I'm a bit of a volleyball nut. And I want to see more of it covered on TV during the forthcoming Olympic Games. So I've written a letter to the BBC and I'm hoping you might also want to send in should you feel the same way.

Btw, In doing some of the research I stumbled upon this article about the history of volleyball.

Tags: volleyball, Olympics, BBC

Here's a little plug for my godfather's charity -

UCARE (Urology Cancer Research and Education) supports cancer research projects in Oxford that are taking a leading role in fighting cancer. Urological cancers represent nearly 20% of all cancers diagnosed in the UK each year. Your support will make a difference!

Tags: cancer, medicine

I'm eBaying a few large items that are pick up only from Surbiton (KT6). Have a browse and get in touch if you're interested!

Tags: ebay, Surbiton

The UK government have come up with a good idea! Show Us a Better Way is a competition that invites ideas for making better use of public information. These could be for improving health, education, justice or society at large. Some of the ideas already posted are really quite good... The prize fund is worth £20,000!

Tags: government, idea

Bulgarian and Finnish have been added to the site. Finnish because it is a Scandinavian language after all and was missed off previously (oops!) and Bulgarian in honour of the ex-national player who comes to our little London volleyball meet-ups. Tenuous, but a good enough reason for us.

Tags: language, Finnish, Bulgarian

A new version of Twitter Watch is out. The main improvement on the original is that the live feed of tweets can now be translated into a selection of languages. There are a lot of Twitter users who don't write in English!

Tags: Twitter, mashup

Here's a clip of our (almost) weekly session in the park. Should've hit the final spike a bit harder...



Tags: volleyball

We added a few more languages the other day and now here are four more, namely; Croatian, Czech, Polish and Romanian. Incidentally they're also competing in Euro 2008 at the moment. Czech Republic beat Germany today so congratulations to them!

Tags: language

Greek and Dutch were added a few weeks ago, now Nimisis.com is also available in Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Hindi. That makes 18 languages all together so far!

Tags: language, swedish, norwegian, danish, hindi

Today's theme is Space. The European Space Agency has started accepting applications for wannabe astronauts. To apply you need to have a science related degree, preferrably be aged 27 to 37 and also have passed the kind of medical private pilots need (which costs about £150). Why not get out of the rat race and into the space race? Flights won't start until around 2015 though.

If you really want to go into space but don't get selected you could still become a space tourist. Tickets start at around £100K - I'd be annoyed if I didn't get a window seat. Here's more info about the industry in a TED talk by Burt Rutan.

Or, if you like your feet on terra firma, but still want to do some exploration, you could download Microsoft's WorldWide Telescope. I tried it out today. Unsurprisingly, being a MS product, it crashed on me - but otherwise it seems like it could be educational.

Speaking earlier of TED talks, I stumbled across a really good one by Robert Ballard on how exploring the depths of the oceans could be equally, if not more interesting and exciting. Check it out.

Tags: space, exploration, TED talks, astronaut