In between work, I’m having to scrape together my remaining free minutes and seconds and mould this time into some usable space. With a number of projects racing along at once, and meetings here and there (one this morning in Birmingham), organising my international travels is having to be done in slices.

I went to the surgery yesterday to find out about injections, and despite arriving an hour early, the nurse was able to see me straight away (which prevented much frustration on my part).

It turns out I’m going to be dodging malaria, yellowfever, rabies, hepatitis B and encephalitis. Nice. Thankfully all other diseases are covered by my existing jabs, but the ones named above all come with a price tag tied to the needle. Malaria and yellowfever are manageable, but the other three apparently are a rather weightier £100 each. At that cost, I may just take my chances and avoid taunting any rabid dogs I happen to see.

I am worried that I am on the verge of a purchase breakdown. For some reason, I’ve got that buying itch, and my wishlist includes a Mac (woah, tres expensant), a bigger hard drive for my Macbook, some live saving immunisations, some flights to other countries (it’s just dawned on me that it’ll be six new countries I visit this year), some carbon neutralisation (of all things) and a couple of trips to see friends. I need restraint and I need it quickly before I get anywhere near eBay which has been proven to trigger these types of sprees in the past.

Swan phoned me earlier, as did Devito and Sam. Swan is still jobless, enjoying the company of Mike and his alcohol in Lufbra. Devitio is still terrorising the Spanish and Sam was in her office making the most of free calls. Sean text me at 8am and asked if I had got around to decorating his CV. Funnily enough, I hadn’t.

If you are near a computer at the moment, Gaz has finally launched his site . He started building it in 1996 and now it’s ready for you to look at. Good job Gaz.

Once a week on a Thursday evening I have the great pleasure of skimming through the (first twenty) pages of the Stourbridge News (the rest are all property and adverts). This beacon of journalism is an interesting mix of press releases and local interest stories, like any other free town newspaper.

Fantastically though, the Stourbridge News has aspirations. It also has a Conservative/conservative bias. I don’t think it’s particularly intentional, just the editorial team can’t disguise their voting preferences.

Many a time has it’s strange take on events, and especially vehement ‘Letters to the Editor’ section (where Disgusted of Norton expresses his hatred of foreigners and their evil ways) become a topic of great merriment over a few pints at the Crisp or a balti down the Lye.

One of my particularly favourite stories that has run for years is the anti-Tesco campaign that has been a long standing favourite amongst the journalists and the politically mobilised members of Stourbridge Town. It’s been going on for at least seven years, if not longer.

To give you some background, The ‘Bridge was wrapped in by a ring road in the 1960s and ever since saw a decline as large shopping centres like Merry Hill became a shopper’s paradise (or hell, depending on your point of view). Despite the fact Stourbridge Town has lost all it’s major independent and local stores, sold out to the mainstream high-streeters, some people are still under the illusion it is 1954 and the Russians are out to get us.

Therefore in the eyes of these over-vocal and time-displaced residents, the idea of having a Tesco in a ‘market town’ is abhorrent. In case nobody had got the drift, this last week’s front page reads as in the image, “Held to Ransom, Fury As Tesco Bag Prime Site”.

Essentially what has happened is this. Tesco, who have been constantly denied plots of land outside of the ring road for the past seven years, went and bought a large empty unit in the rather underused Crown Centre. The space used to be occupied by Safeways, then Morrisions, but both failed to sustain business (due to how much of a rubbish space it is) and closed a while ago.

Disgusted of Norton, along with the anti-progression brigade are once again absolutely fuming and on the warpath, claiming it is a purely cynical move to stop Sainsbury’s moving into the town centre. I think you now realise how ‘middle class’ Stourbridge believes it is. Of course Sainsbury’s would be fine, but Tesco?! With it’s extra value ranges and it’s bland branding, well it’s quite probably the first step towards communism. The Russians!

I watch with the utmost fascination how the population of Stourbridge wind themselves up into a cataclysmic stupor about a supermarket opening that will probably only help bring people back to the town. Disgusted of Norton has nothing to worry though. His/her letters still make great reading, and clearly he/she has enough hatred to write until the end of time. Stourbridge News will continue the crusade until everyone of those Bolshys are sent back to where they came from!

I was quite surprised to find out that Facebook allows you to import entries from your blog via a feed. A nice feature.

