Notes to Myself

Dirty Keyboards

In the Metro this morning there was an article about how grimy computer keyboards can be. Here's a similar BBC article.

One of the keyboards tested in the survey was had more germs than one of the toilets tested! It certainly makes you think if you eat in front of your computer each day.

Although the keyboard I'm using at work is relatively new looking - not much falls out when I tip it upside down like the last one I had to use - I gave it a scrubbing with some washing up liquid. Don't get me started on the office phones...

Wireless Photos

Do your photos stay on your digital camera or computer without you having time to upload them all to share with your friends and family? I certainly have that problem. Is the following the answer?

Blog Photos Directly From Your Digital Camera with Eye-Fi

An intriguing piece of kit! I wonder how well it would work in practice?

Although I wanted to keep all of my photos on my website itself, I am now considering moving my day-to-day photos to a service such as Flickr or Picasa. I've used Flickr in the past but not Picasa. Which would you recommend? Or are there other services I should consider?

www.jlpt.mobi

The perfect domain for a mobile Japanese Language Proficiency Test site:

www.jlpt.mobi

This domain is now open for bidding.

www.gaijin.mobi

When the mobi domains became available I registered a few domains. I've decided to try GoDaddy's Domain Name Aftermarket to auction off the first of these domains:

www.gaijin.mobi

It's a great domain to have but I don't have the time to devote to developing a new site at the moment. I'm sure most of my readers will know that this commonly used term means 'foreigner' in Japanese. I was thinking a parody site might be good fun.

Any potential buyers? Place your bids!

Mario Galaxy

I bought Super Mario Galaxy on a friend's recommendation and so far it hasn't disappointed.

The controls feel natural after a few minutes of play. You've got all the usual Mario moves plus an additional spin attack activated by a brief shake of the controller. The ability to point at the screen adds to the game, too.

On top of the controls, it's the quirky 'hyper 3D' graphic worlds and and great Nintendo presentation that really impacts your experience. Jumping around on tiny planets and flying between them constantly changes the flow of game, even if you are chasing stars within the same galaxy.

The only downside I can find in the game so far is that it's easy. Mind you, I've only just started playing so perhaps the difficulty gradually increases. Also, I think that Mario Sunshine suffered from being too fiddly and time consuming. Maybe gamers these days really do require quick satisfaction or do I just have a decreasing attention span?!

Though the game is only just unfolding I can still already say one thing of Mario Galaxy - creative genius!

ShopTo

A special note must go to www.ShopTo.net who held up to their promise of 'Shop late - play tomorrow'. I ordered at 5:20pm and Mario Galaxy arrived the next morning - with free registered delivery!

160 Megapixels

Now this is a camera!

http://uk.gizmodo.com/2008/01/19/the_160mp_digital_camera_its_a.html#more

The Seitz 6x17 is supposedly capable of capturing images at up to 160MP! That means one full resolution wouldbe 900MB in size. Is this a hoax?

Amazon Delivers

Today is the last day to place your orders on Amazon.co.uk for First Class deliveries before Christmas. I've got a voucher to use myself, actually. What to buy?

At the same time as doing your last minute shopping you can help me pay my hosting fees by clicking through from one of the links above. You know you want to ;)

Selling Domains

Have you ever sold domain names before? Maybe you can offer me some advice. A while back I purchased a few domains but I'd like to sell them. I won't name them but one of them is pretty sellable but fits a niche market.

I've found GoDaddy's Domain Name AfterMarket (see example domain name auctions), which costs $4.99/year, though I'm not sure of the fees for listing domains and whether they charge comission.

Another service called Sedo is free to join and there is no fee for listing a domain. If you domain sells you pay 10% commission.

Do you know of any other domain name selling services you could recommend?

Pay Pal Policy

This isn't my first grumble regarding PayPal. Far enough, the service is convenient for buying on sites like eBay and makes it easy for individuals to receive money from auctions or even friends and family around the world.

