Every year numerous charities run (haha no pun intended) dedicated London Marathon teams. This year Oxfam have teamed up with race sponsors Virgin to help raise even more money for charity, both home and abroad. All round Mr nice-guy Richard Branson, as well as sponsoring the marathon, has also set up a new Virgin money giving website to help charities further benefit from all their donations. The new scheme works in conjunction with HMG’s Giftaid, but it also has the added benefit of removing certain subscription charges due to the company being run as a not-for-profit organisation.

Of course running the London marathon isn’t just about doing it for charity. Running has long been acknowledged as one of the greatest cardio-vascular activities known to man, the benefits from regular exercise of this type is medically quite staggering. Running not only helps you lose weight, but it also helps to lower blood pressure, lowers the risk of cancer, can relieve types of depression, as well as providing people with a natural dose of endorphins making you feel great! The sense of achievement brought about by completing such a task isn’t half bad either.

The London Marathon 2010 kicks off soon, only 72 days remaining – so get involved!.

Run Forest, run!

For some time now I’ve been considering heading back out on a road-trip. I haven’t been out on the open road for some years now, last time we decided to go for Monte Carlo or bust – inspired of course by one of the greatest films of all time…

Our ride wasn’t quite as exciting or as ingenious as Major Digby Dawlish’s, it didn’t have any frills or mod-cons, nope it was just a tatty battered used van that we’d managed to pick up at a reasonable rate from the local van hire company. We spent a few weeks patching it up and making it liveable and then we set off.

Neither of us had really spent a great deal of time in France, so we decided to try and take in as much of the country as possible. We started in Normandy, trundled our way through Paris and continued down south, stopping in Geneva and traversing the Alps until we reached our desired destination: Monte Carlo and the Mediterranean.

We spent a week or so living the high-life and then we turned the van around and sped off west through the French Riviera. I’d always wanted to visit Carcassonne so we drove down and spent a few nights surrounded by some of the most astounding and intact medieval architecture in western Europe. After buffing up on our history we went north to Biarritz, surfed our brains out and watched the sunset every night – twas the perfect finish to a great holiday.

As I mentioned the game is being developed by Bioware, probably the greatest RPG developer in the world, so expect a huge story driven MMO. The game itself is set 300 years after the events of Bioware’s phenomenally successful Knights of the Old Republic series; hopefully some sort of conclusion to Darth Revan’s story will be included. TOR is going to be your more traditional 3rd person MMO, but it will have some significant tweaks installed. Bioware have already announced that it will be heavy on story, with a lot more instanced 1player/grouped scenarios which will help unravel the plot.

Bioware have also stated that TOR will be the first fully voiced MMO, their intention is to make your participation within the story that bit more immersive; I tend to find Bioware games a little disjointed when it comes to this aspect, when you speak to NPC’s they’re always very grand and dramatic, but when you click that ‘prepare to die’ option and the fight begins, you tend to lose that sense of roleplay without a voiceover.

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*Revision*

In a recent statement BioWare announced that an up and coming MMO title they are working on will be delayed to the start of 2011, although they did not mention it by title, most people in the industry have taken this to mean ToR. With Cataclysm due towards the end of the year it makes sense to delay a few months, allow the initial hype of WoW 3rd expansion to die down a little and then hit the market with a fresh finished product. To make any sort of traction in the MMO industry your product needs to be ready, there’s just not enough attention span and patience for a work in progress – so companies get your damn releases right, or don’t bother.

California

California is the third biggest state in the US and by far the most populous area, with such a large area to explore, car hire in California or public transport is essential if you want to make the most of your vacation. The weather during summer is regularly a balmy 40-50°C across the state, with a more temperate climate in the north and much higher temps throughout the southern and elevated parts of the state.

The state is of course famous for its three major cities of San Diego, San Francisco and Los Vegas. Other major attractions consist of the Sacramento Valley, the Yosemite National Park, the Sequoia National Park, the Sierra Nevada and many, many more.

Florida

Florida, otherwise known as the ‘sunshine state’ is another major US holiday destination. It’s the fourth most populated state in America and is famous for its theme-parks and its location amidst hurricane alley. Florida stretches from the north, past the central marshlands of the Everglades and all the way out to the Caribbean down through the Florida Keys; once again arranging car hire in Miami or well prepared travel plans will be essential for a successful trip.

