"Women may be able to blame impulse buys and extravagant shopping on their time of the month, research suggests." 

So now you know when to hide your credit cards! 

More From: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7971578.stm

Something that was recently brought to my attention by a collegue is Balsamiq Mockups which is a nice development tool which allows you to make quick mock ups of your projects before you actually start coding them. So for example you can knock up a rough interface and show how the application or website will work. People can then modify your mock ups and add comments and stuff. 

Havnt really used it much yet but i think it will be fairly useful as we improve our shopping cart software at work. 

More Info: http://www.balsamiq.com/ 

A friend recently introduced me to Spotify which is a piece of software you download and install and then you can search for songs, artist, albums, whatever... and listen to them.

You basically add all your favourite songs to your own playlist and then you can listen to them for free. The only catch is that every 30 mins or so you hear a 30 second advert, but you can pay £9.99 per month for a advert free service.

The best bit however is that you can share your playlists with friends and collegues, so for example at my office in manchester we have a shared playlist that everyone in the office can contribute to and then this playlist is played. It means that everyone in the office can control the music and its not just one persons decision as to what music we have on.

It would be great for parties, because during and even before the event people could add their own music to the playlist so everyone gets to hear there own favourite track.

For more info: http://www.spotify.com 

Software is coming to an end. "OnLive, which launched at the Game Developer Conference, promises to deliver on demand video games via the cloud to the PC, Mac or TV." The system basically will run the games on servers hosted on the internet and then just stream the video to your home computer, so it means your home computer can be very very low spec and all you need is a fast internet connection.

I have said for ages now that software as we know it will be coming to an end in the next few years, all the main applications are moving to hosted version such as my own ecommerce software system ekmPowershop which is fully hosted, there isnt any software to install. Look at Google Apps, they are all fully hosted version of Microsoft Office applications such as spreadsheets, word processors etc...

Full Story from BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7962180.stm

I decided it was time to redesign my website as it was pretty poor before. I was initally going to re-code the whole site in ASP.net as im presently trying to learn as much ASP.net with C# as possible as we have switched to using it at work.

But from looking around on the internet I found this system http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/ which is pretty impressive so far, so thought id just use this for the time being. So lets see how it goes!