I’ve acquired a new site that peddles another informational product, although this time it’s not cleaning related. MafiaWarSecrets.com is geared towards fans of the popular Mafia Wars game that has taken Facebook and MySpace by storm in recent months.

For a mere 20-bucks, I can tell you a few tricks to get the edge in the game and become the don. You have to wade through the sales copy first, of course. Competition is fairly non-existent and there is already a small but strong band of affiliates taking the brunt of performing promotional activities. Fingers crossed.

There are a slew of banks who offer bespoke designed credit cards, whereby you can upload a family photo or a pin-up and have it featured as the background of the credit card. I thought I’d have a crack at making a design that would provide an un-friendly warning to its users. Excuse my poor attempt at using Photoshop.

It’s been a while since I last shared a weird and whacky invention, but the wait is over.

First, let me share the back story. I’m usually the slow coach in our skiing gang and trail behind the others as we descend a piste. Everyone tends to look the same (especially if your jacket colour matches that worn by the entire ski instructor contingent) so it can become tricky to keep tabs on where your buddies end up.

But fret not, for SkiTails (patent pending) will solve all of your piste-people-spotting woes. The gizmo clips onto your jacket or bag and projects a shiny steamer behind you, providing you pick up a wee bit of speed. Easy to spot for others and the skier enjoys a nice flicking/fluttering sound to emphasis their speed.

Here’s Steve donning an early proof-of-concept prototype:

The commercial prospects aren’t that shabby. They’d be very cheap to produce and distribute and I’m sure Sport 2000/Intersport, the major two ski resort retailers, could be convinced to stock a POS unit on a risk-free basis (ie. providing a buy-back on unsold inventory). Mass-customisation might also be an interesting twist.

Like all good technology enterprises, the key now is to reiterate on the product. Next year shall see a series of trials to test different materials and storage/release mechanisms. You should expect to see SkiTails in all good stockists (alongside JML products) soon.

I’d always figured that low-cost delivery services had killed off the need for passengers to escort packages. Always on the hunt for a bargain, I spent the good part of a Sunday morning poking around to see what I could find out.

As it says on the tin, the general idea is that can get a reduced fare in exchange for accompanying a package, passing it through customs, and meeting a local courier to make the exchange. All in all, it sounds pretty dodgy. But by all accounts, from what I’ve read, very few people have a bad word to say. It seems that you’re charged with man handling paperwork (contracts and the like) that don’t quite make it on the scheduled fleet service (ie. DHL) and that the bounty the airline receives is sufficient to pass it on.

Benefits:

• Heavily discounted prices; you can typically shave off ~50% from the standard fare.
• You get fully fledged tickets for the flight and not just standby tickets (therefore you’re guaranteed a seat).

Pitfalls:

• There’s typically only one ticket available per flight. Therefore, anyone wanting to tag along with you will need to pay the full fare for their ticket.
• After the ticket has been booked, there is zero flexibility in changing flight times or cancelling.
• You may find yourself hanging around at the arrival airport waiting for the local courier.

The only operator on this side of the pond offering courier flights appears to be BA. They have just two scheduled routes; Tokyo and Bangkok, although the latter will be axed in middle of March. Prices are advertised to be in the £300-£500 bracket for a return trip, all inclusive.

I phoned in and provided some dummy dates in July (10-24th) and was quoted £430. Booking online, the same flight was marked up as £768 – just shy of double the price. Flexing the dates, I could knock this down to £622 (which seems to be the absolute minimum), so I should imagine the courier flight could also be equally knocked down if you pick the right dates, perhaps to as low as ~£350. BA World Cargo operates the service and the direct line for courier flight bookings is +448703200301.

I doubt I will avail of this, but I hope this information proves to be helpful to someone. Make sure to bring back a nice gift f it does.

Update: MoneySavingExpert.com has a superb piece on other methods of obtaining cheaper air travel.

Fellow Facebook users can now interact with KeithMander.com using their Facebook profile, thanks to the WP-FBConnect Wordpress plug-in. When commenting on a post, you can opt to skip entering your details and instead connect your Facebook account with the site. Providing that you’re logged into Facebook, you’ll then be automatically logged into the blog each time you return.

Moreover, when you leave a comment, you’ll have the option to share the story with your friends via the news feed on Facebook. I already syndicate the blog via my own news feed, but this feature will allow me to reach both friends of friends, and friends of strangers. Plus, with the combo of the Facebook Comments plug-in, any comments left on Facebook are copied back onto the blog, keeping everything nice and tidy.

It’ll be interesting to see if this expanded distribution will bring a new audience to the blog and foster greater interaction.