Paying via PayPal once you have Direct Debits set up is quick and painless, but what about the other way around? Today I tried to transfer my PayPal balance to my bank account and I find it hard to believe that this will take 5-7 working days.

I know that standard banks typically take up to three business days to transfer money to different banks which is bad enough, but 5-7 days? Then there is the small charge for transfers under £50, encouraging users to leave their money with PayPal.

Is there a good reason for all of this, or is PayPal just making an extra week's interest from its users' money?

Markdown

Have you heard of Markdown? It's supposed to be a simpler way of formatting your text, which then gets converted into HTML for you. This functionality has now been built into TypePad.

A couple of examples which I'll copy and paste here are:

*italic* or _italic_
**bold** or __bold__
***bold and italics*** or
___bold and italics___

The * and _ characters are basically your 'tags' but look a little simpler. There are other types of syntax in Markdown such as simple ways to create links, lists and block text.

It's an interesting idea, but I wonder if it will take off. Although this could be useful for new bloggers who don't know HTML I have a feeling it might just start confusing people who dare to look at their code.

> Markdown on TypePad
> More information about Markdown

Face Book

Are you a member of Face Book?

Face Book seems to be the latest craze on the Internet. 'There are just so many people on it.' 'The design is great.' 'Are you going to sign up?' Everyone is talking about it at work.

Through Face Book people have discovered interesting things about fellow colleagues. Pictures, links to videos... Is this a good thing? How long do you think it will all last?

A few years ago I did sign up to a couple of similar sites such as High 5 but I wasn't all that impressed.

I do, however, still use Mixi, a Japanese social community site. It's quite slick and I've met interesting people through it, such as tennis partners.

Quidco

Have you heard of sites like Quidco which offer cashback on internet shopping?

The theory is that if you become a member of Quidco and they have an affiliation with a site you want to purchase from, you click through Quidco and then the referral fee is returned to you. Depending on the site you are ordering from you might expect something like 1-3% cashback.

In return, if your cashback balance is high enough you will be charged a five pounds fee for the year. When you get paid the remaining balance depends on your settings but the money can be transferred to your bank account or PayPal account.

I first used Quidco a couple of months back when I was ordering lots of computer components. I have finally received a mail detailing my first payment. After the yearly deduction I will only get about five pounds sent to my PayPal account.

Unless you do a very large amount of shopping on the Web I'm not sure how worthwhile Quidco is, but it's worth a try if you are counting all the pennies!

One Dollar

Surpass Hosting are having a sale on their Shared Hosting Plans where you would only pay one US dollar which works out to be 53 pence) for the entire year!

800GB disk space, 6000GB bandwidth - normally $25/month.

It may sound dodgy but a colleague has signed up and has been singing Surpass Hosting's praises.

The deal supposedly ends today so if you want to sign up you'd better hurry!

http://www.surpasshosting.com/content/onelove/

PayPal Dispute

eBay Auction

Some time in November, possibly early November, I put a bid on an eBay auction for 3 tennis rackets. The owner described them as used but in mint condition. I asked about chips and scratches and was told that there were a couple of small chips, nothing major.

I won the auction and when the rackets arrived I was shocked. All three rackets were heavily scuffed with many small scratches on the paintwork. On top of this there were loads of chips to the paintwork, some at least 7mm in length.

Worse still, one racket wasn't even the same model as the other two! Could it get worse? Yes, one had a missing butt cap. None of this was described in the auction.

Paypal

The seller claimed that he had sold the rackets on behalf of someone else and had already passed the money on. Therefore, according to the seller a refund is not possible.

I opened a dispute via Paypal and waited over a month for a response. Yesterday, I finally got an e-mail, but it was somewhat shocking. Here is a part of it:

GAME

At the end of November, a friend told me that the GAME website was offering buy one get one free offers on certain XBox games. I thought I'd buy a couple as a treat to play after the JLPT and chose Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Chaos Theory and Ghost Recon 2: Summit Summit Strike for just £9.99!

