Happy new year…

January 05, 2010
New Year's Eve 2007 firework
Image by Kol Tregaskes via Flickr

I know it is well into the new year, however this is my first blog post of the year. Last year was a great year for this blog. I really only started to put effort into my blog around March 2009 and from sticking at blogging on a fairly regular basis I have started to gain a fairly good visitor count.

Up to march 2009 my blog received Just 535 visits, in 2 months. Now that is not bad I suppose, especially since I hadn’t really attempted anything with my blog in those first two months. From march on though the numbers just kept on going up, couldn’t believe it! I decided that if I was to keep my blog I had to take an interest in it, and so for the whole month of March I set myself the task to blogging every day of the month, and it paid off!

For the whole of last year, January 2009 – December 2009, my blog received 43,638 visitors! That is incredible in my opinion 😀 .

My aim for 2010 is to keep up with my blog posting. I now know that I will not be able to make a daily blog post anymore. It is just too time consuming. With me having work and college it is just too much, also with having 2 new websites coming out this year i will need time to dedicate to them!

I start back at college now for my final semester of my course on the 18th of January, and if all goes well with my exams, which the results come out on the 21st, I hope to really put effort into this final hurdle of the degree!

2010 is looking like a good year already! My wallet is feeling the pinch from going out over Christmas, and each day has been great so far! I have a website lined up to start at the end of this month so all is good at the moment!

The Christmas exams have begun!

December 15, 2009
Students taking a test at the University of Vi...
Image via Wikipedia

Today I sat my first Christmas Exam which was Database Management Systems. I feel that it went really good. I have almost already passed today’s exam as 50% of the marks can be achieved throughout the Semester. It feels great now knowing that I have one exam done and dusted and now I just have to focus on my remaining three.

My next exam is not until Wednesday, that exam is in Web Applications Development, that subject is all about websites, mainly Asp.net websites. That exam should be interesting, the lecturer I have for this subject is new to it! She has never taught it before so we have no previous exam papers to look over 🙁 .

Then my final exam of this week ,Broadband Technologies, will be on Friday, the exam on Friday is my most difficult one in my opinion. I need to work really hard at this subject in order to pass it and hopefully I can achieve this.

I remember when I had to repeat an exam before, it is not a nice thing, and the exam I had to repeat was one I failed on my summer exams so I only had to wait a few weeks before I got the opportunity to repeat it so at least it was fresh in my head!

However if a Christmas exam is failed you have to wait until the end of the next semester for the repeat exams during the summer! Since in the second semester I will be doing different subjects than in first semester,by the time the repeat exam from christmas comes it will be dificult to revise for a subject from such a long time ago, failing any Christmas exams will not be an option. It is just too stressful having to repeat an exam!

So that will be three of my four exams out of the way, for the fourth exam ,Training and Support Services, I have to wait until the following week 🙁 I would rather get them all out of the way in one week, but at least it gives me an opportunity to prepare for the exams.

I know a lot of other colleges here in Ireland give there exams out after Christmas, I feel that having the exams over before Christmas makes the Christmas period more enjoyable and relaxing 😀 .

Sony MDR-XD200 Stereo Headphones

November 17, 2009

I have always wanted to have a big set of headphones. The sound that you get from the bigger headphones is far better than earphones. I find that when it comes to a certain time at night, playing my music too loud will disturb others so I used to turn off my speakers and not listen to my music after a certain time.

Sony MDR-XD200 Stereo Headphones

No point just turning down the music! Music is meant to be played loud in my opinion, the louder the better 😀 . So I went looking for a cheap enough pair of headphones on Amazon, after a while of looking I came across these, Sony MDR-XD200 Stereo Headphones – Silver, they looked good and had been given some good reviews, and had an overall rating of 4 out of 5 stars, so they had to be good enough, so I bought them 😀 .

Here is someone else’s thoughts on the Sony headphones:

I recently purchased these headphones to listen to Mp3’s via my PC.
So far I have to say I’m impressed. I wanted a big pair as we have two PC’s in the same room and I wanted to listen to my music rather than gameplay behind me. They are not too heavy and I sit here for hours at a time and can with these on quite comfortably.

I have to agree too, the headphones are comfortable, and for the price at €16.49, I thought I might as well get them! Now don’t expect the sound quality to be the same as a set of headphones that cost €100 or €200, obviously the more you spend then the better the quality will be.

Sony MDR-XD200 Stereo Headphones

However when I got these in the post they were much better than I thought they were going to be, I personally think that the sound is great, and they are definitely good enough for what I want 😀 .

Sony MDR-XD200 Stereo HeadphonesSony MDR-XD200 Stereo Headphones

Connect to a internal hard-drive via USB

November 16, 2009

Back in August of this year I bought a kit for connecting hard-drives to a computer via a USB cable. This is really useful especially if you are regularly fixing computers and need to get access to a hard-drive.

I have been using this a lot since I bought it. If you cannot access a hard-drive for reasons such as it is taking far too long to load the operating system or if the windows operating system has crashed and is no longer accessible then these cables will definitely be very useful.

In order to access these hard drives all you have to do is remove them from the laptop or pc and then add in the connector that is in the kit and then use the usb  and power cord to get into the hard drive, it’s that simple!

A lot of times people have issues where Windows has crashed and they think all of their data is gone! I have found that once the hard drive is taken out and connected to your computer via USB you can still browse through the files and save all the files that they think they lost 😀 .

When I bought this back in August it cost me €17.98, which is really cheap and I think is definitely worth the investment. Also these cables can be sued for a lot more than just hard drives, if you have an old internal disk drive you can use these cables to power up them too! This is really useful for Netbooks which have no disk drive.

For anyone looking to buy a set of these cables they are: USB to IDE & SATA Adaptor Cable 2.5 3.5 Inch Hard Drive

S-ATA&IDE USB - Box

So what’s in the box?

  • USB 2.0 to SATA/IDE Adapter
  • 2.0 Amp AC Power Adapter
  • UK Mains Cable
  • User Manual

S-ATA&IDE USB - Contents

And here are the features of the product, and it fits basically all hard drives! :

  • Compatible with any 2.5″, 3.5″, 5.25″ IDE or SATA drive!
  • Dual Output Switch with LED Power ON Indicators
  • Hot swappable and truly Plug and Play
  • No driver needed
  • Supports IDE & Enhanced IDE 3.5″ Hard Disk
  • Supports ATA/ATAPI-6 Specification 1.0
  • Supports SATA I and SATA II

These cables are also compatible with both PC and Mac! I bought mine with the UK Mains adaptor, however these are available with other mains adaptors such as US mains. If the images are too smallm just click on them to see a larger version! 😀

S-ATA&IDE USB S-ATA&IDE USB - Power Cord S-ATA&IDE USB - 2.0 S-ATA&IDE USB - serial ata connector S-ATA&IDE USB - Power Break with hard drive power connectors