Worlds longest sea bridge

Just saw this pic of what is now the world's longest sea bridge. It was built in Eastern China and at 26 miles long, it could stretch across the English Channel (so much for the channel tunnel lol). Impressive...

Quality counts

The other day my wife triumphantly announced she had found a trampoline selling for 1/4 of the price they normally do. This was terrific as we wanted it for our daughter whose favourite word is “bounce”…

Having spent most of a Sunday trying to put it together using the Pictionary standard destructions it was finally finished… and then we noticed that the frame leg on one side was cracked… not too bad only have to unbolt 4 nuts and put a new frame leg support on. Then we noticed a tear in the trampoline itself… that means taking all the upper part to bits and the biggest pain, rethreading the net. At least she could us it, and bounce she did… big smiles all-round.

And then the zip broke on the safety net… The thought of taking the whole thing to bits, to send it back, to putting up another one and finding similar problems is exhausting in itself. I guess the moral of this story is cheap is cheap for a reason!

Just a test

I’m just playing around with the Tweet Meme button. Mission accomplished- it works!

Technorati Tags: social media,social networking,twitter

Diaspora

Diaspora (pronounced die-ass-pora) is the project of four New York geeks that I came across just recently. Their vision of a social network without the problems of giving away your personal data to big corporations, is something we should all really aspire to. But the only thing now is that Facebook is so huge now (over 400 million users and counting) that it might be difficult to encourage users to switch. But if it does stimulate a mass following, then it should bring change to an industry that really needs to take social networking privacy controls seriously.

Google Instant Search – A to Z

The somewhat anticipated launch of Google’s latest enhancement has gone live today.  Google Instant Search is basically a progression on from the keyword suggestions which have been shown for some time to users as they type into the Google search box.  Instant Search takes this a  significant step further and actually updates the search results themselves as the user types.  Google say that this should reduce the average time taken to perform a search by between 2-5 seconds and thereby save Google/The World more than 3.5 billion seconds every day!

There have already been inevitable criticisms of this by those who decry the additional bandwidth this service requires (miniscule when compared with watching a Youtube rant on the same subject) and those who find the whole idea of change just too bewildering – how long before Time moans about it tomorrow?  For me, this is a very interesting development and makes the deep understanding of a particular target audience even more important in terms of optimising a website for search.

If you haven’t seen it already you should head over to Google to try it out or read a more detailed description (and watch a video) direct from the horse’s mouth.

Oh, and the A to Z?  Well an interesting exercise in vanity/brand awareness is looking at which websites are shown for each single letter of the alphabet.  I’ve seen a USA version but for your interest here is how it breaks down for the UK (for me at least, today).

A is for	Argos		N is for	Next
B is for	BBC		O is for	O2
C is for	Currys		P is for	PayPal
D is for	Debenhams		Q is for	QVC
E is for	eBay		R is for	Rightmove
F is for	Facebook		S is for	Sky
G is for	Google Maps		T is for	Tesco
H is for	Live.com (Hotmail)		U is for	Youtube
I is for	ITV		V is for	Virgin Atlantic
J is for	John Lewis		W is for	BBC Weather
K is for	KLM		X is for	Xbox
L is for	National Lottery		Y is for	Youtube
M is for	MSN		Z is for	Zara

Jacob Old's Google Profile

Just a quick note…

Hello, this is just a quick post to show how very simple it is to upload a picture to a blog via your computer or phone. This post only took a couple of minutes, if that…

Virus writers target smart phones.

It wasn’t that long ago I was having a discussion with friends about the future of computer viruses, and the general consensus was that the next big frontier in virus development would be smart phones. Back then we had phones like the Nokia 3310, but we’ve all moved on from small ‘block’ phones with few applications to ‘wafer thin’ smart phones that are in essence, small computers with sophisticated applications.

On the one hand its great for the companies that write software programs to remove and protect against this malicious software (or malware for short), but not so good for the millions of users who just purchased their new smart phone. This has got to be a concern for Google, with a fresh wave of virus writers targeting the popular Android OS. Check out this link to read more http://bit.ly/aoSzhz