My order was placed on the 2nd of December and although it was apparently dispatched, it never arrived. My games are still missing five weeks later! I have sent about 3 messages to GAME and have had no reply whatsoever. How about that for poor customer service? I've given up on e-mail, so next I'll see whether or not there phone line is manned.

I'd like to point out that my friends have had fast service from GAME, though some have reported that customer service can indeed be slow. Although you may get a cheap deal, be careful...

XBox Bargain!

A few weeks ago a colleague was telling me that Argos was doing a great deal on the XBox. For £79.99 you could get the XBox with one controller and 4 games (Forza, Halo 2, PGR2 & Fable 4) for just £79.99.

He snapped one up and has been buying classic XBox games which are now going for between £5 and £10. Quite a shrewd guy, I thought.

This week there has been a further reduction and you can now get this special offer - XBox with 4 games for an amazing £49.98!!! I nipped down to Argos this morning and bagged myself an XBox, something I never thought I'd do. With it's back-catalogue of great games and at that price, it's an opportunity you can't miss!

To order online (you can reserve online and then pick it up in-store to save on the postage), first add the XBox itself to your basket, then add the four game bundle which should then register as £0.00!

Does anybody have any game recommendations for the XBox? I'll have to get my hands on an extra controller and get Top Spin Tennis.

Of course, I won't be opening my XBox until at least next Sunday - after the Japanese Proficiency Language Test. Resist the urge!

Associates

After realizing that my Amazon Associate ID was only applicable to www.amazon.com I have signed up for the www.amazon.co.uk scheme. Ideally I'd like to post links to both the UK version of Amazon as well as the .com version.

However, it seems that within TypePad I cannot do both at the same time! So, I either post all my links to the .com address or the .co.uk address. This is quite limiting as different version of Amazon often feature different products. For example, I plan to sign up for the Japanese version of Amazon Associates in order to link to Japanese study materials available only in Japan. As my IDs are different for each domain, this is a bit of a problem.

In any case, I've added a few product links to my side bar just to see what the click through rate will be. To those of you who don't like the links, I do apologise, but it would greatly help to subsidise my costs if people click through to Amazon and buy the occasional book or DVD.

If you are planning on buying anything on Amazon, you'd be doing my a favour by clicking through from any of my links on this page.

> Shop at Amazon UK

Google Money

After opening my post I thought that someone was playing a trick on me. What's this, a cheque written out in American dollars? Is this junk mail. Upon closer inspection it turned out to be from Google!

AdSense ads have been on my site for quite a while now and as the click through rate is quite low and I never hear anything from Google, I had almost forgotten about them.

It's against the Google AdSense rules to discuss exact amounts received, so I won't got into detail. I can say that you need to reach $100 in order for a cheque to be sent out... That will go nicely towards the amount I've spent during the last year on my blog.

Natwest told me that it would cost £10 in order to process the American cheque! What's more, it can take up to 28 days because they have to send it off. Surprisingly, Halifax tole me the exact same thing. Can't I cash this cheque for cheaper than this?!

Actually, I did a quick Google search to find that other people had the same issue. I'll have to look into it in more detail or just pay the £10 fee and be done with it. I could do with a little extra cash in the run up to Christmas!

Jet Li

Try this fantastic face reconition/famous look-alike site for a bit of fun! Simply upload a JPG image of a face and see which famous faces are close matches.

I'm not quite sure how but I came out as Jet Li - well he was the coolest of the matches I got ;)

VISA Debit

I've always used my VISA credit card for internet transactions on overseas websites. However, for some strange reason last month's monthly TypePad payment failed. Although I hadn't changed anything I got an AVS error which apparently means the billing address on record doesn't match the details my credit card provider holds.

When I phoned my credit card provider they insisted that there was nothing wrong with the card. All that they could suggest was that the problem might be caused by a space missing from my post code. But I can't imagine that was the problem seeing as I've made numerous monthly payments on the same card.

