Sam Davyson

Thanks to the great response from everybody. Should have up to five people travelling quite a way to be involved. I look forward to it. See you at the station.

A fix! To make full use of your Task Bar in Windows you need to have the Task Bar unlocked and get rid of any empty toolbars you might have floating around.  You do this by:

1.  Right Click on the Task Bar.
2. Untick Lock the Taskbar.
3. Remove Toolbars you don’t want.

Bingo! You should be able to use the whole thing!

Due to a certain unfortunate event I find myself using Windows all of a sudden. Now I used to use it all the time so I am familiar with the interface and everything but … since getting used to using a Dock instead of a Task Bar I can’t understand why on Windows the Task Bar is so afraid to become full up. Why does it always have so much empty space?

To illustrate what I mean look at this image:

Then I open another application and:

(Click images for larger versions)

Each individual programs place on the Task Bar shrinks and the overall length of the Task Bar in use remains the same. Why?! What is the rest for? Is this just Windows being silly… or am I at fault here?

Appropriately considering my financial situation I am looking for ways to make money fast. My mission is this:

• To have £36 available in my bank account my the 27th of this month in order to pay my phone bill.

Today is the 21st so there should be enough time for money to transfer as long as I can make the money quick enough. Methods of making cash that I have used before including adverts and text links on pages are simply too slow for this project. I need something much quicker.

I have subscribed to a lot of survey websites and I am answering the emails that they send me. Many of these give the promise of cash. But I think that it may take too long for it to actually be given to me. I’ve tried Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The pay is awful for completing the tasks though and since I am not a US resident it seems to be tricky to get the money out of the site.

Late nights on ITV normally turn into ITV Play. This is a adfree show or collection of shows (that was infact once it’s own channel) which involve live puzzles which callers can phone in and solve to win cash prizes. The puzzles are always very straight forward and normally have many solutions. Callers who phone in which correct answers are told that their answers are “not hot”. And the prize money remains with the presenter.

For instance on the program called “Glitterball” they have one game in which you have to complete the start of a word or phrase. The start given was the letters “FULL”. The answer could have been anything. When I watched FULLSTOP sprang to mind. It was guessed by a caller soon after I thought of it… but it wasn’t hot. Other incorrect answers for the game included FULL STEAM AHEAD, FULL MOON, FULLY, FULL UP etc. Someone even guessed FULL METAL JACKET. But it was unfortunately also incorrect. Seven answers had apparently been singled out by the production team in advance to be “hot”. With the number of possible answers literally infinite, the number of calls to the show in a minute being just under a thousand and the average number of calls taken to air per 5 minute period being roughly one the chances of you being a “lucky winner” are not very high. In the time I watched only one of them was guessed (FULL BODIED).

Here is one of the puzzles from tonights show. Just see how many answers there are to this one. You have to make a four letter word by taking one letter from each line of the letters below. E.g. DIRT is one correct answer.

C B D S

O A I E

N L R ?

E D L T

(I forget the fourth letter on the third row.)

Many many solutions. Definitely more than 30. In this game only 5 were “hot” and would win prizes. The chance of you winning anything is next to nothing… and with the calls costing multiple pounds to make and the presenters ramblings to pad between callers being severely irritating ITV Play is worth a miss.

Great to play but if you break your DVD player remote it becomes possibly the most expensive way to count to thirty ever invented.

You can save yourself 6p if you buy 3. Great.

Last night my house was broken into and 4 laptops were stolen. This included my Apple Macbook. Insurance should hopefully cover everything… but in the meantime it is a real bugger.

What we know so far:

• It is to be released before the end of 2007.
• It will be carried on the O2 network.
• It will also be coming out in the rest of Europe at roughly the same time (probably exactly the same time).

What we anticipate:

• The iPhone will have had a major revision before or to coincide with the new release possibly including the release of an iPhone Nano.

What we hope:

• To see some price drops and a decent conversion of dollars to £pounds (£1 = nearly $2 now) so that we can afford to get one of the darn things!