In other feed news, I’ve discovered a few million fantastic freeware Mac apps from a place called FreeMacWare . Sometimes you think “Oh, I need a utility to do that,” but sometimes you are surprised by what other people have thought of that you didn’t. Anyway, I now have hundreds of not-so-silly little applications on my Macbook, and am signed upto the handy feed.

One of the best I discovered came through on the feed today. Called NetFixer it takes a web address and saves a screenshot of the whole web page in JPG, PNG or GIF format. Beautifully simple, all it lacks is the ability to turn off the ‘save to’ screen and let it assign an automatic filename. A definite gem though.

There is also nice little Suduko app called MacdoKu and one that I can only believe will be incredibly valuable when I swap over to Mac fully – Teleport allows you to control two macs using one keyboard and mouse.

There are more congratulations to hand out. Long time school friend Buzz (who I went to playgroup, primary and secondary school with) has announced his engagement; so my best wishes mate!

Oh, you may have noticed the calendar is back, albeit a bit squashed. This will eventually be properly fitted into the design, but like I say, this is a bit of a temporary hash of a design until things slow down at my end.

The first Multipack of 2007 was in Stafford, and despite the railway’s best effort to ensure there would be no trains going there (bus service instead) they accidentally let two services slip through the net, but it meant we all turned up an hour earlier than normal.

Happily, like all train journeys in England, there was no lack of excitement. Being there were no seats, I ended up standing in the cattle-market outside the toilet and had the immense pleasure of being the ‘door guardian’. Unfortunately for all of us, one man forgot to lock the door and flew out into the aisle to the entertainment of the entire carriage. We also had the Laurel and Hardy of the 12 year old eastern European world, who clearly list vandalism and ‘being a bit rowdy’ in their Who’s Who entry. After being told to jack it in several times by various passengers, the tone got distinctly more aggressive and I was quite glad to get of the train at Stafford. Fun fun.

Most of the usual faces showed, plus a couple of ‘rookies’, and we headed over to The Swan for beer, food and some intense discussion on attribute/element semantics and the iPhone. Later we moved to The Bear (handily close) and then another establishment (I didn’t catch the name) where we played pool until we decided to get food at Wetherspoon’s and make out way back on the station.

Ambitions for the Multipack this year are push the geek envelope, and there were plenty of discussions about getting the website in order, doing some membership pruning and organising some more events.

The train home consisted of approximately 70% drunks, and 10% police, which is always nice, and the journey climaxed at New Street with an arrest. If only life could be so exciting all the time.

In other news, I spent Friday evening scouring the web for good prices on flights to Delhi and Nepal. It should be a straight forward thing to do, but it isn’t, and comparing intercontinental flights on the net takes frickin’ ages. I think I’m nearly there though. I’m booked in for six pints of inoculations on Tuesday, and by the end of next week I’m going to look like an overused pin cushion. But it’ll all be worth it in the end.

It’s unusual for me to post so much tech stuff in one go, but a few things this week have got the focus of my attention.

Firstly, I have upgraded to Yahoo! Mail Plus. Most people might have assumed that being a web-type, I probably have my email system sorted down to a tee, but that is far from the truth. I have had my Yahoo! address from the first time I ever went onto the internet back in 1998 or sometime around then, and ever since have been reticent to change it because of the level of confusion it causes. I really don’t like it when people change their contact details, that’s why my phone number is what it is and has been since 2001, and I’m planning on keeping that way.

For a long time I have wanted to break the shackles of free mail, but there are just some conveniences that a third party webmail system provide that you just don’t get any other way. For example, I know my mail is constantly backed up, always accessible and is all in one place. The problem with free mail, especially Yahoo! Mail, is that you get silly little adverts along the bottom and your address doesn’t sound that professional either.

Over the years I’ve tried to create secondary email accounts. My main domain/work account has switched over so many times it is hard to keep track of where it is pointing, but as Yahoo! mail doesn’t allow you to assign your domain email addresses to your account it was never a satisfactory solution. That is, until now.

As you may or may not know, Yahoo! like Hotmail, is running a beta version of it’s new mail program. It’s like having Outlook or Mail running in a browser window, with full drag-and-drop for messages and attachments-upload-while-you-type. It’s really fantastic and really quite stable. I have been tres impressed.

The problem up until now is that it still sticks those silly little adverts on the ends of my email, I’m still stuck with a Yahoo! email address (albeit two now, they let us have a second one last year) and no domain attachment facility, unlike the lauded GMail service (send and receive your domain mail from your standard GMail inbox). But sometime recently they snuck this last feature into the lineup on their Plus package. So I signed up (£11.99 pa).

