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My mate Cameron is running the London marathon to raise money for a prostate cancer charity and has asked me to post his donations email on my blog. Here goes …

As some of you may be aware already I am running the London Marathon on the 13th of April in aid of The Prostate Cancer Charity.

The Prostate Cancer Charity was set up in 1996. In its relatively short life, the Charity has played a key role in raising both public awareness of the disease and political debate about services and support. Over recent years they have invested nearly £5 million in vital medical research and supported thousands of men and their families.

Prostate Cancer is the most prominent cancer among men and the UK survival rate is only 44.3%. Every year in the UK nearly 35,000 cases of prostate cancer are diagnosed.

On April 11th 1998 my Grandad passed away after a long battle with Prostate Cancer. It is almost 10 years to the day that I will run the Flora London Marathon.

On January 21st 2008 my Uncle passed away in Bristol after suffering from Prostate Cancer as well.

It is in memory of both of them that I am running the London Marathon. Hopefully, with your help I can raise some much needed funds for research and at the same time raise awareness for a disease that most men just don’t want to talk about.

I have made a pledge to The Prostate Cancer Charity to raise £2000 to help them out. In return for this they have awarded me a Golden Bond place in the London Marathon. I will be running 26 miles/42 km on Sunday 13th April 2008.

It does not matter how much you donate, just that you do because every pound will be put to good use.

http://www.justgiving.com/cameronpadfieldsrunningthemarathon

Donating through this site is simple, fast and totally secure. It is also the most efficient way to sponsor me: The Prostate Cancer Charity will receive your money faster and, if you are a UK taxpayer, an extra 28% in tax will be added to your gift at no cost to you.

So please sponsor me now.

Please feel free to forward this on to anyone you want to! The more that know about this the better.

Thank you so much for your support, it really does mean a lot to me.

Cam is hard working, honest and funny as f*ck so he will do almost anything for a donation to this worthy cause. Feel free to let your evil side run amok and really test his commitment.

If you aren’t an internet geek this will mean nothing to you. But to those of us who spend our days coding sites so that they work on all the different browsers and platforms on the wild wild web this is huge news.

The Acid2 test is a complicated web page that will only display correctly on a browser that conforms to a set internationally accepted standards outlined by the W3C. If the web browser that you are using supports web standards then the Acid2 test pages will display a nice smiley face. If it doesn’t then the results will be not such a nice smiley face.

You can click here to see how your current web browser performs on the Acid2 test. It probably doesn’t do too well.

The point is though there are lots of internet browsers out there like Firefox, Safari, Opera etc and most of them are moving towards being fully standards compliant. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer on the other hand is a pile of poorly coded junk and doesn’t even come close to passing the Acid2 test. I guess they always figured that if they pre-packaged their internet browser with the Windows operating system then they would not have to comply to international standards. This is a real bugger for web developers like me because we have to code our sites to work on most of the worlds internet browsers and then we have to code them to work on IE6.

Recently Microsoft has been losing a share fo the browser market to a far superior standards compliant browser called Firefox. To stop the rot Microsoft released IE7 but that was largely based on the original code from IE6 and wasn’t really much better. So it looks like Microsoft have finally gotten the message and built their next internet browser IE8 from scratch so that it complies with the correct international standards. The follow picture from the IEBlog shows that IE8 will comply with pass the Acid2 test.

If this can be believed then it is the most significant development for internet browsers in a long time.

According to soshable Digg have changed their algorithm. I have a feeling that they have changed the algorithm because there has been a growing chorus of people who think the Digg results are decreasing in quality and that a lot of complete rubbish is being Dugg to the top for no real reason. Perhaps Digg have finally realised that to retain their credibility they have to ensure the quality of their results is high.

Or perhaps they want to take the control of the site away from a small number of very well connected super-diggers who are pushing loads of decidedly average links to the front page.

I have a simple idea that might help. What if the more you digg the less each digg was worth? That way well networked diggers who pushed each other stories to the top all the time would have less control over the results.

Today I watched large tourist crossing the road nearly get knocked over by another cyclist. After the near miss he stopped for a chat and we had a laugh about how often cyclists nearly hit pedestrians. Anyway to make a long story short he was from Alaska. Bloody friendly people those Alaskans (not sure of the correct collective noun).

Techcrunch have blogged a list of NINE things to do if you want your story to rate well on Digg.

Yawn. This is a much more accurate list of things to try if you want to get loads of Diggs.

1. Praises something to do with Apple
2. Mock Microsoft
3. Mock a big organisation or corporation
4. Promote file sharing or theft of copyrighted content
5. Have a list of other sites that are billed as the complete list of resources for [insert generic topic] on the web
6. Write a poorly thought out TOP TEN or NINE REASONS about some random topic

This is what you really need to do if you want to rate well on Digg.

This came in on email:

The Japanese government must believe their people are very hungry, otherwise they would not be hunting whales in the Southern Oceans.

To assist our Japanese friends, we propose to send packets of instant noodles to Japan to save the whales from being eaten. To show the intent of these noodles, please attach a letter to the Prime Minister of Japan, Yasuo Fukuda, about the continued Japanese whaling in the south seas, and the world’s opposition to the wasteful and unneeded slaughter of whales.

Individual noodle packets can be sent to:
Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda
1-6-1 Nagata-cho
Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 100-8968
JAPAN

This morning the greatest living New Zealander passed away. Sir Edmund Hillary was an icon to millions of Kiwis all over the globe and will be sadly missed. Our Dear Leader called him a “heroic figure who not only ‘knocked off’ Everest but lived a life of determination, humility and generosity”. Well said.

KiwiBlog reports “He is also near unique for being featured on the bank notes of a western country, while still alive. Apart from monarchs, this is almost never done in case they later do something inappropriate.”

My regular route to work is being dug up again and it made me realise that it has been roadwork free for a number of months now. This got me wondering if more roadworks are done in the summer when it is warn and nice to work outdoors. Maybe roadworkers are harder to find in the winter.

If this is the case then it is a real bummer because it is likely that more roadworks will be done in the summer when there are more cyclist on the road creating dangerous situations like the one in this photo.

This made me think of my great new idea for cycle safety. What if roadworkers were only allowed to dig up cycle lanes in the winter when they are significantly less busy? And during the summer they can dig up the regular roads. This way there would be less intrusion during the busy cycle months and therefore statistically the roads should be safer for cycles.

They (you know the they people who control everything) already do other common sense things (no seriously) like fix the tube at night when no one is using it. Why not only dig up cycle lanes in the winter when all the softer riders bikes are collecting dust?