I have an account with Connect Me Anywhere and they now let you buy a telephone number for 2 Euros per month - BUT THIS IS NO NORMAL NUMBER! It doesn't need to be attached to your house or wired up or anything and it connects whoever calls it to which ever phone you are using at the time.

Confused?! Here's my case:

I travel around a lot, moving countries for anything from a week to a couple of months at a time. My family (Gran especially!) are reluctant to call because of the high call costs and find it hard to keep up with my new phone number every time I change location. With these so called "Call Me" numbers I bought an 0207 one (London, UK) - then in my account I set which phones I want this forwarded to. So I saved my Canada apartment phone and whenever someone calls 0207ImNotTellingYouTheRest, the phone number puts them right through as if they were calling my apartment direct and the call costs just 0.7 pence per minute! So my contact number never has to change as I just point it to the new phone every time and the best part is, my Gran thinks she's calling me in London so calls me all the time!

This is pretty special but if you're not yet convinced, here's the magic:

I'm not in my apartment much, mostly out or at work. So in my Connect Me Anywhere account I have my mobile, my office phone and my apartment phone set to on. Then when someone calls my London number, all 3 of these phones ring at the same time! Which ever phone I answer connects then the others just drop and I still get charged the tiny call rate above.

I think it's hard to put across switching phones to ring (on) and don't ring (off) without making it sound difficult, but I promise you it's not! You just log in on the website and click each phone number to toggle it on or off. I've tried out how efficient this is and it seems there's no delay at all, the second you change a number to off, the number doesn't ring, and the second you add a new number to your list, the new phone is active and rings when someone calls.

Another bonus is you can switch all numbers off and any time someone calls it goes to voicemail. Any messages people leave are sent to your email address as an attachment and also available when you log in online!

This is absolutely amazing! If anyone has anything that even compares to this magic then post here - these guys are taking communications to the next level!! (and saving me a fortune at the same time!)

Get yourself one at Connect Me Anywhere's website

As you probably know, this week a judge has ruled that a Sikh girl (Sarika Singh) is allowed to wear a Kara (religious bangle) in school after being expelled for refusing to take it off. A link to the full story is here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/7529694.stm

So my intention is to gather some opinions as I personally am absolutely disgusted that such a ruling has been made. I welcome anyone who agrees with me or who has any facts that may make me realise I am in the wrong for thinking such a thing. My argument is as follows:

Firstly and most importantly, this judgement absolutely undermines the whole UK schooling system and the principles that underpin it. The school (Aberdare Girls' School in Wales) has a policy and code of conduct which must be signed by the pupil and parents upon entry to the school, clearly stating:

"Jewellery often poses a health and safety hazard to school
activities. Pupils are allowed to wear a wristwatch and one pair of
plain metal studs in the ear. No other jewellery is permitted."

and the pupil must also sign the school rules:

"I will ensure that my personal appearance is always of the highest possible
standard and is in line with the school’s expectations."

I notice the girl is 14, and therefore must have been at the school for at least one full academic year previous to this? And both the parents and pupil signed the code of conduct upon entry to the school? Meaning the parents and pupil agreed to abide by the rules and regulations of the school! So why are they now allowed to take the school to court over something they had willingly agreed to?! It's disgusting. It makes a mockery of the school and diminishes the policies that uphold it.

I hear her lawyer's defence included "...the Kara was as important to her as it was to England spin bowler Monty Panesar". I'm pretty sure Monty Panesar didn't sign a code of conduct to say I will not wear anything other than a watch.

Another HTML fix for you web designers!

Skype kindly highlights numbers on your web pages. It doesn't look too bad so I don't mind it - BUT depending on your formatting Skype can break your pages. If you're like me and want to stop people interfering with the websites you make, simply enter this code into the header of any affected pages:

<meta name="SKYPE_TOOLBAR" content="SKYPE_TOOLBAR_PARSER_COMPATIBLE" />

All good! A second fix for these sneaks who think they have the right to control people's websites. But unlike Google with their toolbar, at least Skype gave a solution on their website for this

Hey hey!

