The iconic arcade game celebrates its 30th anniversary on May 22, and Google has created a one-of-a-kind Pac-Man Google Doodle in its honor.

Google frequently switches up its primary-colored logo in order to celebrate the birthdays and anniversaries of luminaries and important innovations (Sesame Street and the barcode have been among the honorees), but the Pac-Man Google logo is unique in that it is the first playable Google Doodle.

According to Google, the Pac-Man logo will have a total of 256 levels. Users can click the “Insert Coin” button to get the game going. (See it in action in the video below.) Pac-Man will be up on Google for a total of 48 hours–from 8AM PT on Friday through Sunday morning.

The programmer behind the Pac-Man Doodle was the son of a game and pinball technician and used to accompany his father to arcade parlors and help him tinker with the games.

We’re still not entirely sure whether businesses around the world will object to staff performance rates since the Pac Man launch. Luckily 4pm on a Friday afternoon shouldn’t cause too much damage, ah what the heck…it’s all good fun!!
Go on try it out now at: http://www.google.co.uk (But we didn’t tell you to…shhhh!)

For more fun and games why not add Pac Man to your home page? Click here for the Pac Man v2.6 widget

Also check out the geekiest Google logos of all time.

The past few months have been fairly interesting as the organisation of the wedding is coming together and all our hard earned cash is starting to pay off for various things such as the cake, band, church, venue, flowers, suits, honeymoon and car etc It never seems to end. I thought I was good at organisation and planning, previously working for an events company I thought it’d be a breeze. Boy was I wrong!

Next weekend is the infamous stag do (Pictures will be available) and one of which I have been most looking forward to. Although the amount of effort that has gone into getting a group of lads together has been particularly challenging. Whether its not communicating back (at all in some cases) or at the last minute dropping out, not paying up or suddenly deciding they are busy has been some of the many curveballs that have thrown the operation out of sync! This isn’t a rant or to point fingers or to say to those that their friendships are weak. Not at all! In fact my woes are not even that bad compared to the unfortunate lack of social interest in the Hen do!

Are we bad people? I don’t think so…bad timing? perhaps…or simply just a lack of courtesy? More like it! It would appear that no matter how much you do to make things right, do things correctly, help others when needed, provide services off your own back for the good of others it nearly always doesn’t mean much when you ask for a favour in return.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some great people and friends that we have out there, but there are also a lot who probably won’t care either way. Something I’ve also learnt to observe is that in business if you do a favour for someone it is more likely to make a return than if you did it for a friend…why is that when business is supposed to be so competitive. I’ve been to networking functions where I’ve felt more welcome and more appreciated than my local church, and yet I have no real connection with them other than we are here to make money.

Anyway, I digress…the point I’m trying to make is that even through all the plans and careful considerations, the countless revisions and the stringent co-ordination just because we do good things, work well, achieve our goals there will be others, even your closest of friends that won’t give the consideration you perhaps think you deserve. A quote by Dennis Wholey “Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian.”
Unfortunately that’s just the way the world ticks round! But hey, that’s just my view…slightly negative I know and I guess the most important word of advice and something I find useful to do is to simply pursue. There’s no point worrying what everyone else thinks and the good news is to know that the ones who stay by closest and give you the respect you deserve are what you can most likely call your ‘real friends’, of which I know we have a lot of. Quite often I have been the culprit of dwelling on what I can do to gain authority from those may not be willing to give it and in the very same instant missed out on possible opportunities, thankfully none to serious.

So as we draw ever close to the day where we flock our nests and begin our own lives I have one thing that I feel I would like to contribute after my latest recent epiphany: Quite often it is better to do something right now, rather than necessarily doing it right.

Basically just get on do whatever it is you want and don’t hold up because others have their opinion about how you should do it. Too many people have kicked themselves for waiting too long!

And without further a due I am logging off…finally!!!! lol

He quickly discovered that there is little help and support for the Prostate Cancer Charity and has therefore decided to create a charity event to raise awareness. Matt is an enthusiastic mountain bike rider and after recently spending the best part of two years in Canada as a mountain bike instructor he thought long and hard about how to combine the two and create an event worth noting.

At first it was obvious, a mountain bike ride, but not just any ride…it had to be epic, something not everyone has done and something that will gain valuable support and respect. He decided that without having a ridiculous budget and to maximise the exposure throughout the UK a bike ride from Lands End to John O’ Groats would be the most appropriate…easy heh? But with a twist…they would do the entire ride off road…over all the hills, through all the rivers and fields, down single track paths, roughing it under the stars and finding accommodation wherever possible! Sounds a little more tricky now doesn’t it?

