll be 'used' by the masses.

Just dropping a quick line to let you know I've returned to England, from my 'change of scenery' visit to Barbados. I expect to be posting some more photos from my visit on Flickr soon, so keep your eyes open!

Nice piece of FREEware. I definitely recommend..

Quick Media Converter is a powerful and very complete Free video and audio conversion software. Converts to and from formats including: flv, avi, divx, xvid, mpeg4, ipod, iphone, psp, 3GP, 3G2, AVI, DIVX, XVID, TS, DVD, VCD, MPEG, MPEG2, MP3, WAV, amr, m4a, mp4, vob, mov, h264, h263, wmv, wma. Resizing Cropping and also Web Cam or DV Cam fluxes capture to avi divx . Batch Conversions supported, desktop activity recording. (Source)

Download here.

Just got back from watching Hancock and I must say, it wasn't that bad at all.

It definitely rates higher than I Am Legend, both in plot, acting, and action (see my review of that). Plus, it has a few twists that had me somewhat impressed. And, with its happy, albeit ideal ending, I recommend it as a movie to add to your shopping cart when strolling through Blockbuster.

In total, I think 7/10 is a fair score.

The next movie for me will probably be either The Incredible Hulk or The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor.

For some reason, I've never managed to get the native Vista weather gadget to work. I always get "service not unavailable" no matter what location I put in. Because of that I've downloaded and tried Met Office Weather gadget, and even though this works great, it does not give me an option to put in my exact location-I guess that clearly Leamington Spa, furthermore Coventry are not big enough for coverage.. ?

Anyway, today I report that I've found a great gadget that works lovely for weather. It is from Weather Underground and displays current temperature (F and C), the day's max and min, location, and also gives a nice pictorial representation of what it looks like outside (e.g. clouds, sunshine, etc).

I recommend you check it out! Also worth noting is that it doesn't seem to restricted to one country, thus far I've tried out UK, Barbados, Paris, USA and India.

It's that glorious time once again, i.e. time to learn new software. The software choices are mainly 'required' for my research so it's nothing too fancy. They are:

LaTeX is a high-quality typesetting system; it includes features designed for the production of technical and scientific documentation. LaTeX is the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents. (Source) [To use LaTeX on Vista, I first installed Basic MiKTeX 2.7, then TeXnicCenter. proTeXt seems like a good option as well but I'm yet to try it.]

Eclipse is an open source community whose projects are focused on building an extensible development platform, runtimes and application frameworks for building, deploying and managing software across the entire software lifecycle. Many people know us, and hopefully love us, as a Java IDE but Eclipse is much more than a Java IDE. (Source) [To use on Vista and Linux, I downloaded and installed Eclipse IDE for Java Developers.]

If you know any good tutorials on any of these, it would be great if you could share, thanks! :-)

lol, i luv lolcats. The photo above was sourced from here.

"Will I ever get this right?". This is what I asked myself this morning, as I managed to confuse myself for the second week running, about exactly how communion would be administered to me at church. See what going overseas for a bit, then returning home can do to your brain? lol.

Anyway, I ask myself this same question a lot in my walk as a Christian. Often I go through trials and problems and often I must admit that I waver. Even though I don't fully doubt, I feel a weakness in me, a weakness that probably would not be there if I trusted in the Lord completely like I should. Then, in the end, once things have passed, of course everything works out fine, sometimes I even see why the Lord let things happen as they did, and I aptly exclaim, "Wow! That's some divine planning! I hadn't a clue that other situation was important!". But then the question hits me, "Will I ever get this right?".. Will I ever do what is right and fully put aside what I know to be wrong? Will I ever trust in God completely even when things are as clear as mud? Will I ever be the Christian that God knows I can be?

To be honest, these questions usually make me cringe! Sometimes however, on a lonely, quiet day, they catapult me into deep thought, which usually leads to critical self-evaluation. After all, to be a Christian means to grow, to learn more, to move pass what we were, to aim higher, and ultimately, as Paul alludes to in 1 Corinthians 11:1, to imitate Christ.

In summary, the life of a Christian isn't easy, or is it to be taken lightly - this we all know. It is hard work, sometimes we will falter, but the important things is to  immediately put things right. Self-evaluation is also necessary, and personally, I think it's a wise process to do often. In times where the question "Will I ever get this right?" arises, let's hold strong and reply, "With the strength of Christ we will!" After all, Philippians 4:13 in my Bible states, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me".. and I think we have the same Bible. :-)

Have a blessed week my friends.

One thing I like about Yahoo!, it's a one-stop-shop, and arguably the best portal to the Word Wide Web. Whether it's day-to-day news from around the globe, or big events such as the World Cup, Euro, or the Olympics.

