The Return of Tiger Woods

This week saw the return of the greatest golfer of all time: Tiger Woods. I am a huge fan of Tiger Woods and have been since I was about 7. This is the first time he has played a professional championship since the 2008 US Open which he narrowly won, 7 months ago. He played quite well on the first day beating Brendan Jones 3&2 comfortably. But on the second day he struggled against the South African, Tim Clark, losing 4&2.

I think that Woods picked a wrong time to come back. He is definitely stronger on stroke play than match play. He should have come back for a stroke play tournament. I was very disappointed when I woke up to the news that Woods had lost. By losing this match it has brought his confidence. He should definitely have come back for a stroke play tournament. Oh well. There are plenty of other tournaments.

Universal Mobile Phone Charger

A few days ago I read in the Daily Telegraph that the big mobile phone companies such as Sony Ericsson, Nokia and Motorola have agreed on a universal charger which would be the same for all phones. The charger would be a Mini USB one. And it would only consume half of what other chargers would consume in standby. This would be implemented by 2012.

Although it didn't say in the article, I figured out that this also meant that there wouldn't need to be a separate socket to connect the phone to the computer. This would reduce the weight of the phone.

One of the best ideas ever thought out but it is long overdue. It should have been introduced when mobile phones were first made.Well at least now the companies have had some sense to do this. I am hoping that there will be no delays and it will work.

Windows 7 Beta

Recently my dad downloaded Windows 7 Beta 1 to test it out. It is not very surprising that Windows 7 was launched only 2 years after Vista since Vista has received a lot of criticism.

Windows 7 is a very good operating system. I have tested Vista briefly and Windows 7 is very similar but I like the improved taskbar very much. We have never switched over from XP because my dad thinks that Vista is not very secure. When I used Vista I never found any bugs in it but I only tested it briefly so I can not say.

We installed Windows 7 on 3 computers and we have never had any problems with any of them. It even worked perfectly on a 6 year old laptop (except the Aero theme)! It seems very secure and we have never encountered any major bugs in it.

I think most people will switch over to Windows 7, even people who recently bought Vista. The only criticism I have of Windows 7 is that Microsoft should have thought of a better name!

For a more detailed insight into Windows 7 please visit my dad's blog.

Space Junk Orbiting the Earth

Recently, I read an article in the Focus magazine which says that the space junk orbiting the Earth is becoming quite dangerous for space flight. Today on the Internet I happened to find a similar article and I decided to write about it in my first post.

Since the beginning of space flight there has always been debris floating around the Earth such as rocket boosters and nuts and bolts. These things have not been very harmful. Until now... Recently these things have become dangerous. A bolt may not sound harmful but if this bolt is travelling at 10m/s it becomes a huge problem. These debris are endangering other objects orbiting the Earth such as satellites and the ISS (International Space Station). Luckily objects which are bigger than 10 cm can be tracked. This is done by the SSN (Space Surveillance Network) which is a network of 25 sensors which are placed around the world. This is then processed by very powerful computers and if required a warning is sent to NASA.

The debris is very difficult to get rid of and if it crashes with another piece of debris it explodes into thousands of other pieces. Some of these object simply crash to the Earth and burn up but there are still a lot of debris above us. Currently there is no option for the satellites such as the ISS except to simply get out of the way by moving up or down. There have been plans to use things like lasers to get rid of these objects. But a laser powerful enough to do this could also destroy other satellites so these plans have never gone past the planning stage.

But there is nothing we can do now except get out of the way. Hopefully in the future we will be less careless about what we leave in space.