Here's one for all you web designers out there! Are you finding random yellow input boxes on your HTML forms? Here's why - the ever so helpful Google Toolbar parses your page and paint yellow all of the input boxes whose name contains the word email, or any input boxes after the text "email". So remember to say thanks to Google for the accusations you'll get from all of the clients you've ever made websites for...!

I wouldn't mind so much if the toolbar did it's job properly but it paints the wrong fields! For example if you have "Email Address:" then it's textbox, it paints the textbox yellow fine. But if you have the textbox then "Email Address" and another textbox for say, password, on the next line, the password box gets incorrectly coloured in! Well done Google.

I've worked out how to get around this so anyone who hasn't already worked it out, read on.

Firstly, change the name of any fields that contain the word "email" to another word, so "em_ad" works.

Secondly, to get rid of their assumption that any textbox that follows the word "email" or "email address" you can create a textbox with style="display:none;". the type here must be "textbox" and not "hidden" as Google ignores type="hidden" and jumps to the following textbox. It misses display:none so you can make it think that is a real field.

Voila! All fixed from what I've seen so future products can be all good. Hope this helps some people out there

Shout back if there are any other "helpful" plugins/toolbars that redesign your website for you. I know Skype does a similar thing with phone numbers but that actually looks like Skype and not just a bad web designer

Hey, back again! There's an issue that's been pressing on my mind for a long time so I thought I'd raise it to see what kind of response I get - maybe I'm crazy and out on my own, but I'm sure there are people out there who will agree.

The point is pretty simple. First off, let me establish the fact that if you are a parent and fail to feed your child you can get charged with abuse (neglect). This is perfect and exactly how it should be as it has a direct impact on the child's health and development, or "failure to thrive" as it's known in the social work world.

For years TV has been bombarded with programmes about "fat Britain", "half ton mom" and many, many others telling us how fat we are all getting. One particular programme whose name I can't recall, showed a mother who was morbidly obese in England who also fed her 10 year old child to the point that he was obese. She was looking to get a gastric bypass in order to control her excessive eating, which consisted of take aways, fry ups and other incredibly unhealthy meals. Her situation had led her to refuse to leave the house as she was ashamed of how obese she was - note that she was not a "half a ton mom" but something like 30 stone so still fairly able to get around. Although I am totally against obesity and unhealthy eating in general, I have no major issues with her if this is how she wants to live.

My issue is the effect this is having on the child. The child was going to school and getting bullied because of his weight, the mother didn't leave the house and so the child had to take himself to school and fend for himself with anything concerning the outdoors. Yet when the child came home from school the camera showed the mother saying "shall we just get a takeaway for tea? Just our fourth one this week, haha". What?! She proceeded to call her local takeaway, who knew her name, address and order just by the sound of her voice! Then upon arrival she sent her son to the door as she was too ashamed to answer the door herself.

I'm sure you have seen something similar to the above but if not no doubt you can relate to what I've said and answer the question - why aren't parents charged with abuse for not supplying a controlled, healthy diet to their children? In the above example the cost of the takeaway was almost double the amount the parent could have spent on something healthy from the supermarket to feed the 2 of them. I'm absolutely disgusted and think that in a country that is aiming to tackle obesity we are failing our younger generation by allowing parents to influence with their slovenly, lazy and incredibly unhealthy ways.

Let me leave you with some facts from http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/50541.php and I look forward to any comments or opinions people have on the above.

Adults in England in 2003 (adults means people 16 and over):
22% of men were obese
43% of men were overweight
35% of men were of ideal weight or underweight

23% of women were obese
33% of women were overweight
44% of women were of ideal weight or underweight

Estimates for obesity rates in 2010:
Men 28% - 33%
Women 28% - 31%

Girls (2-15 years old) 22%
Boys (2-15 years old) 19%

After looking around on Google the earliest record of this email was February 2005 so if I multiply the number of times I've received this email in the past few weeks by the number of weeks since February 2005 then by a random 200,000 (a VERY rough estimate of people who may be in the same situation as me this week) Marks and Spencers probably owe a fifth of this years £1 billion company profits to their customers in the form of vouchers.

Do the maths, people, why on earth would this be for real??

I found myself bored and dissatisified in a swamp of VoIP providers.

After breaking free from the restraints of VoIP through your computer headset, I began to find companies who offer VoIP rates through your mobile. Surprised and happy, I was soon conned through the registration door of companies with great marketing technique only to find the quality of service poor and the rates not so great as they make out - especially if you're more into making a call hassle free than a complicated game of "call me back before I put the phone down". Then the daunting, yet understandable, news of Orange and Vodafone blocking internet calls made the list of prospective providers even smaller!

My tired legs sat me down. Back in front of the computer I had once attached myself to and trawled through forums of bitching about various providers. Old names, old services. Nothing new to find. Until, that is, I spied a post for connectmeanywhere.com... Seeing more posts I moved to the site and began to read up and browsed their rates, scouring their content for traces of the same stuff previous providers had scammed me with!

Half convinced, but still sceptical from previous experience, I registered.

Well, never to this day have I regretted it! Save any phone(s) you like to your account and make cheap as chips international calls from them! It's as simple as that! I've got my mobile, home phone and office phone all saved to the one profile. And there's so much more than your standard VoIP providers

I imported my contacts from Gmail and Outlook (there's more than just these clients) and simply called up, typed in the contact name and it rang them! No need for internet, just calling up a local number to access my account. I've also got a load of contacts saved as "speed dials" - so to call my Dad in Australia I ring 02071003011 and it connects to him immediately for just over a penny per minute!

Other free services include calling an email address - it records what you say and sends it as an attachment for FREE! You can also make groups of emails and so send out a group "vmail"

Not to mention the RSS feed reader - get your blog or fav website read out for free by simply saving the url and calling it.

There are no ties, contracts or anything like that with them - just use it as much or as little as you feel like. I got about 15 mins of free calls when I signed up so I say try it out - and if you're not loving it as much as I am, nothing's lost!

Who else is enjoying the ConnectMeAnywhere experience? Where is the future of VoIP heading, who is leading us there and how??

Why does the world not seem to know what VoIP is?? I save a fortune every week by calling internationally through a VoIP provider rather than my landline or mobile provider.

So many people I've spoke to don't actually realise how much phone companies rip them off as soon as they want to make a call outside the country - calling Australia can be about 1.5 pence per minute yet I've heard people calling from like 50 pence per minute!

I say "get a grip people and stop needlessly throwing your money at the greedy phone network providers!!"

If anyone wants more info or a few pointers on finding a provider, post here. Or if anyone wants to shout out a good VoIP provider - share and share alike!

PS. contrary to what people seem to think, most VoIP I've seen aren't like a mobile/phone contract, you use what you want, when you want

I know this topic is a bit dated but I'm new to this blog thing and feel the need to express my opinion! What are the government doing?? Why do we now need to pay £3000 tuition fees instead of £1000??

And it's "ok" because you can get a loan for it - actually, just thinking, why would I want an extra 9 grand to pay back on top of my 12 grand standard student loan? Hmm...Are the benefits of going to uni now totally outweighed by debt?

Another question I've never found the answer to is, do foreign students have to pay that too? Are there other costs you have to pay? I got accepted into Edinburgh uni (didn't do that course in the end...) but never looked into whether I'd get tuition fees paid for like Scottish citizens do or whether I'd have to pay them?

Does anyone have any answers? I'd like to hear from international students as well as UK students. Also, anyone that wants to stick up for the government - I suppose it's always good to hear both sides of the story