Darren Straight's Blog

ICT Enthusiast and photographer.

By - Darren Straight

Made in Express Contest 2006

I was just reading the latest MSDN Flash Newsletter and thought that some of you might be interested in signing up to the Made in Express Contest. Where to start? Or, more correctly, how to start? That’s the challenge writing this piece. It’s a nice, sunny (by Seattle standards) day out – and my mind doesn’t want to focus on work. OK,

By - Darren Straight

The name darren in chinese

I was looking in my website stats this morning and came across the following search term key phrase used to find my site: “the name darren in chinese” Now that’s interesting I thought to myself, somebody has actually found my site by entering the search term “the name darren in chinese” into a search engine, I wonder if I could

By - Darren Straight

10 Minutes With Microsoft’s Desmond Nair

In an interview titled: “10 Minutes With Microsoft’s Desmond Nair”, blogged by Angelo Embuldeniya, Firefox is said to be loosing it’s community, Vista is coming to home users in January 2006 and MS is not going Open Source! Angelo: Why did MS introduce tabbed browsing in Internet Explorer 7 (IE7)? Had Firefox anything to do with it? Desmond: We introduced

By - Darren Straight

Search Keyphrases March 2006 (Top 10)

216 different keyphrases where used to find my site in March 2006, here are the top 10 with the amount of time they were used and their percentage. vtunnel | 40 | 9 % flashchat | 20 | 4.5 % society kindly interest nature | 17 | 3.8 % darren straight | 15 | 3.4 % blg | 10 | 2.2 % hotmail

By - Darren Straight

Windows Vista 5308 Public Download?

How long before this get’s taken down?  It would appear that Windows Vista 5308 is available for members of the public to download from Microsoft’s servers. This is almost certainly a mistake on Microsoft’s part, but nevertheless – the build is publicly downloadable and appears to be identical to the version available to testers via MS Connect. Naturally, the build

By - Darren Straight

ExtremeMaps.net back up and running with my brother as the new admin!

Following my recent post titled “ExtremeMaps.net is now back in my possession!” I have now given full control of the Domain name Extrememaps.net as I said I would to my brother Lewis, I have also supplied him with a year’s worth of hosting with 5000.00 MB of Disk Space and 250000.00 MB of Bandwidth so he will have some space

By - Darren Straight

Mind control over muscle power

Thinking about the way your muscles work could physically boost your strength, research suggests. A Hull University team asked 30 subjects to do biceps curls and found their muscles worked more when they focused on what the muscles were doing. But lower rates of muscle activity were recorded when they simply visualised themselves lifting the weight. The study is being

By - Darren Straight

How dodgy are you?

Is life hunky-dory?.. Sleeping peacefully at night? Well everything may not be as it seems. While there are plenty of you who deliberately interpret the law in your own special way, most of you may think you’re a model citizen. But little do you know… Fill in the Crime Sheet and find out exactly what you’ve been getting away with.

By - Darren Straight

A Photo of some of my old pc stuff that lays in my cupboard!

This afternoon I was looking on my MS Discussion forums and came across the following post by mondine: I guess one of these days, I’m going to have to upgrade from Win98. I’ll probably get XP, about the time they’re ready to replace Vista. And well just before reading that post I had just been sorting out some of my old PC stuff

By - Darren Straight

WordPress Widgets Plugin (WPW)

The WordPress Widgets Plugin (WPW) is now available for download well that is once WordPress site is back up, just before I was going to post this I refreshed the WordPress.org page I had open and it noticed it now said “WordPress.org is taking a lunch break.” it’s been like that for quite a while now but yeah I’ve finally