Brian's Place

Welcome to Brian's home page!

This site is all about the bright side of life. In fact, if you look to your left, you will see that there are several pages dedicated to just that, starting (not surprisingly) with The Bright Side.

If you are depressed by the endless diet of doom and gloom in the media, who would much rather tell you about a train wreck on the other side of the world than something good happening closer to home, then welcome to something different!

The Bright Side isn't just a collection of laughs, though. Central to it is the philosophy of "Pay It Forward".

I like this philosophy, because I seriously believe that when applied in its many forms, it helps to spread happiness, courtesy and positivity, counteracting the misery, discourtesy and negativity that is constantly being spread elsewhere.

"Pay It Forward" also relates to our care for the environment. If you look at my Environment & Technology page, you won't find much preaching, but you will find many positive and interesting developments, not to mention some neat technology and some great job and investment opportunities!

Part of enjoying life is keeping the brain active. Playing computer games, solving puzzles and trying to understand some intriguing aspects of the universe we live in are all part of this. Collectively I group these under "Mind Stretchers".

Learning to fly a plane (at home, on a PC simulator) can become a very enjoyable life-time hobby, and a very mind-stretching one at that. Being physically confined is no obstacle to exploring the world in quite a different way, and you will make many on-line friends as you go along.

I introduce you to this hobby here, and point you at some good places to get started.

I also provide some help with computers, divided into general information, trouble-shooting and web page creation. Most of this is just a matter of pointing you at other people's excellent work.

A feature of this site is the effort put into providing a large number of (hopefully) useful or interesting external links. You will find these scattered throughout most of the pages, often with a quick summary of the links in the right hand panel.

I would like to offer a special note of thanks to the folks behind Wikipedia, the greatest free knowledge resource in the world, and to everyone who freely contributes to it.

If you follow the links on this site, you will be visiting Wikipedia quite often!

If you like this site, please share it with your friends. Have fun!

• Navigation
• As you would expect, the buttons on the left-hand side panel will take you to each main page (some of which have several sub-pages when you get there).
• To see what's new on this site, click the "Latest Updates" button.
• The right hand panel contains (hopefully useful) links of various kinds. You will notice that different kinds of links have different colours - you'll get the idea! If you can't distinguish colours, I have tried to use helpful tooltips as well if the colour is significant.
• The Google Search box at the top has SafeSearch switched ON by default and opens in a separate window - just close that window when you are done to return to my site.

• Eyesight Friendly!
• This site has been designed so that you can increase the text size if you need to, without wrecking the layout.

• On Internet Explorer 7 you can adjust the text size from the Page menu, probably near the top right hand side, or press the ALT key to see the old menus near the top that you were used to (and then select the View menu).
• If you hold down the CONTROL key and move the mouse wheel, you may or may not find that you expand the whole page, rather than just the text. This depends on your browser.

• Input Always Welcome
• I am most interested in any comments, inputs or suggestions that you may have. Please click this icon to e-mail me.
• I will always answer e-mails (apart from requests for computer trouble-shooting - sorry!).
• If the result of your e-mail is an update to this site (no promises!) then I will always mention your name/moniker unless you ask me not to.

• Are You Using Internet Explorer 7 Or Firefox?

• Did you know that you can automatically open a number of tabs when your browser starts up, each with its own different home page?
• If there is a collection of pages that you always open up each morning (for example) then this is really useful.
• To set them up using IE7, just go to Tools, Internet Options, General Tab, and then type a number of lines into the Home Page box, one line for each URL address.
• To set them up using Firefox, first open as many tabs as you want (Control+T is the shortcut) and load each tab with the page that you want in that tab at startup. Then go to Tools, Options, Main and in the Startup box, select "Show my home page" for "When Firefox starts", and click the button marked "Use Current Pages". That's it!
• (You can probably do a similar thing with other multi-tab browsers.)
• If you really like this site, you could maybe make it one of your many home pages (I would be very honoured in that case!).