Friends Websites:

Metal Websites:

StormWarrior
Official website. Following within the footsteps of Manowar, yet with a stronger Viking element. StormWarrior's music empowers the Spirit with sagas of strength, battle, and courage. A band whose music is truly battle-worthy. Essential listening for any Viking!

Moonsorrow
Official website of Moonsorrow - The creators of Metal that is both melodic and intense, Metal that suits almost any non-modern environment with an extremely uplifting and pleasing tone, with some truly heavy parts thrown in for good measure.

Blind Guardian
Official website of Blind Guardian - A band who play the more "uplifting" edge of Metal. Blind Guardian are a pretty good Power Metal band that create music to suit almost any occasion. Ideal for listening to at times when you might be feeling low or angry, as it will both calm and uplift you.

Rammstein
Official website of Rammstein - Germany's best known Industrial Metal band. Rammstein create music that fits beautifully into the more modern setting. This is excellent industrial Metal that's ideal for enjoying in the office, on the factory floor, or even whilst driving something obscenely fast!

Wacken Open Air
Wacken Open Air (W:O:A) is Germanys biggest Metal festival, with attendances that would easily exceed 100,000 persons if the site didn't have a strict capacity of 70,000! So far, it's also much heavier, much less expensive, and - In a word - Much better than Reading/Leeds or Download...But on the same token, Wacken has been becoming a bit more like the "sell-out" festivals with every passing year, in my opinion...

Bloodstock UK Metal Festivals
Sadly, England doesn't have any Metal festivals that come anywhere near the size or intensity of Wacken. However, the yearly Bloodstock festivals in Lichfield and Derby will hopefully change all of that. The Bloodstock festivals are gaining momentum with each passing year...And with their recent affiliation with the W:O:A festival, may soon become as big as (Or perhaps even bigger!) Wacken itself!

Other Websites:

European Coaster Club
Website of the European Coaster Club. Once part of the RCCGB, this now seperate organisation caters for members who are more interested in the technical and operational aspects of thrill rides, although their events are just as fun as those of the RCCGB! The club with their excellent "First Drop" magazine, which contains information on everything that is going on in the World of theme parks and thrill rides.

UK Rail Forums
Discussion board for everything related to railways within the UK and beyond, with additional sections for light rail, rapid transit, rail tours, and train simulator programs. Although this is mainly a site for railway enthusiasts, everyone else is invited and will be made to feel welcome. A good source of information for anything you need to know about UK railways - Right down to how forthcoming engineering works will affect your weekend journey!

Companies and Services:

Virgin Atlantic
This is the first (And so far only) airline that I have flown across the Atlantic with, and my opinion of them is very good in all areas bar punctuality. The flights are pretty cheap (London - New York, £260.00 return when I went) and the customer service was top-notch all the way!

Virgin Trains
We've all heard the joke that "Sir Richard Branson can't call his rail company 'Virgin' - All of his trains are f***ed!", but in reality this is pretty much untrue. Although questions do have to be raised about the use of Pendolino trains on the West Coast line (Their heavy weight causes a lot of excess wear.) their customer service is very good and the only problems that I've had with them relate to overcrowding on afternoon services.

South West Trains
My local rail operator, and a very good one at that. South West Trains started out with a network that was plagued with poor infrastructure, ancient rolling stock and reliability that made even Amtrak seem much better! However, South West Trains have managed to perform an unbelievable turnaround with new timetables, new trains, and a comprehensive programme of repairs...And all within their first three years of operation! Thanks to their hard work, we now have a local rail operator that everyone from my area can be highly proud of.

Deutsche Bahn Journey Planner (English)
Deutsche Bahn's rail journey planner is a highly efficient system which can allow you to plan bus and rail journeys in Germany, England, France, and some other European countries. Although tickets sold through this site may only be available for journeys within Germany or Europe, the journey planner itself is very fast, easy to use, and is generally more reliable than the National Rail website. Please be advised that the DB planner might not take current engineering works into account when planning journeys.

Brinkster
My webhost of choice, Brinkster is a great hosting company who offer free (With small Google text advertisements) website hosting with full ASP support. Some features (Such as serverside e-mail, image manipulation and remote file linking) aren't available to free accounts, but this is a relatively small limitation compared to the quality of services offered. This is where DieselDragon.co.uk is hosted.

Google
Out of all the search engines I have used, Google is without a doubt the most functional and yet user-friendly of them all. Google can search for websites, images, Microsoft Word, Adobe PDF, and practically any other type of file if you know how to use the "filetype" command. Google also provides search results for Yahoo and a few other internet search engines.

Google Mail
Googles' e-mail service offers a 2Gb+ inbox, search capabilities, POP-3 (PC mail client) functionality, excellent spam and "phish" e-mail filtering, and many other features. Google Mail services are currently only available via invitations sent by existing members, but if you talk to family/friends or look on the internet, it's relatively easy to obtain an invite.

MSN Hotmail
Microsofts free e-mail service is the most widely subscribed to in the World. Offering a quite large inbox (Size dependant on your location) and fairly good spam filtering capabilities, Hotmail is a quite user friendly and fairly reliable e-mail service, although you have to pay a subscription fee to access your mail using POP-3. A good place to start if you're looking for your first e-mail account.

YouTube
A video hosting website owned by Google that allows users to upload your videos for the World to see, provided that they're not copyrighted and are under the 10 minute/100Mb mark. There are no bandwidth limitations - So if everyone on the Internet decide to view a specific video, it will always be available. All videos on this site are hosted on YouTube.

ImageShack
Pretty much the same as YouTube, but for image files. Users may upload practically any image at any size as long as it's not illegal, obscene or pornographic. ImageShack creates thumbnails that allow people to host huge images on their websites without causing the viewers browser to download large amounts of information...Essential, considering that the World still has a majority of dial-up internet users!

MySpace
A highly-popular profile and social grouping website, MySpace hosts millions of profile pages for people around the World. Although it's easy to group all of your friends together on your page, MySpace does suffer from a few plagues - Notably an excess of badly thought-out page coding by users, occasional spamming (Although the staff do nip it in the bud as quickly as possible), and c**p Emo bands adding your profile to theirs in a lame attempt to make themselves look popular and "big". On the upside though, MySpace do provide a good weblog facility.