Here’s a not particularly pretty graph which shows the number of dreams that I wrote down each day in 2008:

We all dream each and every night, the tricky part is having the discipline to wake up and write them down (and if you don’t, you’ve got practically no chance of remembering it the next day). Some of the dreams were really detailed, while also quite random. Here’s an example from the 3rd April which, with the return of Bauer, is quite apt. Names have been removed to protect the innocent.

I see Jack Bauer and he is with a criminal that has been caught. The criminal is lying on the ground and is hurt. Jack wants to know more about another guy that has got away. He asks for info on what kind of guy he is.

In the next scene, a boy is with his mother (played by X) in a convertible car on their way home. The boy comments that the criminal goes home in a nice car and that he has lots of connections. They go past a car with a man inside holding a rifle.

They arrive home which is a petrol station. The power has just been cut off. The mother is in the room and uses a torch to shine light into the room.

The sister puts on the radio. I turn it off. I lie in bed. A man comes into the room and says “you’re the one who locked the door” and laughs. I throw some rocks at the guy and he then jumps to the side of the bed.

I wake up (at 4AM) feeling very confused and scanned around the room thinking that this was real and that someone was there.

I tallied up all the flights of 2008 and used a flight emissions calculator to access the damage. I took 45 individual flights and travelled 77,590 km. That cost mother Earth 17.1 Tons of CO2, and would’ve set me back 147.49 Royal Pounds (according to ClimateCare.org). Ouch!

Now, since I wasn’t conscious about these said costs, I’ll bail out on paying my dues for last year. However, I vouch that for 2009, I’ll offset the entire carbon footrprint from my flights.

Here we go:

Continuing on from the prior mid-year review, it’s time for a recap of the year that was 2008.

As before, I’ve adopted a traffic-light rating to complement the corporate-esque roundup of the resolutions that I set at the beginning of the year.

Read more: Amber
I read more in 2008 than preceding years, but it was still a pretty feeble attempt – with just 6 or 7 books read. I did manage to polish off a book in a single week during the Crimbo festivities, so it can be done. 12-books will become my aggressive goal for ‘09.

Do some daring things: Amber
Changing job and stripping bear in front of  2,500 Dubliners isn’t too bad. Just not exactly what I had in mind. I rather had the idea of being in a play or some other kind of activity to push my comfort-boundary. I’ll give an overly harsh Amber rating to punish me on this one.

Consume less sugar: Red
The office Pizza oven and endless supply of chocolate really didn’t help with this one. However, I’ve taken a recent fancy to salads and veggies, so all is not lost.

Be more focused: Amber
I’m not entirely sure what I exactly meant by this.

Travel to more exotic places: Green
The second half of 2008 was a more quiet affair, but I still managed to visit 12-countries across 4-continents in a single year. Highlights included a couple of skiing trips and a road-trip around California. Zanzibar still picks up the prize for the most exotic location, but I think I need to step it up in ‘09. My ambitious travel wish-list for this year currently is as follows: Stockholm, Berlin, Paris, Reykjavik, Hong Kong, Milan, Jordan, New York, Vienna, Rome, and Rarotonga.

Become illustriousness for something: Red
I’m still just a regular Joe. How wants to be famous anyway?

Embark on building a virtual real estate empire: Green
Still a bit all over the shop, but good good groundwork has been laid during the year. The acquisition of BusSongs has proved to be highly successful. Thereafter, I also snapped up MafiaUnit.com and FixMyFloors.com which booth need to prove their worth in the year ahead.

Restart my dream diary: Amber
Started off very well, clocking in a tun off dreams in the early months. My patience wore thin during the Summer stretch (perhaps increased daylight makes it more difficult to recall dreams?) and has started to pick up again on the approach to year-end. I still enjoy it and really want to stick with it in ‘09. I’ll post some comprehensive analysis shortly.

I trust you had a kick-ass 2008.

As an experiment, I wanted to try my hand at creating a niche-content from scratch. I grabbed one of the domains I registered a few months back, outsourced the research and creation of the content and after around a week I have TopInterviewTips.com, a site providing advice and tips to help prepare for an interview.

The site cost a grand total of $95.15 to create ($88 for the outsourced content writing & $7.15 for 1-years domain registration with GoDaddy) and took around 2-hours to project manage. Admittedly, I did also spend some 5-hours to fiddle with the site’s design. However, this would be a one-off task and additional sites could be launched with the same template in under 3-hours in total.

My goal is that the site might earn $1/day in advertising revenue. I suspect that this is overly ambitious. But if it can be done, then this could be a profitable model; whereby sites could be quickly churned out (a site a week would be certainly feasible) and bring in lots of small amounts of revenue.

Update: I couldn’t help but give the site another aesthetic update. A gray colour scheme is a bit easier on the eye than the lime green. Do you think it’s better?