Well a couple of weeks ago my toshiba decided to give up the ghost and the screen internally failed, the screen has already been replaced once and it's a few years old now, so I think it was time for upgrade, though I must say my dad actually bought me my new laptop! Out of the blue too. I was planning to save up for a new one once I found a job, but my dad asked me where my laptop was one weekend and I said the screens gone again, and then last week out of the blue decided just came out with "oh yeah son im buying you a new laptop" shock wasn't the word. So thanks Dad! Even though I didn't stop saying thank you all the way through the store when we bought it! So for the past two weeks me and my Dad have been Laptop hunting and in the end found the Compaq Presario CQ60 as a great choice!

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Recently at E3, Sony Computer Entertainment (SCE) annouced and unveiled it's newest model of the PSP (PlayStation Portable) the PSP Go. While the name doesn't sound that interesting there are some interesting viewpoints on the console itself already, and it hasn't even hit the stores yet. What I know from reading various articles and reading articles from Sony themselves is that the PSP Go is to be a contendor to rival the recently released new Nintendo DSi amongst other devices currently on the market. I generally don't like to bitch about a console to much because it makes me sound like a fanboy, but really im not. I think the whole fan boy groups are sad and lame and quite possibly need to get laid but anyway back to Sony and the PSP Go.

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I haven't done many PHP Tutorials recently so I decided I'd be writing a couple of PHP tutorials over the new few days, pretty basic stuff nothing complicated. In this tutorial were going to be learning about variables and numbers in PHP, im going to show you how they work and how you can use them, you'll also learn how to create your own variables and how to use pre-defined variables. You'll also see how they work and how you can apply them to future scripts that you may make in the future!

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Here is a blank two column (Right) CSS template which you can use to get you started on building a website. All of the main divs have been styled and the layout is avaliable for you to simply paste into your favorite code editor and begin designing it to your liking. You'll find the full source for the blank CSS template at the bottom of the page. However please read the whole page instead of skipping to the source code, there's a couple of statements about certain CSS attributes you might want to change

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Today James' Blog experienced some downtime today, about 12 hours worth, which is quite alot, but strangely this was not because of a server going down. No it was a strange incident involving one of the key systems that powers WordPress (The engine that runs James' Blog) and that is MySQL. If you had visited the site today then you would of either got just a forever loading page or if you had viewed the site after a few hours you would of got the temp page I set up, which redirected all links to the temp page. Because the website wasn't offline just a key system wasn't functioning correctly which like I said was MySQL, it handles all of the databases connections and because access to the database couldn't be established nothing was able to be displayed.

My host got in touch with me after having communication difficulties of there own and basically this was the problem:

"There was first an issue with MySQL which i corrected, but then outbound requests would not resolve hostnames. This highlighted an issue with DNS, which I have now resolved. Two, probably unrelated issues happening consecutively..."

In basic terms the service MySQL could not process connections correctly and the DNS (Which is mainly the domain name which is james-blogs.com) had difficultly to. Probably just bad timing like Dan (The Tech support rep said in the statement above) but everything is fixed now and also my host have put in some new measures to stop this from happening ever again which is good! But to be fair since moving to LRC-Hosting 10 months ago, this has been the only downtime besides when they moved there network around (Which was planned)

Anyway James' Blog is back online again, sorry for the downtime and now I shall reply to some of your comments that people have been leaving on articles and tutorials.

Every tutorial I've done on navigation bars or menu's has been the normal one level navigation bar, but when you build a website you may feel the need to create sub categories, for example my blog houses various tutorials which are stored in categories, I have a drop down navigation bar on the main link, which is tutorials which then displays sub catergories and then the specific catergory e.g. Tutorials > XHTML > Basics in that example there are three levels. You can create navigation bar levels using lists, it's the easiest way to create a drop down menu but for styling it can get a bit tricky, but in this tutorial Im going to show you how to form a drop down navigation menu and then style it with CSS

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