As a short term solution I used a VISA debit card and was pleasantly surprised that it seemed to act like a VISA credit card, although obviously my account was immediately debited. Unfortunately I forgot about the service charge incurred with 'overseas spending' - d'oh!. Luckily in this case was only £1.50 but for such a small transaction it's quite a significant amount. Be aware of these charges when you go on holiday!

eBay Express

Have you seen eBay Express yet?

Just New. Just Shops. Just Now.

That's what the blurb says. It looks as though eBay have teamed up with real businesses to offer all sorts of brand new products.

I've just had look and although there are no tennis products as yet, there is a series of Dell computers which caught my eye.

Has anyone used this new service? I'd be interested in any feedback.

Tenniszine

The first blog I've seen devoted to tennis, Tenniszine. An interesting read and worth a look if you're into tennis.

Eclipse

With my Demon broadband, I maxed out at 0.5Mbps, but since changing to Eclipse last week, my speeds have been much much better!

When I've run speed tests, the results have fluctuated quite a lot, but with the slowest so far being at least twice as fast as my previous connection, and my highest speed clocked at 3.9Mbps, I'm overjoyed!

If you decide to make the switch to Eclipse, please enter "DARREN" when asked for a referral code ;)

Why Two Taps?

British bathrooms usually have two taps instead of one because, historically, British plumbing provides hot and cold water at different pressures, meaning mixer taps are more difficult to fit.

Read more interesting facts from BBC's 10 things we didn't know last week.

Hacker Required

What do you make of this job advert I came across on the Internet?

Programmer/Hacker Required

Got some time to spare and some mad skills? Cool new company seeks web developer looking for a summer job. Dare you to apply.

Live Tennis

According to the BBC website, this year's Wimbledon Championships will be broadcast live on the BBC Sport website. Nice!

The service will be available to UK broadband users and will mirror terrestrial and interactive coverage. Three-minute highlight packages rounding up each day's play will be available to a global audience.

How do you suppose they will enforce this? Via IP addresses or site registration?

Moving Mt. Fuji

If you had an infinite supply of water and a 5 litre and 3 litre bucket, how would you measure exactly 4 litres?

This was a question which I wasn't expecting at one interview I attended. A logic puzzle? It reminded me of a book I'd purchased a while back but hadn't got around to reading, How Would You Move Mount Fuji? Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle, by William Poundstone.

After reading some of the book it is evident that this type of puzzle, along with 'impossible' questions, have become commonplace, especially amongst high-tech companies. Designed to put your problem solving skills on the spot and under pressure, it's not the most pleasant of experiences.

I found an article from 2003, Wired News - Landing a Job Can be Puzzling, which shows that this is not just a recent trend.

If you are interested in reading tackling some baffling riddles, puzzles and questions, try these sites:

> AceTheInterview.com - Microsoft Interview Questions
> Interview Questions - Microsoft, etc.

Google Mars

Google Mars anyone? Whatever next?

String Tension

I've come across a freeware piece of software called Freqmess. Using a microphone and this software, you can apparenlty measure the actual tension of your tennis strings. By entering the type and thickness of string you are using and then hitting your strings to produce vibration, this software attempts to calculate string tension. I've had erratic results so far, but may play around with it some more.

> Freqmess - Tension Measuring Tool.

String Forum

For everything you ever wanted to know about tennis strings, visit http://www.stringforum.net.

Sick Mask

I snapped this image on the Odakyu Line, Kanagawa-ken, Japan. I wonder if this kind of thing could catch on here in England?

TrackBack Hell

TrackBacks have been causing me great furiation of late. Many 'organisations' seem to be targetting this blog with spam TrackBacks every day. Deleting these takes time and is plain frustrating. Banning IPs has limited results and so from now on I shall be disabling TrackBacks on all new posts.

I may start disabling TrackBacks and comments on old posts too. Unfortunately, there is no way to mass disable trackBacks or comments in the TypePad interface, though I think I may have a workaround. Ideally, I'd like a new feature to do this, or a feature to turn off new trackBacks or comments after X amount of days, or similarly, to only allow trackBacks or comments on the last X posts.

