Notes to Myself

J Influence

As I read my book on the train I noticed a nice pair of legs and a short skirt in front of me (as you do). Then I noticed this girl's black loafers and knee high socks. Hang on, was this a Japanese school girl on the London Tube?

She wore a short black skirt with a small lace frill, a long sleeved white shirt with a fitted black waist-jacket, and a brown leather satchel with two straps on her back. To finish the look she had her hair parted in the middle and a small bun either side of her head complete with blue ribbons. Nice effort!

She wasn't Japanese. She was English, a young girl of about 20 years old, I'd say. I wonder if she always dresses like that or whether there was some kind of convention going on? Ah, I miss the whacky clothes you see in Japan.

Extravagance

When I went to pick up my racket from the tennis shop earlier today I witnessed some pure extravagance.

There were two Indian guys at the till, talking to the manager as he rung up their purchases. I looked at the cash register and was shocked - the total was £842!

After seeing this I realised that the Prince racket on the counter wasn't the only purchase. The two guys had a total of six brand new expensive rackets and at least two pairs of shoes.

One of them said something about playing in two days and he wondered what the weather would be like. I got the impression that they were extremely wealthy individuals who were about to play some tennis for the first time in their lives.

I'm sure those rackets will be wasted on them. What pure extravagance!

Logitech MX 518

Up until yesterday I had been using an old Logitech 3 button wheel mouse. I never made the move to optical mice for one reason or another. I was never that impressed by the fact that they don't work on certain surfaces and they tend to pick up movement if you lift the mouse but hover to close to the mouse mat. However, I decided my wheel mouse was getting a little old - it literally sqeaks going in one direction!

Meet my new mouse, the Logitech® MX™518 Gaming-Grade™ Optical Mouse. It's a high-spec mouse and its had many positive reviews by gaming sites.

You can vary the resolution of that the mouse works at up to 1600dpi via two small buttons near to the mouse wheel. This is supposedly ideal for games where you want to be able to fine tune your movements/aim.

There are two buttons for near where your thumb rests and another more centrally located on top of the mouse. Using the SetPoint drivers you can assign these buttons to different tasks and I've noticed that the two thumb buttons perform 'back' and 'forward' in internet browsers.

The build quality is excellent and the rubber feel around the edges of the mouse is very comfortable. I'm not overly keen with the shiny plastic casing over the top of the mouse. It's not too great if your hands are sweaty. Apparently each mouse has a slightly different pattern which makes the mouse appear to have bumps and ridges.

The movement of the mouse is incredibly smooth. I'm not used to optical mice at all! I am experiencing the hovering movement as I thought, which is a little distracting at times, but I'm sure I'll adjust soon enough.

So far, I've found the MX518 to be a great mouse. The MX518 retails for around £30 on the Internet. Recommended if you don't mind paying that bit extra!

Stringing Time

After work I popped into Wigmore Tennis shop near Bond Street to leave my racket in for restringing. I'm quite excited as I'm going to try out the popular Big Banger strings by Luxilon.

Anyway, I was hoping to pick it up tomorrow evening but the guy said the earliest that it could be done by was Saturday. This got me thinking about Japan again.

It cost me about 1/2 to 2/3 the price to string my rackets in Japan and the service was great - many shops offer same day stringing or even 45 minute stringing services!

Who You Are

A while back I started reading Derren Brown's Tricks of the Mind book. I say started because I still haven't finished. It's a strange collection of chapters discussing everything from religion to hypnosis and it has so far failed to really hook me.

One part of the book talks about a lady who comes across as really abrupt. Whether it was on the phone or by e-mail, I forget, but she claimed that she wasn't really nasty and that she was misunderstood.

Derren Brown says that it doesn't really matter what she think she's like - the reasoning being something along the lines of if she is coming across as rude to other people then she is rude, whatever she thinks of herself.

But it does matter what you think of yourself. If we are too negative this can have a large impact on our confidence and self-esteem. We need to have a balanced view of ourselves and try to be content with our personalities, even if we are not perfect. We can't believe everything that people tell us about ourselves. They are only opinions afterall.

Likewise, I don't think you can say that it doesn't matter what other people think about you. It might sound ideal, but you have to consider what people think of you in many situations. The question is, how much should we react to other people's perceptions about us and to what degree should we care?

Twenty's Plenty

Kind of clever, don't you think? I took this picture in East London in a 20 mph zone.

Venice Photos

On the side bar to the right you should find a new gallery: Venice 2007!

> All Photo Galleries

Disabled

How about this for a well timed photograph I took from the passenger seat of a car? I don't know why exactly, but I really like this picture.

In the Zone

Have you ever experienced being 'in the zone'? Perhaps this is most applicable to sports but I'm sure it occurs elsewhere, too. You experience a period where you don't have to 'try' or even think, you simply 'do' and spectacular results come naturally.

I experience this very rarely but it happened yesterday playing tennis. For a good few games I simply couldn't miss. Every shot I hit seemed destined to land in, if not be a winner. The timing of my strokes seemed perfect no matter what shot I hit. My friends stood in awe, but so did I. It was fantastic.

