Firetop

So today my wife and I went for the twenty week ultrasound at East Surrey Hospital to check on junior’s progress. Suzie_Q wouldn’t let me find out what the sex is, apparently rather than being able to plan, it’s more exciting to wait until D-Day. However, I think I definitely spotted something which gave away the sex as being a boy whilst the nurse was closely measuring the femur. With legs that are off the ‘above average’ scale it’s certainly looking like being very tall, so either it’s a mini-me or a supermodel. Other male indicators have been the chinese chart (which is apparently correct ninetynine percent of the time) and the needle on a thread direction test - conducted by a non blood relative on sacred ground whilst holding a bible and stroking a black cat… (more…)

I bought a Toshiba Satellite Pro laptop a few weeks ago, I got sick of the iBook to be honest - it’s pretty but the CD drive packed up (I’m definitely a PC man!). To make life easier I wanted a docking station so that I could come and go quickly, to and from my office. Instead I had to settle for a port replicator. This handy device plugs into the laptop on a USB port, and everything else plugs into it - saving me the hastle of inserting and removing multiple connections from the laptop each day. However, I did discover a keyboard and mouse ’PS2′ problem with this particular model - the ‘Toshiba Port Replicator II’. (more…)

At 5:30am on Sunday, having loaded our vehicle the day before, we drove down to Dorking Station to set up our stall for the car boot sale and sell lots of items recently superseded by newer wedding gifts. It’s still dark at that time, but that doesn’t stop the keenest bargain hunters armed with torches, grabbing things whilst you unload and set up. We’d expected this early-arrival hassle – it goes with the territory… but what we hadn’t expected was for BBC1’s daytime classic ‘Car Booty’ to set up a pitch right opposite ours. (more…)

On Friday evening, after celebrating the birthday of a colleague with drinks at the Island Queen Pub in Islington (no it wasn’t a gay Hawaiian pub), I was pretty hungry when I got back to Dorking at 11:35pm. I phoned my wife to see if she might be able to pick me up at the station, but she was wavering on making me get a cab… until I threw a Kebab offer in. Being five months pregnant Suzie_Q has an enormous appetite right now, the arrival of food is celebrated like Christmas morning by an excited child, I knew a Kebab offer would get me a lift home! (more…)

Having just read an article in Advertising Age entitled ‘How Google Has Helped Build Brand Advertising Online‘ I think it’s worth pointing out that Google has also helped to do the exact opposite. I’m not disputing Tim Armstrong’s description of how ‘Saturn’ used Google Earth and Google Video to let people find dealerships and view product videos… but lets be realistic - how many cutting edge campaigns have we really seen like that recently? Instead what we have is a mass market of long tail niche advertisers, who have often been introduced to web advertising for the first time via Google Adwords… and now obsess over click rates and measurable RoI. It’s hitting everything from the Yellow Pages to standard banner advertising. (more…)

If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that I’m quite a hard person to please. When it comes to the Xbox 360 I’m even fussier; last month I slated award winning Gears of War (and still stand by that decision). This month, rather pleasingly, I became completely addicted to the demo version of Lost Planet on Xbox Live. I loved it so much that within a week I phoned my wife to have her buy the full game for me whilst she was out shopping. That decision has not disappointed; hours of immersion on Lost Planet pass by in the blink of an eye. Get up early enough on a Saturday and fight against a large population of Japanese players, not something I’ve come across before - but finally handy for the year I spent learning Japanese at secondary school - “Hajime mashte”. (more…)

On Saturday evening Suzie_Q and I went for drinks in Crawley to celebrate my cousin’s belated birthday, our destination was the Rat and Parrot pub. We’ve been there before, it’s a bit on the rough side with clientele that probably wouldn’t look out of place at ‘The Jockey’ in TV’s Shameless; it lacks character, the staff seem to deliberately ignore you at the bar and it would be very easy to inadvertently get into a fight. When we arrived at the Rat and Parrot the doormen were checking ID, when we presented them with our driving licenses both sides were scanned into a laptop. “What’s that for?” I asked the bouncer, to which he replied in a deep voice “So if there’s any trouble we can find out”, “Where’s the data stored?” I asked… “Oh it’s just for Crawley you know, to check nobody has been banned.” I was slightly disconcerted by the fact my ID had been scanned and stored without my permission by somebody who didn’t seem to fully understand why. (more…)

I’ve been letting a lot of my registered domain names go over recent years, keeping just the very best ones with earning potential. It’s easy to waste money on a bad domain - not so easy to make money from the good ones unless you know how. I learned a lot about domains during my 2004 domain research project, these days my remaining fifty domains are earning a nice income using the Sedo domain parking service. By pointing domains at Sedo, domain ‘guessers’ or ‘direct typers’ are presented with relevant Google adverts - and I get paid a click commission. With around 30% of people clicking through it’s not a bad way to make a living in your sleep - whilst providing a helpful service. (more…)

Valentine’s Day – a day of love, romance and kissing… lots of kissing if London is anything to go by; come early evening the Tube was jammed with couples kissing on platforms and in carriages… not snogging, just repeatedly kissing each other and whispering sweet nothings – all quite nauseating. Suzie_Q and I were off to the Royal Opera House to see the opening night of Madama Butterfly – a Christmas present I bought my wife… to be received on Valentine’s Day – see what I did? Genius This was our first outing to the opera… and I can also safely say it will be our last. (more…)

It first got my attention a few weeks ago, there on an advert at King’s Cross tube station were Mark and Jeremy from Channel Four’s ’Peep Show’ - Mark claiming to be a PC and Jeremy an Apple Mac. Then I opened the Metro newspaper and there they were again on a double page spread. Actors David Mitchell & Robert Webb have sold their souls to Apple to help kill the PC with a UK equivalent of a campaign already run in the US and Japan. At first I wasn’t sure if Apple aligning their brand with a good for nothing, lazy, pot smoking lay-about ‘Jeremy’ was a positive thing, but now, having seen the Mac vs. PC adverts online I think it’s a move of genius (whether they were deliberately aligning with character Jeremy rather than actor Robert Webb I’m not 100% certain). (more…)