Amazon Referral

Not long back I received an e-mail from Amazon associates. Without breaking the rules and going into too much detail, I was shocked to see actual purchases, though of products not featured anywhere on this site. So 'indirect' purchases also count.

Anyway, it occured to me that if anyone was intending to buy something on Amazon they could click an Amazon link on a blog site first in order to give someone a referral. But I wouldn't actively encourage such an activity...

Jazz Up Your Japanese With Onomatopoeia

New Year Again

Did you join in with any Chinese New Celebrations yesterday?

For those of you wondering what you can see in London, have a look at these BBC pages:

London: Chinese New Year 2006 | Photo Gallery

Sadly, I only got one little red packet this year ;(

Browser Share

For those of you techy types, what do you make of the browser share stats for this website? Firefox is doing pretty well, but I thought it had a bigger percentage the last time I checked.

Please don't ask me which blues and which yellows are which ;)

Google on TV

The World According to Google which was aired on BBC Two today, 1900 GMT, is available to watch online in full! I've never watched a whole streamed TV programme before. Well, I have now.

Serve Trouble

Justine Henin-Hardenne ensured Martina Hingis suffered a first-round exit at her latest comeback event, the Sydney International, on Monday. [BBC Sport]

I couldn't help but laugh and feel sorry for Martina Hingis after hearing what Justine Henin-Hardenne said after beating her:

"I had a little bit of trouble on the return. It's never been easy for me to return against a player who's serving pretty slowly," said the Belgian.

Ouch. Anyway, good luck to Martina on her comeback trail.

Eating Sushi

Click on the link below and then click on 'watch this video' under the main sushi picture.

> How to Eat Sushi Video Page

Warning: very funny!

Mario Bros Clip

Here's a funny video clip of some people performing Mario Bros. music for all you Nintendo:

> Mario Bros Music Video on Google

[Credit & thanks to Yaz.]

Hard & Cute

These hard-looking boys walked along rapping to the music they were listening to. But if you look closely you will see a cute side to them - how cute!

Snow Oblivion

My feelings about Sunday's Japanese exam seem to be described well by this photo.

Tip Jar

Has anyone noticed the green 'Tip Jar' on my site? I have aptly named it 'Tips 4 Del'. From the Six Apart site I quote:

You put effort into your weblog - now you have the opportunity to enjoy the fruits of your effort. And to make it easy, the Tip Jar feature works via PayPal, so millions of weblog readers can simply drop cash in to your weblog from their PayPal accounts or directly from their credit cards.

I especially like the way it uses PayPal and that proceeds can be automatically put towards paying your TypePad subscription costs. The tip jar seems like a nice idea but how likely is the average blogger to receive many of these tips, even if the minimum tip is $2? I'm guessing quite few.

Even loyal readers like yourself wouldn't be tempted to reward an unemployed blog writer to help pay for hosting, now would you? Should I make no tips by Christmas my little tip jar shall be smashed into tiny pieces after being ripped from my side bar.

Compensation

If you are a TypePad user, how badly were you affected by the service problems last month? The TypePad team made a generous offer of 15 free days hosting in compensation for this less than perfect service.

Now this is great, but there was one part which really had me thinking. In the e-mail sent out by TypePad, there was a link which brought you to a page which enabled you to choose how much extra (or less) compensation you would like. These two options were included:

The performance issues affected me greatly, making my experience unacceptable for most of the month. Give me 45 free days of TypePad.

I really wasn't affected and feel I got the great service I paid for last month. Thank you for the offer, but please don't credit my account.

This choice bothered me for a few days, after all, I am not exactly rolling in money at the moment and a month and a half of free service would be fantastic. If the level of service had been truly and utterly awful, then of course I wouldn't hesistate to take up such an offer, but it wasn't as bad as that. But perhaps I could say the problems 'greatly affected me'.

