Deliver Us From Swedish Furniture

This article made me chuckle to myself. As someone who has the ability to attract only those women that my friends affectionately call ‘nutters’ the idea of having a ‘grown-up’ sorting things out for me is actually getting to be appealing. I remember a few years ago a friend of mine from university asked his parents to arrange a marriage for him. At the time I was totally amazed as he had spent his entire time running around after blondes and now here he was asking his parents to find him someone from back in Mauritius. When I asked him he confessed “I’m just fed up with all this relationship crap. I just want one that is…you know?” “Ah yeah, yeah, I know” I said in reply, but I must admit that back then I didn’t have a clue what he was on about. However, after another false start of a relationship and another tick added onto my cynicism chart, I am now really getting to understand what he meant.

In the article they mention that the western approach to letting kids get on with sorting out their own relationships as opposed to other cultures where the parents are involved in ‘approving’ the relationship. I must admit, this is still not something I would be too happy with, I mean I can’t even agree with my parents about my choice of car and I know full well they have been less than happy with the girlfriends of mine they have met….although it must be said they probably have a point….about the girlfriends, not the cars!! Still somehow the idea of having a completely data driven approach does appeal to me. The reason? Well firstly, ⇥ Continue reading

Ever heard of Bombing Google? They way Google used to work was to associate the text around the links with the link itself, so you could actually get some idea of the context the link was in, therefore increasing it’s relevancy…or so the theory went. This meant that if you were searching for something like Baked Beans and all the links to Heinz said something like ‘Click here for Baked Beans’ you knew that there was a link between them even though there is not actually any mention of baked beans in the word ‘heinz’. This all worked beautifully until a ⇥ Continue reading

I was reading this article about Facebook relationships and a few things struck me. The first, and most obvious, concerns the bloke that cheated on his girlfriend only to have the woman he cheated on her with look him up on Facebook….ouch, but what an idiot (although not as much of an idiot as this guy….you will need to register to read the thread, but it is very funny and definitely NSFW!)

Secondly, how many of my friends now have the ‘In a relationship with’ or ‘Married to’ status on their profiles. ⇥ Continue reading

Cyber Monday – what the !*&^ are you going on about? Well apparently over in the US retailers noticed that the Monday after Thanksgiving (during which time almost the entire country shuts down) saw an uptick in the sales at online stores. My friend that runs bathroomwall t-shirts has noticed that Monday mornings are one of his busiest days, so you can imagine that after a big holiday this is accentuated as people look for any excuse not to go back to work just yet and have probably just seen the new gadgets and gizmos that their friends and family have (and we can’t have that now can we?) So they just nip online to catch up on the news and have a coffee before getting down to ‘work’…oh yeah and a quick check on Amazon.com ⇥ Continue reading

I still find this amazing. The internet and domain names have been with us for a while and yet people still don’t realise the value of getting the right names. Imagine, if you will, that you are the people back in the 19th Century having made your stake to some land in the US. As more people arrive, the value of the land increases, obvious really. In fact back then the railway baron’s would forcibly ‘negotiate’ the land away from the owners when it became obvious what they had. Fast forward to the internet and domain names are essentially the same thing, but right now there are an awful lot of major brands that do not have the rights to the domain names relevant to them, just have a quick look here. Now some of them are people that have at least some realisation of the value of the domain they are sitting on, cowboys.com for example was a site that sells things to do with cowboys, but they have recently sold it to the Dallas Cowboys. However if you were sitting on Angels.com, wouldn’t you want to do a little more with it than that?

It’s not been a good time for IT security at Pfizer. After admitting to having 34000 employees data stolen by a former employee (although they believe that it is not being used for any nefarious purposes…so that’s all OK then isn’t it!!) and a P2P app letting 17000 employees data slip….oh yeah and a couple of company laptops with a load more employee data going missing they are then caught by some trojan applications hi-jacking some of their PCs and sending out spam for fake watches, penis enlaregement and, naturally, Viagra. ⇥ Continue reading

I found this article about a guy in the Netherlands called Alain-Raymond van Abbe, who claims he has developed a method to combat these types of behaviour. When Iwas younger I was a terrible nail biter, but as I have, ahem, matured, I only have the occasional nibble these days. Apparently this is pretty common as you get older you learn to deal with anxieties/boredom in other ways, which will probably explain my smack habit*.

The problem actually feeds itself as a person that is anxious bites their nails/skin and then feels anxious about the way their hands look and so feel more anxious. So the way he deal with it is two-fold. ⇥ Continue reading

A huge, and I mean huge, spider’s web has been found over a path in Lake Tawakoni State Park, Texas. Apparently when it was first found it was a white sheet and looked etherially beautiful, but since then it has become covered in mosquito carcuses and it even sounds like they are screaming. The 200m curtain of silk has mystified the experts as they don’t know if they really are looking at a plot for the next Stephen King novel or some less scary spiders that just co-operate to build a very big web, but that’s nowhere near as exciting, so I am going to stick with a nice, tabloid friendly ‘ARRRGGHH, giant spiders found in Texas’ approach

I just could not decide on a title for this - it works in just too many ways….so lets have a competition. Answers on a postcard (or in the comments section below, your choice) the winner gets, um their name mentioned on this site, something more valuable than anything else I would give away for this

Why wait for November, when you can stare up at the sky for pretty streaks of light, but without the bangs that scare your dogs? Yes, kids, it’s the time you’ve all waited for, it’s the annual Perseid meteor shower….. ⇥ Continue reading