Mobile Stew

This photo reminds me of when I was cramming for my exams at Uni!  This cute little fella is the tarsier, one of the smallest primates in the world, found
only in the Philippines, on the island of Bohol in central Philippines
and in Sarangani province on the island of Mindanao*. 

Read more here

I'm getting a bit bored of Project Gotham 3, so I've just picked up a copy of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter for the Xbox 360.  Tried holding out for as long as possible, but it seemed silly to only have one game for my Xbox 360 that I play.  Haven't played it yet but I'll be online before and after the Spurs game if anyone wants to show me the ropes.  Don't forget I've got a new gamertag - 'Dreem Team'

Not a lot to say today as I've been keeping one eye on the Commonwealth Games as my 'little' cousin was competing and he did very well winning a Silver Medal in the High Jump. 

For those of you who have no idea what the Commonwealth Games are its for countries who basically used to be part of the British Empire, which includes Australia, Canada, New Zealand, a lot of African nations and most of the Caribbean so the competition is pretty good.  For some reason America doesn't take part......

Given that he's only 21 and already he the British #'1 he's looking a good prospect for the 2012 London Olympics as he'll only be 27.  I'd put a bet on now.

No, it's not a fix and Abe does actually exist!  Like they say - you have to be in it to win it and Abe posted the best suggestion.

Congratulations mate and let me know if want more Amazon vouchers to go towards your nano.  I think you should have enough to buy one now.  If I don't hear from you within a week I'll just send you the Amazon vouchers.

I'm going to be suspending the competitions for a while until the site traffic builds up again to make them more competitive!

I've been thinking recently about getting a hardware firewall as in my mind it should offer a better level of protection for my home network (currently I have 2 PCs, a Xbox 360 and 2 Modded Xboxs running XBMC connected to a Netgear WPN-824 router), whilst freeing up resources on my PCs. 

It just seems to make more sense to stop attacks at the 'edge' of my network rather than letting them through to PCs.  I also wouldn't have to fiddle around with setting up firewall rules on each PC, instead just setting rules at a network level.

Has anybody else done this or considered this?  Can you recommend any devices?

There are some features on my blog.  The comment captcha is now all in lower case to make it easier to leave comments.  Also, you no longer have to register to leave your name with a comment - a 'name' can be chosen for the comment as you post.

Hopefully, this will encourage the shy readers to start leaving their names!

The Chicago Tribune says it has compiled a list of 2,653 CIA employees, just by searching the Internet.  The newspaper said it gathered the information from
online services that compile public data, that any fee-paying
subscriber can access.  It did not publish the names, at the CIA's request. Many
of the agents are believed to be covert. The paper also located two
dozen "secret" facilities.

It's scary how much info is available on the net.  Whenever I meet someone new I tend to 'Google' their name first to see what I can learn.  This backfired on me a few years ago though when I agreed to take a friend of a friend from the US I'd never met before to a party.  When I googled her I found a picture ...

A survey conducted by Google found that British internet users spend an averageof 164 minutes online daily - the equivalent of 41 days a year -compared to 148 minutes watching television.

Men spend on average 172 minutes on the web daily, and women 156 minutes.  Londoners and Scots are the most dedicated net users, accordingto the survey, carried out by the TNS institute last month involving 1030 adults aged 16 to 64.

I'm not surprised by these findings.  I'm actually going the other way and trying to spend less time 'online'.  It is so easy to fall into the habit of logging on to see if there are any new emails or any new RSS stories.

One area where I am cutting down is my mobile internet ...

I'm going to be online in about 20 mins on PGR3 with my new Xbox Live gamertag 'DreemTeam' if anyone fancies trying to beat me in my Ferrari 355. 

Add me to your buddies list if you've got a Xbox 360.  So far I've got two Connected Internet readers, Dollarman1 and Wey2Good4U, on my buddies list.  It'd be great to get a few more.

Apologies for the lack of posts over the last couple of weeks as I decided to take a break from blogging, amongst other things, as I wasn't too well.  I'm back to full health now and normal service will now resume.