This time I'm writing about the Olympics and Yahoo!'s photo coverage of the opening ceremony. In my opinion, it's a pretty good slideshow and I recommend you view it here.

Well, the Beijing Olympics has now (i.e. today) officially started and what an Olympics it intends to be! The official site states:

Program of the Games of the XXIX Olympiad - The Games will take place August 8-24, 2008, in Beijing. The Games will play host to the 28 summer sports currently on the Olympic program. Approximately 10,500 athletes are expected to participate in the Games, with around 20,000 accredited media bringing the Games to the world.

Out of all the sports, my favourite ones are diving, gymnastics, and water polo. I would watch these all day long!

Below there's one of the many photos of a Lego Sports City (apparently created by the The Hong Kong LEGO Users Group within 100 hrs), aimed at recreating the 2008 Olympic grounds.

As a past lego-maniac myself (I actually still have a box full of past 'projects', lol), I fully appreciate this Lego Sports City. Very cool and well done!

Anyway, let's all hope and pray that things go well this Olympics with regards to security, natural disasters and athletes doping up.

Nice article: HOWTO: Ubuntu Install From USB - Works For Other Linux Too!

After viewing the trailer, I was adamant that this new version of Batman was the same old overplayed story and hardly seemed to impress. However, because a number of my friends (K,A,M) said that the Dark Knight was the "best movie they've watched in a while", I decided to give it a go - especially since one friend (K) commented that it was action from beginning to end.

My review? Just above 'good'. The best thing about the movie in my opinion was the plot; the storyline and the characters were very well developed. Conversely, that development was stretched just a bit too much making that 2hrs and 30mins of film, not for the faint of heart - my sister can attest to that. The action scenes in the movie were sparse and I think only about three times there was cause to make some noise.

Possibly the highlight of my evening was the attempt at a Morse code conversation between someone else in the drive-in and myself, as we used our bright lights to flicker on the movie screen between films.

Anyway, all-in-all, I would give the Dark Knight 7.4/10. To me, it is not as good as films like 300 - that had action, plot, and was short - and more recently, No Country For Old Men - which, albeit a bit disturbing, and much less straight forward than Dark Knight, was a great movie.

I guess this just proves that 10,000 French men can be wrong. Or.. that those French men watch bearrr junk movies.

Ever wanted to find a font just like the one used by certain publications, corporations, or ad campaigns? Well now you can, using our WhatTheFont font recognition system. Upload a scanned image of the font [or direct it to a URL] and instantly find the closest matches in our database. If WhatTheFont can’t figure it out, you can submit your image to the WhatTheFont Forum where cloak-draped font enthusiasts around the world will help you out! (Source)

Interestinnngg....

These are just a few quick tips that I stumbled across a few seconds ago to bear in mind when working with CSS in JavaScript.

Tip 1:
Compounded CSS attributes lose the hyphen and the second (third, forth, etc) word have an Upper Case first letter. For example: background-color (in CSS style) becomes backgroundColor (in JavaScript) and text-align (in CSS style) becomes textAlign (in JavaScript).

Tip 2:
Compounded HTML attributes use Upper Case first letter for second (third, forth, etc) word. For example: colSpan, bgColor, readOnly

Tip 3:
HTML "class" becomes JavaScript "className".

These tips were sourced from this web developer forum.

(I must say that I've only validated Tip 1. Feel free to comment on any of the others.)

Along with the update to my blog, I've also updated the jasonnurse.com homepage - a snapshot of which is below.

The new links are:

1. Ph.D. Research - this links to my University of Warwick ePortfolio which gives a brief bio (mainly academics) and also outlines the area of research for my Ph.D.

2. Flickr - it was a hard decision, but I've finally abandoned the development of my own photo sharing web site and joined up with Flickr. In my opinion, Flickr is an excellent and very professional web site, and I'm glad to be one of its newest members.

3. Codeyard - the main purpose of this codeyard is to display some of the better projects I have worked on over the years, and in some cases to provide code for general public (but non-commercial) perusal/use. (Most of the stuff I'll try to put under some open source license.)

Bye bye old setup (see below)..

Hello, new setup!! (See current blog layout)

Ok ok.. so it's not that comprehensive.. but, I've been meaning to do this for ages and I'm glad I finally got the chance! Instead of having a photo of Barbados (even though the beaches really are picturesque), I thought it appropriate to have a photo of England - Royal Leamington Spa to be specific - as this is where I've spent the last year of my life.

So, please, leave a comment and tell me what you think. Which one looks better? Why? Is this one horrible? (You better not say that *grr) Let me know! :-)