A run down of the top ten blogs I keep an eye out for and read on the net regularly in alphabetical order;

Rory Blyth
Microsoft Channel 9 employee, interesting reading his often bizarre and crazy posts! Even if they’re sometimes on the long side, often most of the time worth the read!

Evan Davis
A business look and viewpoint to current affairs from the BBC’s Economics Editor.

Nikki Denis
Friend from the States! Good to keep up on what’s happening on the other side of the pond!

Ian Forrester
Another Beeb Employee, writing some good blogs on all things technology.

Thomas Hawk
Professional photographer from San Francisco, good general technology orientated and photography related blogs, and even better actual photography!

Joseph Mallozzi
Exectutive Producer of Stargate SG:1 & Atlantis, getting all the latest info and spoilers from the two shows!

Ben Metcalfe
Ex BBC Employee, now living in the states, writing interesting technology and media related blogs!

Myles Noton
My fellow friends blog, who I read to keep an eye on what stupid or evil plan he’s plotting next… Oh, and to snoop on what he’s writing about so I can compete against him to produce a better blog. Hah.

Kristin Veitch
Columnist for E! Online, dishing the dirt on all the latest news and insider information about all your favourite American TV Shows!

Long Zheng
A student in Australia, blogging all things technology and Microsoft!

I look back on the photographs now and I see faces filled with hopes and dreams, laughter and love and I’m reminded of something that was once said to me. A photograph of you smiling at the camera is a postcard sent from you in the present to you in the future and it says “you were having a good time”.Sean Ellis, June 2002

That’s the closing paragraph to the introduction of the book; 365 - A Year In Fashion, a book which is a collection of photographs by Fashion Photographer Sean Ellis taken everyday for an entire year.

It’s an interesting book, with every page showing photos day by day; everyday during 1999. Photo’s range from his professional work, to personal ’snaps’ depending on what he did on that given day. The book brings a sense of acomplishment, being able to see what he achieved in one year, and is a good book to look at as a whole to see how his life, and styles changed over that period.

At the beginning Sean says how making the book made him become compelled to try new things, travel to new places and meet new people, in his search to try to get interesting moments for each day, an intriguing technique to make you go out and do something with your life, he had a goal to complete, and he made the most of it.

Anyway, if you ever have the time, I suggest rent the book from your local library to have a look, it may not be one of those books you keep to look at again and again, but it’s good to see it atleast once.

Hampton Court Palace, Taken March 13th 2007

After entering an on going BBC Photography competition, this photo has been selected to be shown on BBC Online and on BBCi Interactive TV as part of the BBC Britain in Pictures series this summer. Here’s a photo of it on BBCi below, thanks to Myles for taking the photo below for me.

Hopefully this will be the start of something good! To see the photo for yourself, you can have a look at the BBC Website, or press Red on your TV from a BBC Channel, and navigate your way to Britain in Pictures.

While I sit here typing away with James Bond; Tomorrow Never Dies playing in the background on our seven year old standard definition (SD) television, people around the world are snapping up the latest in technology - High Definition (HD) televisions. With the chance to watch much better quality TV, and with prices becoming lower and lower you can’t blame people for moving over.

But already, the next generation of TV’s have started being developed, in the form of Ultra High Definition (UHD). Back in November 2005, the Japanese public service broadcaster, Nippon Hoso Kyokai (NHK), first demonstrated the technology, but with the recent news development has begun, it only shows that we’re one step closer to it becoming a reality in our homes.

Now, how does UHD compare to HD you may ask? Well, its alot. An awful lot. If UHD was a Ferrari, HD would be an everyday Ford, and SD would be, well, a Skoda. An old Skoda at that, from 1981. Anyways, UHD is capable of a very impressive 7680 x 4320 resolution compared to 1080p HD (thats the decent HD, not the cheap ass HD) which broadcasts at 1920 x 1080. Yes, I know that’s alot of numbers which probably mean less to you than anything. But, in a nut shell, you would need 16 HD TV’s, placed into a 4 x 4 grid to replicate what UHD TV can produce.