Well anyway, I think it’s a worthy cause which is why when Matt contacted me to do the website I literally jumped at the opportunity. he wanted something easily editable, so we chose Wordpress as the platform. He also wanted something quick as he had important radio interviews that he wanted a site to be available for so we used a theme from themeforest and then customised it to make it look a fair bit more interesting and unique.

Anyway, we think it looks quite funky and feedback so far has been pretty impressive. have a look yourself and let me know what you think!
www.backpedalcancer.com

P.S. Big thanks to Tim at www.filteredcreative.co.uk who has been very supportive of the cause and the techy stuff.

More and more people are creating events, pages and groups and they want to share these profiles with their friends. But the new facebook can be a a complex process when it comes to manually selecting your friends to send requests to.

Why can’t they just make a “select all” button? Fortunately there here is a nice small piece of Javascript that solves your problem:

javascript:elms=document.getElementById(‘friends’).getElementsByTagName(‘li’);for(var fid in elms){if(typeof elms[fid] === ‘object’){fs.click(elms[fid]);}}

To use, simply go to your event/group/page, click invite people and then paste the above snippet in the URL field of your browser.

Left-click the mouse in the URL field and hit Enter. This will then select all of your friends in your list and then you can click the “Invite” or “Send” button on the Facebook page to send the invites.

Easy peasy lemon squeezy. And it saves a lot of time manually clicking each friend.

Thanks for reading, please bookmark, comment or re-tweet this if you found it useful

Even the legendary masterchief has to have a break sometimes, its just mind numbingly boring for him not killing grunts!!!

Piano staircase

Take the stairs instead of the escalator or elevator and feel better” is something we often hear or read in the Sunday papers. Few people actually follow that advice. Can we get more people to take the stairs over the escalator by making it fun to do? See the results here.

The Worlds Deepest Bin

To throw rubbish in the bin instead of onto the floor shouldn’t really be so hard. Many people still fail to do so. Can we get more people to throw rubbish into the bin, rather than onto the ground, by making it fun to do? See the results here.

Visit the website here: www.thefuntheory.com

Chris and Sams Wedding Promo movie from Chris Newnham on Vimeo.

In addition Google has developed buzz to be compatible with smart phones and of course there own Android mobile operating system. This new product appears to be a collaboration of Face book, Twitter, Picasa and MSN all rolled into one package which also interacts with Google’s other products.

By hitching Buzz to Gmail Google are using their core clients as a staging ground for launching their new social networking platform. Gmail is the third most popular web-based email provider in the world with over 170 million unique visitor’s end of 2009, according to comScore.

Over the next few days we will be seeing buzz roll out to Gmail users who will be able to use it amongst other Gmail users. The great thing about Buzz, and again possibly a deal clincher for Google is that public status updates will automatically be indexed by Google and be made available within real-time search results. Users can however opt to keep messages private to share only with friends and colleagues. But you can see as a marketing tool how powerful this could potentially be.
Users can share images from Picasa and videos from YouTube, they can also view tweets from Twitter but can’t post from Buzz to Twitter (yet). Buzz is however unable to currently display face book updates.

Whilst this may appear to be major floor is Google’s strategy the live updating to Googles search results gives this new product a different kind of strength. Also by targeting the Gmail masses it is a fine testing ground and a good reason to attract new users. I know i for one will be creating a Gmail account very soon.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin said he was not deterred by other companies’ experiences in melding email and social networking.

“I wouldn’t discount something because it’s similar in the one sense … to something else in the past that may not be that successful,” Brin said on the sideline of the event following the main presentations.

However in a counter-strike Facebook has launched its new skin layout and is currently rolling it out to the 400 billion face book users. In addition a new partnership between Facebook and AOL will see the social networking site’s Chat feature integrated with the latest version of AOL’s AIM instant messaging platform.

The agreement will allow Facebook users to chat with friends when replying to AOL email contacts.

AOL said in a blog post that it will also add its Lifestream application to AIM, allowing users to receive updates from contacts on social networking sites, including Digg, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter.

We also know that the new office 2010 and outlook 2010 will be able to interact with your social accounts, viewing live status updates from your followers and being able to update your status from within the software. It seems there is a new era of social networking as more apps are developed daily, new software and updates, new products and services are all able to interact and automatically update each other.

This is an exciting time for the world of social networking from a business and consumer point of view. The world is getting smaller as the web is getting bigger and communications across networks are starting to demand huge power. Stay tuned for more updates.