Basically, any emails sent to me from now on will be delayed two weeks in getting a response, there is an autoresponder on my account; so there should be little confusion.

I leave home at 8 in the morning, and I think I’ll be in Morocco by about 8pm. We’re flying from Heathrow, with whom I can’t remember.

I guess all that remains to be said is bye, I’ll make up for the lack of posts when I get home, I promise.

Anyhow, any feedback on it would be appreciated

The book itself was excellent, Dan Abnett really is as good as people say he is (not that I ever thought he wasn’t) - the book manages to be funny, dark and very clever, while making all three seem effortless. He manages to make a faceless army of hundreds of thousands seem real, giving an insight into their lives and feelings.

We are guided through the novel by Captain Loken, the captain of an Astartes company. Astartes are demi-god like characters in war armour, and Abnett does an amazing job of portraying them in the book, even for people like me who don’t know a single thing about them (I’m not really a massive warhammer follower, I just bought the book because it was there).

I think this is an amazing book, and one that others even vaguely interested in Warhammer should probably read, as it details the start of an event that shaped the Warhammer we know now.

Info

Pages: 416
Publisher: Black Library
ISBN-10: 184416294X
ISBN-13: 978-1844162949
Link to Buy

Braving pirates, storms and floating logs, the team made it all the way around the world on recycled cooking fat, arriving back at a Spanish port yesterday. I guess this isn’t really sailing, as I categorized it, but it’s close.

It took the EarthRace team 11 minutes short of 61 days to get around, breaking the previous record set by Cable and Wireless Adventurer a decade ago. The team comprises of two Britons, a New Zealander and a Swede, with Pete Bethune, the New Zealander, as the skipper. It is his second attempt.

The EarthRace left on the 21st of April, and immediately ran into troubled waters, the autopilot broke, meaning the boat had to be steered 24 hours a day, and fresh food supplies were left behind.

The EarthRace boat has a clever design, which means that instead of bouncing over waves and slowing down, it cuts through them, maintaining speed, but making it a very rocky ride, and much more difficult to control. There’s a picture I found on the Guardian website below.

I guess all thats left to be said is a huge well done to the crew, who battled massive problems, and still made it.

I’d been thinking of setting up some scheduled posts while I’m away, I’ve got some pretty good ideas for that and they could well be interesting. I’m adding a special bit of code to my blog so it shows people that I’m away, although I’ve not decided how to do it so it doesn’t change my page summaries on search engines. I’ll probably put it in the sidebar, thinking about it.

That’s an idea for a new plugin, something which automatically adds a bit of code to your template while you’re away, so that people know. I’ll have to look into that

But yeah, I’m really looking forwards to this, and I hope nobody ruins it for me to come back to by messing with my sites

However, what I’ve not seen many of are niche targeted job sites, for instance targeting content creation, article writing or such, and I think they would be popular. If you look on popular forums like Digitalpoint and webhostingtalk, you see a hundred or so posts a day which are after certain services, like content creation - they get huge response. Most people who end up posting on big wide niche websites are unable to find anything anywhere else, it seems to be sort of a last-call.

A niche freelancer site could be to those people what a full on freelancer site is to people with massive projects, and it could be profitable, I think. I don’t think that it should charge for membership, but if you put advertisements on it, probably CPM, then while posters are browsing looking for work, you’re earning a bit of cash - everyone wins

I don’t know how feasible the idea would be, and I’m experimenting with scripting to do stuff like this, but if it works out, I may launch my own.

There is also better support for SSL for the admin area, and bulk plugin management, as well as a bunch of other stuff (you have to read the post to see it all).

It doesn’t look any different to 2.5 (no surprises there) but there are some nifty little new functions, like the theme selector - when you click a theme it previews, like on wp.com, which is definitely cool.

I’m looking forward to the final 2.6.