Blog Random

I’m a bit of a Killers fan. I loved hot Fuss, liked Sam’s Town and am hoping I’ll like new album. I seem to be on the losing side but I like their new song, Human. Once it hits the charts I think people will suddenly change their minds and like it too.

At first I thought the lyrics were “are we human or are we dancers?”. Thinking this couldn’t be right I looked up the lyrics and found its not dancers, its denser. It appears I’m not the only one mishearing the lyrics. Popwatch have an entire article about it, crazy.

I’m 90% sure it is denser now, even if it does sound like dancers. It would be funny if the official lyric was dancer.

P.S. This post is just a segway so that I can gloat I got Killers tickets.

It may seem obvious to most, in fact, its obvious to me… but, don’t leave a magnet resting on your laptop (above the hard drive) while you go to lunch!

I came back from lunch today and the guys in the office were looking at me worriedly. I asked why and they went on to explain that while I was away my laptop began to make loud clicking noises. They soon realised it was the magnet and moved it away but it seems all too late.

Why did I put a magnet on my laptop? I have a couple of those twizzly gadget magnets and I was fiddling with them while I tested out the paypal sandbox (see next post). I decided to go get some lunch and without thinking just popped them on my desk/laptop. Same thing? No.

Plus I hadn’t backed up my photos in a month (all work related stuff gets backed up anyway) so lost all my pictures of Rome and the trip through France. Bummer!

I don’t often take the time to report on a decent service I’ve had. I usually spend more time thinking about and talking about bad experiences but I was very impressed with the guys over at car world uk, in Peterborough.

I was sceptical at first, the car was a pretty good price for what it was (not always a good sign) and I had to travel 2 hours to go see it! Having checked them out on-line and by telephone I went to take a look. Not only was the car great but so was everybody I dealt with. Most car show rooms seem reluctant to help, as if turning up is causing an inconvenience but not this place.

Having got the car home I found something very small wrong with a part of the interior. The part could easily be replaced for £40 and I had a free 3 month warranty, but the warranty wouldn’t cover it. At £40 I was just going to replace it myself but I gave them a call and after refusing to drive back to Peterborough for a cheap part they happily agreed to just reimburse me if I bought it myself - excellent!

To top it all off, they sent me a Christmas card the other week!

If you found this looking for a review of car world, I’d recommend them based on my experience. If you’re a regular reader of the blog, apologies for the niche topic.

This summer I visited Cape town and even though it was winter there the weather and views were far better than here! Its a beautiful place and I often check up on the web cams available of the area. There are even some of the beaches we visited, which is quite cool - if only I’d arranged somebody to take a screenshot of me.

Some of the better and more updated cams I’ve found are:

• Kapstadt.de
• Bay tv (these guys have quite a few)
• Fish Hoek Galley (we went and ate here)

I’m quite proud of some of the photos I took on my point and shooter. As there don’t seem to be too many decent sized images online I thought I’d put them up for all to see. I’ve brought them down to half size to save some space!

Read the rest of this entry »

A friend recently recommended signing up to SeeFilmFirst if I wanted some free tickets for up and coming films in the area. I have to admit, I was a little sceptical, but he’s already been to see one film for free and had a number of emails about others showing locally. I’m yet to get any notifications but I haven’t given up hope yet. I’ll post an update if it works out.

Cinema tickets certainly aren’t cheap but the power of word of mouth seems to outweigh the price of a few cinema tickets for production companies that give out these free tickets. I’m guessing the cinemas don’t lose but, with the price of their food, they’d probably make a profit from most people that attend anyway.

I did a quick ‘google’ for see film first and it appears that the movie tokens they send out are posted all over the web on “free stuff” and “hot deals” websites. If I start getting to see films for free I might see what else I can stop paying for (legally).

I’ve spent the last two weeks working on some plugins and a design for this blog. It’s been good fun and I needed to get rid of the template from wp themes but it took up a lot of spare time. Now that the design is out the way I’m planning to spend a lot more time on some decent quality posts. I don’t want to be a churner (alex king blog).

As for the update, I’ve created my own theme for the blog and added some nifty little features. I wanted to do something a little different and so I’ve moved the “sidebar” content in to a “top bar” (trade mark). On a single post page I’ve used the WP 2.3 Related Posts plugin to put relevant articles in the top bar. I’m not completely happy with the features of this plugin as it only compares tags so I may end up writing my own that caches a full text search.

Other plugins I’m currently using are:

• RB Internal links (for linking to internal posts)
• Random Blog Article (for the blog random favourite above)
• Popularity contest (for the most popular articles)
• All in one seo pack (doing a good job at SEO for the blog)

The blog has only been up about two weeks and its only been on search engines and external sites about a week but I’ve had what I would consider a reasonable number of visitors (125). Thats more than I had even hoped for the first month! Hopefully once I’ve built up the content of the site a little more that number will increase dramatically. Still waiting on my first comment though!