One of the key attractions to Florida is of course Orlando and its huge variety of theme parks and attractions. Disney Land, Universal Studios and SeaWorld are great fun for all the family and a number of discounts and offers can be found on or offline depending upon how hard you look and what time of year you head out.

If those two destinations don’t get you going, then very little will; might as well just book that spot at Butlins or grab a last minute flight to Tenerife, because Florida and California have it all going on and you’d be a fool not to love it.

The gameplay trailers and screenshots look dramatic and visually stunning. The combat looks fast and furious; the style is described by NetDevil as ‘twitch’, suggesting that quick reactions and skills in dog-fighting are going to be essential – anyone remiss in these abilities is going to be spending a lot of time floating in zero gravity amongst space junk I can assure you.

The game is set in a fictional human-based universe with 3 main factions or nations: The Solrain Commonwealth, Quantar Paths and The Octavian Empire. These nations all have their own individual backstory and unique crafts, abilities and etc. The story starts 100 years after a giant war between humanity and its enemies the Conflux has ended with a cataclysmic event known as the Shift. Worlds and solar systems have been torn apart and scattered during this event and the threads of humanity are only just now reforming and reconnecting through a network of Jumpgates, known as the Skein.

NetDevil and Codemasters look like they are going all out on this one. The majority of the game will be PVP based, but there will also be PVE and instanced PVP. Players will be able to rank up, possess multiple ships from cruisers to mining vehicles and a number of trades, professions and upgrades will also be a major aspect of the game. As space MMO’s go this is certainly one to keep an eye on.

Travel and tourism has been hit hard by the snowpocalypse – you can always tell that the end of the world is nigh when you go to Tesco and you see people wheeling trolleys around stacked to the hilt with flour and canned goods. In the last month freezing temperatures have caused huge delays for those travelling to and from mainland Europe. Just before Christmas, airport authorities began closing down runways and the Eurostar service notoriously shut down trapping people inside the Channel Tunnel for almost a whole day.

In the freezing conditions travel across Europe has become an increasingly arduous task, a significant amount of commuters have been forced to make additional travel arrangements either by plane or rental car. France and Britain have been amongst the worst hit, while at the same time being the least prepared for such drastic weather. Areas of France such as Grenoble and Nice have experienced the heaviest snowfall in nearly two decades; reports from Grenoble suggest that the city’s streets still lie buried beneath nearly a foot of snow. In Spain the army was called in to clear roads around Madrid and in the surrounding area.

Meanwhile across the channel our fair isle virtually ground to a halt after two days of intense snowfall. Trains, planes and automobiles all fell victim to the icy conditions; a number of services simply ceased as they were unable to cope with the situation. In some parts of the country people encountered hours of delay, one lady in Scotland has been unable to return to her remote home for over two weeks due to the treacherous conditions. Some economists have suggested that the bad weather will cost the country an estimated £690m a day which will only hamper Britain’s financial revival.

Google kicked off the new decade with the release of its eagerly anticipated ‘Google phone’ known as the Nexus One. Over the last year or so, Google and others have increasingly started to shift their business focus more towards mobile technology, 3g and mobile broadband, over more traditional markets. The release of smartphones and the success of Apple’s iPhone has ensured that the internet is becoming increasingly more mobile based. The demands placed on the web by new technology such as 4G, social networking sites like twitter and applications like Skype for mobiles has forced the web to expand, to become more immediate and to become quicker. If you thought we lived in a 24/7 instant world before then you were wrong, because we are accelerating.

The launch of Google’s Nexus caused a big stir in the tech community, in contrast with this Microsoft’s recent announcement of the ‘slate PC’ at the CES convention in Las Vegas received a somewhat less than enthusiastic reception. The BBC’s Paul Miller described his reaction to the ‘Slate’ as “confirming my worst suspicions that this is your standard Microsoft software in a slate form.” But Devins Connor from Tom’s Hardware, arguably one of the best and most clued up tech sites on the net, disagreed and suggested that the ‘Slate PC’s’ combination of e-reader size and Windows 7 was likely to make it a success.

However, Both Google and Microsoft’s products are just small pebbles in the pond when it comes to technology announcements. Towards the end of January Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, is due to make a major product presentation on the 27th at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. A huge amount of hype and buzz surrounds the event, but little is yet known about the intended product, rumours are hypothesising the release of an iSlate or iTablet. The majority of evidence suggests that some form of tablet or e-reader with PC like abilities will be displayed, but for more on that we will just have to await and see.

The Nexus One