It's not everyday you get to attend an event that could be described as "symbolic", but the social media cafe held at Bletchley Park today could certainly be described as that. The site is the birthplace of the IT as we know it today and social media is the very latest development in how we use computers, and the place has pretty much everything in between those two points that to its hosting of the National Museum of Computing. It is also the site where incredibly important work took place that is credited with shortening World War II and saving millions of lives. It is an amazing site, and there is so much there that it is difficult to see it all in one day, and the dedication, friendliness and knowledge of the staff and volunteers bring the place to life and make it a visit a rewarding experience. Despite all this though it hangs under a big black cloud of government indifference, it has to attempt to meet the increasing challenge of restoring and maintaining this complex site largely though money it raises itself, an issue you may have seen highlighted in today's Telegraph online.

Just trying out the Sun Weblog Publisher extension for OpenOffice 3 to see if it works. As you will know, OpenOffice 3 was not included in Ubuntu 8.10 as it was released too late for their release schedule, however it is possible to upgrade using these instructions on Softpedia. Installing the extension was quite simple, I just downloaded the extension (which was free) and then in OpenOffice went to Tools → Package Manager → Add found the extension waited for it to install. The extension should then be listed in the extensions manager with an “Options” button (a bit like Add-Ons in Mozilla Firefox), this will open a dialogue to enable you to put in the settings for your blog.

On this day last year I wrote my very first blog post, prompted into action by a link from Martin Weller's blog to my then largely empty blog! I'm glad I became a blogger, I've already explained my reasons for blogging and the last year has no doubt seen some quite dramatic changes in the technology world. The blog has come a long way since then and now I am proud to say that on average two to three hundred of you visit it each day. I would like to say a big *thank you* to everybody who has read my posts and taken the time to comment. My fist post was about the Course Profiles application we created that works inside Facebook. Back then we were being told that no student wanted their university to have a presence in Facebook as The Guardian put it: