George Pearce - iamPearce

I went to see the Alice in Wonderland remake today, unfortunately not in 3d but it was still pretty amazing. Also unfortunately I had to leave early (curse public transport) but what I saw of the film was absolutely brilliant.

I don’t really remember the original animated series, it didn’t stick in my mind that much as a (younger?) child so I can’t really compare, but I absolutely loved the Hatter character – it was portrayed brilliantly- I think he must have been my favourite character in the film, it was just perfect. I wish he’d been in the film more though- he was maybe fourth character and a lot of the advertising media involved him.

Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum (characters of Matt Lucas) were amazing.

I’m no film critic, but I really enjoyed what I saw of the film (and I had great company), which made it a pretty awesome experience.

I’m looking forward to going back and seeing it in 3D – that should be even better. And 3D glasses!

Having now received all of my offers from Universities, I’ve made my final choices and submitted them to UCAS.

Assuming I achieve the grades, I will be studying at Birmingham University on the F300 Physics Bsc course.

If I don’t, I’ll be studying at Cardiff, on the same course. (Assuming I get some basic grades).

As I posted before, I looked around both Uni’s and they were both amazing – both places I’d be more than happy to spend my three years on that degree, so  whatever happens I think I’m well set. Even better, I don’t need to deal with UCAS at *all* (I think) until August, when my results come out. .

I went and visited the Physics department at Birmingham University yesterday – I was at Cardiff last week and those two make up my firm choice and fallback, ready for when I ship off to university in September.

I really enjoyed my time at Birmingham, I like the facilities, the department, and I got along well with the staff that I spoke too.

As Birmingham is also the higher ranked university; and the one with the higher grade requirements, it is pretty likely now that it’s going to be my first choice (firm) with Cardiff being my fallback.

That means that in as little as 8 months; I could be studying in Birmingham – a prospect I’m quite looking forward to.

The Birmingham Physics department I would definitely recommend considering, when thinking about a UK Physics degree (as would I the Cardiff department), their research grade is very high, and looking around their labs and such; there is a huge amount of equipment available for research projects (and some of the things first years were doing looked fascinating).

I’m now on the way back from Cardiff, as I posted earlier I spent today there on a physics applicant day.

Its been a brilliant day, and I’m very pleasantly surprised that Cardiff has made me consider my previous decision that it would be my fallback uni, behind Birmingham. Granted, I have only so far been to Cardiff uni open day and the applicant day in next week, so I’ll compare the two directly, but I really enjoyed my time at Cardiff today.

The department looked great, the atmosphere was brilliant and I really liked that the department isn’t vast like Birmingham’s is, I like how personal everything seemed.
The facilities were also very good, and everything just seemed really nice, enough for me to sway from being definite about Birmingham for a while .

I also met an absolutely awe inspiring guy while I was there, on the same applicant day as me, called Glyn. I’m hoping to find his blog, and I believe I have his Facebook details but he was absolutely brilliant – him and catching back up with an old friend made the day for me.

Back on track though, I have Birmingham open day next Tuesday, and after that, now that my offers are all through, I can start thinking about my actual choices.

Interesting food for thought is that if I firm with Cardiff and achieve AAA grades (two A’s and my welsh bac) then I’ll automatically be eligible for a sizable grant, which I don’t think applies at Birmigham. I’ll find this out on Tuesday, though.

Well, I’m now about an hour from my train change for home, so I’m going to have a read.

I am off to Cardiff today. In fact, I’m on my way there now, on the ten to six train. Very early. I’m far more awake than I expected to be.

I’m on my way to look at Cardiff university, I have been invited for an applicant day today. I’m planning on taking some photos with my phone, so I’ll add those to this later. I’m looking forward to getting there (and getting a coffee) and from what I have heard about the university it sounds great, so today should be an experience. Also catching up with an old friend, who I haven’t seen in quite a while .

Ciao for now, back to my music and book .

It looks as though GMail is to become Google’s next shot at Facebook, according to an post I read on mashable. Its interestingly timed with Facebook releasing that they are going to integrate email into their very popular social networking platform.

Now I think this will create an interesting battle; because Google are (one of) the leading webmail providers and Facebook (the) leading Social Networking site. They are now about to cross into eachothers territory, using their own existing mammoth userbases as a boost.

It’ll be interesting to see who comes out on top of this one; as Google FriendFeed and the other various ones didn’t work out so great.

One of the things I hate most about Facebook is the mail section, which is old fashioned, very backwards and difficult to manage any volume of mail with.

I read today; via twitter, that Facebook are planning a new mail system entirely (dubbed Titan), which would provide it’s users with fully functional email addresses available from within Facebook.

The interesting thing is that apparently their planning on allowing POP3 and SMTP access to the mail, which means users could access their mail without signing into Facebook. As a full mail-service, that puts it into direct competition with Gmail, and as Facebook will roll it out to all their millions of users; Facebook already have a massive number of users. (although; how many will actually use the service I don’t know)

I can see it working really well; because users, especially younger ones, will then see Facebook as a complete solution for email and social networking, and except for msn messenger, Facebook email will most likely do everything that Hotmail does (plus threading), accessible from somewhere everyone goes already – it could be a winner.

It’d be nice to see how well Facebook implement a mail client – I’m looking forward to seeing.

A few months back, I swapped one of my domains, fused.org.uk, with Donald Kelly. I regretted it very quickly, Fused is a great domain and of course it had a lot of links which never made it to this blog, as he used it for his own.

Well today, I got it back. And now I can continue with my plan for it’s development; so keep your eyes open in the next 12 months for something awesome.

I’m going to try creating things to target UK traffic; because in past little experiments it’s worked out well – it’s easier to capture UK traffic because there is less competition and the traffic is still of a high volume and quality, and speaks English.

I’m also trying something else totally new – taking my time developing things. I have a few other things in development to launch before I head off to university, things for me to play with and work on while I’m there, I hope.

I won’t make the plan for fused.org.uk public, but with any luck it’ll be the first project (bar this one) that makes it out of “alpha” into a fully functional website.

I installed the beta of office 2010 a week or so ago, I only installed outlook because I use 07 for everything else but today I think I’m giving up on it.

Outlook 2010 is great, its a lovely piece of software and by all means it has a lot of cool features, but its connectivity with my blackberry sucks, which rendered half of it completely useless to me.

And I can’t seem to find a way to send feedback without the send a smile thing, which to me is essentially ‘let’s take a snapshot of your computer, processes, and anything else we like to peruse’ so I’m not a fan of that.

So, when I get home I think I will probably uninstall 2010, stick with my 2007 which doesn’t have outlook.

I do like the interface though. It looks very pretty and everything I need is fairly easy to access, although the send receive button could maybe be somewhere on the home tab in the ribbon thing – its more nitpicking than anything.

But as it is it annoys me, I am thinking of leaving it in favour of online email (apps by Google) and the email on my blackberry, the combination of the two will do me nicely .

[written from my blackberry, on opera mini, which is brilliant]

So did Google Wave just fail?

I mean, it was supposed to be redefining email and all that fun buggery, but to be honest, I’ve not yet see anyone offer Google Wave as a means of contacting them – maybe this was one of the projects that Google would rather forget?

There was a huge buzz as it launched, as I remember, but since then it seems to have gone down like a lead balloon, I joined, with one contact, failed to see the point and never used it again.

I’m curious as to whether there is.. *anyone* that uses wave routinely for a means of contact? Or did it just die?