Finally, the adverts are gone, including the ones in my inbox. I have a full screen of pure message. The capacity has gone up to 2GB from 1GB, but this is of little concern as I keep my inbox pruned down to just the essentials. I now can send and receive not only from my Yahoo! address, so there are no lost messages, and I can confidently hand out my work email knowing that I only have to check one inbox from now on. I am very pleased, and don’t mind paying that small amount for the privilege.

All I want now is IMAP, and according to recent discoveries by other Y! Mail users, and also Apple’s announcement this week, I wouldn’t be surprised if it an option given to subscribers later this year. But even if it doesn’t happen, I’m still going to be happier with my mail than ever. The new interface is really leading the field in my opinion, and although Google has the edge with integration of all it’s other applications, I’d rather keep my Yahoo! Mail any day.

Secondly, I love this . What a brilliant idea; it’s funny nobody has tried this before. I’ve seen some unusual bastardisations of Mac Minis in the past, but this looks like great fun.

Finally, and not very tech related, I was incredibly annoyed this morning to find a book (the book was tech related) that Amazon had allocated me £2.32 to send, actually cost me £7.70 to send. I was not impressed.

OK, so here’s me jumping on that big iPhone bandwaggon. You’re probably sick to the teeth of these types of blog post now if you collect RSS feeds, but at least it lets you know I am alive, well and very excited.

I followed most of the keynote yesterday on MacRumours and engadget , and was as pleased as anyone else to see the final unveiling of a brand new type of Apple product. In a way it’s funny that everyone is overlooking Apple TV as on any other launch that would be the talk of the town, but today, that’s not the case.

There are a number of blanks that still have to be filled in. Jeff Croft spotted that if it launches in June, it’s likely to be running Leopard (OS X 10.5) and I’d say that’s a fair guess. Also when this thing does finally turn up in the UK, what network is it going to run on. I had this discussion with Butts last night and we narrowed it down to likely be Orange or 02 (Three won’t get it, Vodafone are not business/high-end orientated and Virgin piggybacks anyway).

The multi touch technology stuff is an incredible advancement in portable device interaction, and you can guarantee at some point in the next 5 years this will end up on other small electricals like laptops (if Apple does what it does best and surprises us, we may see it sooner, but not this year). The one downside is tactility, which the iPods have, but this seems to totally skip, and is an accessibility issue whichever way you look at it.

It is sort of the holy grail of user interaction – gesture driven controls with real and physical feedback. Admittedly sound goes some way to solving this, but with totally visual buttons the only solution I can think of is a hover system where a visually impaired user can run their finger over the display face and hear the button they are hovering over before they press anything. It’s not quite as good as touch feedback, but who cares when the rest of the product is so goddamn perfect.

I think most people who had anticipated the product had assumed that wide-screen would mean a full length display, but in reality this is much better. Placing your hands over the screen to hold it would have been clumsy, so the bars at the top and bottom are nicely thought out, albeit at the expense of a slightly smaller screen.

What will be most interesting will be the new generation of iPods that follow. Has Apple defined it’s new style? I would have thought the iPod may well follow suit to use the touchscreen too. Thankfully battery life should be better on any units without phone capability, 5 hours talktime is pitiful (standard is between 7 and 9 on a standard smartphone I am reliably informed), but 16 hours of music playback is pretty good as far as iPods go.

And will I be buying one? Well probably, depending on my phone contract arrangements, although it probably won’t be until this time next year that I will even be able to consider it. Someone remarked yesterday that Apple were entering a new market they know nothing about, but I think that is where they have previously thrived; all you have to to do is think iPod. Oh, and a rare public appearance by Jonathan Ive ; I think Steve might have insisted that he make some kind of contribution to the keynote, as this one could be a big one.

Not that I often blog twice in a day, but it’s worth mentioning that despite everything else being dwarfed by what Apple gets up to, Swan has dropped out of his PCGE, Dan flies to America on Sunday and Butts was officially appointed as product manager.

I spoke to Flash last night and he seems to be enjoying his time teaching Design & Tech (the one teaching job I’d consider doing), while on the other hand Swan is considering going to the bookies. Normally this would be considered a typical money-squandering Swan-like-action, but this time he is looking for work, thinking of doing the odds. I think he’d fit in perfectly.

Work is thick and fast, and I’m enjoying the ride.