Typically, after a while I started thinking about how long it would last and then I started feeling a slight pang of hunger. Once you doubt yourself, it's all over. I hit three returns into the net and returned to a normal level of play.

I once heard a professional player, Agassi I believe, describing a match where everything went right. He described the ball as if it were the size of a basketball! Was this a similar experience as I had, albeit at a very amateur level?

What is being in the zone? I'd hazard a guess that it happens when you are relaxed and let your 'muscle memory' from practice take over, as if you are on auto pilot. Wouldn't it be great if it happened more often?

Venice

After four nights and the best part of five days in Venice I'm now back in the UK.

Venice is truly beautiful. The old buildings, canals, bridges and narrow passageways produce a unique and romantic experience. It's a photographer's dream - it's hard to take a poor photo in Venice.

If you like your ice cream, you will love Venice. There are all sorts of flavours including banana, apple, pear, tiramisu, my favourite pistachio, and even chocolot hazelnut if you travel to the right area.

But for how long can these feelings last? If you are like me then I'd recommend going for two nights, otherwise you may grow a little weary of the trekking back and forth across the city. Believe me, you will be doing a lot of walking, even if you take the river bus boats. This can be quite a task with temperatures reaching nearly 30 Degrees Celcius (approx.) at this time of the year.

Another reason to go earlier (or later) in the year is hayfever. Don't forget your medicine if you are a fellow sufferer. I had to double my dosage and was still sneezing and sniffing constantly. Three out of the four people in my group suffered very badly.

Another thing you may not like is being totally swamped by the sheer number of tourists. Venice seems to be 99% tourists, 1% locals! The big site-seeing spots are obviously the worst. Piazza San Marco was awful, with people everwhere. I truly hated being there, though there was some restbite inside the impressive Doge's Palace. It's definately worth doing some exploring and walking along the hidden back streets to enjoy the beauty of Venice without hoardes of people on your heels.

Other things to watch out for are the expensive yet poor restaurants, which mostly make you pay a cover charge and then whack on 12% service. Take a guide book to avoid dissapointments. Cruel as it may be, we had a good laugh at one of our friends who had a very bad squid cooked in it's own black ink (very brave!). As bad as it was he still finished it all off!

My last winge is about mosquitoes. On the first night I had a disturbed night's sleep with that horrible buzzing noise around my head. Despite wearing long trousers tucked into my socks (yes, that's right!) and a long sleeved shirt, they got me four times: once in each hand and once on each ear! My ears were swollen and fat for two days and the itchyiess was unbearable. I felt like Dumbo!

All in all, I'm very happy to be home. The cold rainy weather was a joy to behold upon our touchdown at Heathrow.

To Venice

It's bank holiday time in the UK tomorrow and on Friday so I'm off to Venice in the morning! See you soon!

English Tennis

Yesterday I went along to a tennis club to look around and join in the 'club night', where club members turn up and play casually, then lounge around at the bar.

The facilities were good with a total of ten tennis courts, three acrylic/sand courts and seven hard courts. I was given a small piece of paper with a security code on it to get into the changing rooms. Lots of people had left their bags in there but it wasn't all that secure considering they hand out the code to prospective members without even taking their particulars.

As I had expected being a Friday night, there weren't many young people around. I'd say most of the youngest tennis players were in their 30s. Also, the standard was quite low. However, I was told that there are various teams and whatever your level there is someone to play with. It's hard to judge whether to fork out £500 based on that advice, though.

I found playing tennis with English people utterly alien to me. It's totally different to playing with Japanese people, whom I play with regularly. All the time I kept having to stop myself from replying in Japanese.

It felt to me like there was a distinct lack of tennis etiquette last night inspite of the fact that everyone was very friendly. People return balls to the other side of the court, but don't even aim at the server or wait for the server to be in a position to receive the ball. I saw people lift the net and kick balls back, too! There's also a lot more banter going on between points, or so it felt.

In terms of rules, they played '1st one in.' which means on the first point of your first service game you can keep serving until you get the ball in. I've never played that before. It also feels strange how people simply say, 'No.' when the ball is out whereas a Japanese person will never say that and will typically point to the sky like an official (and a ball which is in gets a baseball 'safe' gesture pointing to the ground).

Back in the changing rooms there were a couple of young French guys getting changed. One of them looked at my racket and said, 'Oh, the old Prestige. Can I take a look?' He seemed impressed saying that the old ones were best but was unaware that the Prestige Classic had been re-released. I'm guessing these guys were pretty good, but where were they playing?

Captcha

A friend has come to visit England from Japan. We caught up the other day and were talking about this website. As usual his excuse for not posting more comments was that the 'comment' link is too small. That's not really valid seeing as he obviously knows where the link is!

Then he told me something that surprised me. He said that on numerous occasions he had typed out a short comment, clicked on 'post' but after being confronted by the 'CAPTCHA screen' ("unauthenticated commenters will be required to pass a test that helps validate that they are a person and not a machine"), he had given up. Another friend said he'd done the same in the past.

I remember one of my readers complaining about the hassle of CAPTCHA. Though I could turn it off I am sure I'd get loads more spam comments like before. I might turn it off for a while in the future if it's really putting people off posting comments.