View all photos on Flickr.

I’m toying with the idea of getting a new camera for Christmas; a digital SLR. The difficult question is which one, and how much do I spend?

Read more about my project, read my dissertation or download the software.

I got a bit frustrated with the silly costume so took it off shortly after the ceremony. My dad did take lots of photos of me wearing it before the ceremony - most of which make me look very silly (and rather fat).

The “official” graduation photo (£36, and you get to hold a bit of white plastic pipe which is meant to be a “scroll”) takes 4-6 weeks to arrive. Can’t wait…

The weather wasn’t brilliant, but it didn’t rain much, so we had a good time walking round the usual tourist venues without having to visit a single museum.

My photos from the trip are on Flickr.

*I got an A* at GCSE French, which means I can just about fumble my way through buying a beer or lunch or train tickets without needing too many hand gestures. I can also decipher most roadsigns, food packages and menus without too much trouble. Which all seems a bit pointless, because as soon as a native French speaker hears me mumbling Franglais they respond in brilliant English, and most of the menus in the sort of place we were eating in Paris are bilingual. At least I can figure out which toilets are the gents without too much trouble…

Without wanting to sound big-headed, I’m especially pleased because, as I did at school when I got four A-grade A-levels, and prior to that straight A/A* GCSEs, I worked hard, but not too hard. I guess I’m very lucky that I can do well academically without putting in an extraordinary amount of effort. I’ve spent a large part of the last three years doing things other than uni work (not too much of the typical student drink/party/watch crap TV thing, but a lot of other stuff that I found fun, like volunteering on average ten or more hours a week for St John Ambulance, and going to work abroad). I decided a while ago that having a 2:1 degree and a lot of other good experience would be much better than getting a first class degree but having no life away from uni work. Happily, I’ve managed to get the first, and still have a life away from uni (and I’m fairly sure that I succeeded at my job interview because of the things I’ve learned that aren’t related to my degree course, rather than because of my academic achievements).

In some ways it feels a little like I’ve cheated the system (traditionally I guess one is supposed to go to university to become engrossed in one’s subject for three or four years, studying constantly; whereas I treated uni as a “day job” with added perks like lie-ins and student discounts, and got on with other things the rest of the time). However, I suppose isn’t one part of being smart the ability to get the results you want without expending any more cost or effort than is necessary?

Just under two weeks ago I was moving out of my slightly grotty but well-located student flat in Clifton, Bristol, across town to a more upmarket one-year-old flat in a slightly less smart but still nice area of town (just off Gloucester Road). I’d spent a while packing boxes, throwing away rubbish, making lists of all the organisations I needed to inform of my change of address and so on. I was confident that by the Monday morning, when I’d planned to move out, everything would be ready.

At about 8:30 am on the Monday, I was still feeling rather tired after a weekend of night shifts for St John Ambulance (two of the biggest university balls) so when I heard a large lorry trying to get down the narrow road I glanced behind the curtain at it and promptly rolled over and dozed off a bit. An hour later I was up and dressed, pulled open the curtains, and noticed that my car, parked in the street opposite the flat, had a flat tyre. Marvellous. Just what I needed.

So I went out to look at the tyre, and found scratches all down the side of my three-month-old car, a chunk taken out of the tyre, two chunks taken out of the alloy wheel, and note on the window left by a neighbour who witnessed the lorry I saw earlier damage my car and drive off. So I spent the morning phoning the insurance company and visiting the police, and by about lunchtime could finally start the move.

The very British “it could have been worse” attitude kept me going - at least it only damaged paint and plastic and a wheel, not denting any metal, and so on…

The new flat is brilliant, especially after making a trip to IKEA (yet more stress) to get some furniture to store all the junk I’d brought with me in. However, due to a change of service provider there was no internet connection, meaning for over a week I was only able to read my email on my mobile phone. More stress.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, two weeks later and the car has been fixed (I still had to pay £150 insurance excess, which hopefully I can claim back from the other party when the legal expenses people get their act together) and I now have internet access, of sorts, by paying extra to T-mobile to use my phone as a 3G modem. (The broadband ISP apparently isn’t going to connect us until 4 July, and I couldn’t live much longer without proper web access). My stress levels have returned to normal, and things look good for the future, though I am still a bit pissed off about the car…

From a casual reader’s point of view, most of the old blog posts have now disappeared, but most other content has been copied across. I still have the old blog posts saved, and one day I might trawl through them and re-post anything that’s still worth keeping. There’s a lot of new content, and more will follow in the future.

The blog has been split into the four main sections of the site, so if you’re not interested in technology and computers stuff you don’t have to read that bit, for instance. Although you can still read the blog in traditional aggregated format too.

The new sections of the site add more information about me and the main parts of my life. You will note that I’ve just about finished my degree course so I’ll be moving away from student things towards my work (where possible) and other aspects of my life. Some sections such as work are yet to receive much content; others such as St John Ambulance have already got extensive content which will no doubt grow over time too.

The template was designed from scratch and there are several custom bits that make the site unique to me and rather unlike your standard WordPress installation. One day I will write more about these. For the time being, the geeks amongst you can study my URL structure and try to figure out what’s going on ;-)

Meanwhile, the rest of you can just enjoy the site!

I have a Windows Mobile PDA phone, and I can keep my phone and PC in sync perfectly well without Outlook. Someone asked how:

Syncing email

This one is easy. Don’t store email in Thunderbird. Instead use IMAP email and keep it on the server. That way you can collect email in Thunderbird at home, anywhere from webmail, from any IMAP client (e.g. Outlook or Thunderbird) at work/uni/wherever, and from your PDA phone. The email remains on the server so no syncing is necessary really. (I guess it helps if, as I do, you have flat-rate internet access on your PDA phone).

Syncing contacts

This is the other half of syncing with Thunderbird. I’ve not yet found an easy way to store your contacts on a remote server. Instead I use FinchSync (free) to sync the phone with the PC every so often. (I connect my phone to my laptop by Bluetooth, but you could use a cable, or whatever).

This also has the brilliant advantage that if I lost my phone, I’d have a backup of all my contacts in Thunderbird.

Syncing calendar

Google calendar is very useful, but accessing it from a PDA phone isn’t straightforward. There are several applications to sync your Google calendar with your phone’s organiser “over the air” (i.e. using your mobile internet connection), the one I use is OggSync. There’s a free basic version, though if you want support for multiple Google calendars and other features the Pro version is about $30 (£15) a year, and well worth it.