To make it easier to understand and actually visualise, the image on the right is an accurate representation of the sheer magnitude of UHD TV. The blue area represents UHD TV, the yellow area represents 1080p HD TV, and the white area is 720p HD TV. The picture quality is undoubtly un imaginable until we actually see it for real, but my question is, what size TV would you need to make UHD TV actually worth it?

But with this increased resolution brings an increased file size for video and television broadcast. One minute of uncompressed video footage is 194GB, which would mean a two hour movie would need approximately 25TB of storage, (thats 25,000GB). The transfer rate currently is 24 Gigabits a second, something which is unbelivable in todays current broadcast systems. This is one of the biggest hurdles at the moment facing this new technology. The video data would have to be encoded to be able to be broadcast to make it feasable, but seeing as how at the moment each encoding unit (you technically need 2, one at the broadcast end (ie. TV Studio) and one in the TV itself) being as tall as a person, they would need to be the size of a few chips able to fit into the back of a TV to make this technology work.

Either way, there’s no doubt UHD TV is years and years off yet, so there’s no need to throw away those sparkly new Blu-ray and HD DVD’s just yet, but it does go to show that one day we will have to again, and with his new technology already in development, it’s only a matter of time.

It’s the only thing we’ve heard for years, and it’s the only thing we will hear for years, but the London 2012 Olympic games are on their way… and with that, the Olympic Committee decided their old logo needed a bit of a face lift as you can see on the right. Yes. That is the new logo.

Now, you may be thinking - what on earth is that to do with? Well, welcome to the club, from what I can gather not too many people are fond of this new ‘design’ either. From something that looks like the guy in charge of the new logo left it to the last minute, then sneezed all over his drawing and decided to just go with it, it doesn’t quiet yell to me “Olympics” or “Future” as it’s mean’t to, but rather a cheesy looking cover from a 1970’s rock band’s album, which no doubtly flopped.

The design company in charge of this logo was Wolff Olins, who among other things have brought us the current Sony Ericsson brand design, which is much, much better that this new creation, I really don’t know quite what they were thinking, let alone spending £400,000 on it.

Now, after looking at it for a few seconds, you work out that the big pink blobs are actually numbers, saying 2012… with a big square bit plonked in the middle for some reason… Then, someone must have remembered they actually forgot to include ‘London’ or the Olympic logo anywhere, so after some rash decision making, decided on randomly placing ‘London’ at the bottom of the 2, and the the Olympic logo in the middle of the 0.

This new pink catastrophe of a logo is meant to be modern, and represent the future. Well if the future of design is going to be that then god help us. The old design prior to now, shown on the left, in my opinion is much better, and if I had decide which one to use, I wouldn’t have to think twice - it would be the old one hands down, with its much more modern look and feel.

No doubt we’ll have to live with this logo cluttering advertisements, billboards and television for the next five years, even with the lack of support it has received, but it really is poor, a pre-school kid could design something better if they were left alone with a tub of paint and their hands. If this is anything to go by, I really am not looking forward to how we will make a mess of the actual games themselves!

I can’t believe that two years ago I was sitting in examination rooms my 6th Form Westlands, completeing my A-levels. Now, two years on I’ve completed my second year of university, and boy what a year! From going to America and getting adjusted to life over there, to then coming back to Kingston for the second semester to get re-adjusted back; or atleast try to get re-adjusted.

Four months, three final exams and enough coursework to feed a starving goat later, and I’m done for this year. All packed up and after leaving Kingston earlier today and after a quick stop off at Stonehenge for a photo spree I was back in Devonshire for two months over the summer, hopefully with a long well earned break if I can call it that. The summer will be me bracing myself for a year working in industry during an internship starting in a couple months, which will then be followed with my final year before going into the real world for good!

Hopefully there will be plenty of time for other stuff too though over the next couple of months; such as photo sprees and even perhaps our very own British photowalk! There’s also another Open Day and then Broadcast Live later this month which I may be attending which will be good, as well as some other events if any happen to come my way!