I couldn't help but feel like I was being tested by this choice, like it was a test of human conscience and honesty. How many people would not take up the 45 days free days, even if the level of service they had experienced wasn't that bad? Maybe only those who had not read the e-mail or those very few incredibly honest people who cannot bear to lie?

London Tennis

"London Tennis puts adult players in touch with one another for competitive singles or doubles matches or for practice hits."

> http://www.londontennis.co.uk

[Thanks to Masato for this link.]

River Scene

This was a photo I took recently from close to Embankment Tube station in London. As I'm quite proud of it and thought that some of you might appreciate it, I've uploaded a it here as well as to my photoblog. If you look closely you can see St. Paul's Cathedral, the 'Erotic Gherkin' and the moon.

> www.drippinglotus.com

Tennis Partners

Are you a tennis player with a lack of friends playing partners? If so then you might want to check out Tennis Rendezvous! I'll be signing up soon, then.

> http://www.tennisrendezvous.com

Fall Back

I'd never heard of this before until last night, but a useful way to know which way the clocks are going to change is to remember the following:

Spring Forward, Fall (Autumn) Back

Summer time is now in force from the last Sunday in March until the last Sunday in October.

> http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com/info/bst.htm

i-am-i-mode

Following my post this week on English i-mode, I've found the English i-mode website from O2 - notice the Japanese in the Macromedia Flash title.

> http://i-am-imode.co.uk

Flexpoint Tour

May I present the Head Flexpoint Radical MP Tour tennis racket.

Though I had planned on sticking with my trusty Liquidmetal Radical MP Tour for a good while to come, I started to like the idea of picking up its successor (the Flexpoint) after finding out that the newer model has similar specs, but that it has a more open string pattern, lending itself to greater spin. The whole Flexpoint technology wasn't really a huge pulling factor for me - I mean, I didn't really buy my current racket just for the 'Liquidmetal'.

After some searching and some eBay bidding I picked one up for £65 - not bad considering the £150 RRP! Also of note, though the racket is a bit scratched up, it came with Head FiberGEL 16 strings at 60lbs.

Well, here is the official line from Head about Flexpoint Technology. I find it interesting how the breakthrough Liquidmetal technology which was boasted about so much with my current racket is now hardly visible next to the Flexpoint paintwork, dimples & holes. In a nutshell, the idea is for the racket to flex in the hoop rather than along the length of the racket, cupping the ball for greater control.

Below you can see my two Radical MP Tours next to each other - the Liquidmetal & the Flexpoint. They are similar in many ways, though the newer Flexpoint has a more open string pattern and a slightly bigger head size (100 vs 98), though it appears slightly less head-light.

Today I took out my new racket for a spin on the circuit (yeah, ok, it was just down in the local park), and boy, was I impressed! The amount of spin is far greater than I can generate than with my Liquidmetal racket and so really swinging at the ball feels far safer, with the spin dragging the ball back into the court at the last moment. Also, I was very surprised with how much power I was generating with strings which are tighter than I normally play with. This racket may have already replaced my Liquidmetal as my racket of choice!

After hitting for quite a while, my wrist was a little sore. To avoid further tennis injuries I am very keen on playing with 'safe' raquets. Today, however, I was hitting hard more often than normal so it's really too early for a fair comparison.

Update, January 2006: I no longer play regularly with the Flexpoint Radical Tour. Though I like it in various ways, especially with regards to spin, after extended play it feels harsher on my arm than the LiquidMetal Radical Tour, so for now I'm sticking with the LM version.

Opera 8.5

My favourite browser has been updated to version - Opera 8.5 has been released! Now totally free there is no excuse not to try "the fastest browser on earth", a browser packed full of features. You won't regret it!

More than one million people have downloaded the Opera browser in the two days since Opera announced it was dropping the ad banner and going completely free.

There is the odd occasion where Opera doesn't render a page correctly, in which I revert to Firefox . Try the newly released version 1.0.7 too!