» Random

After a 4-year stint in Dublin, I’m back in Blighty and free from the shackles of the corporate world. It’s refreshing, yet a tad overwhelming. I’ve been rather quite likely to have been employed by two of the most prestigious Internet companies and to have worked alongside some pretty impressive folk. It was a pretty tough decision to make; the time taken to make it is a testament to that, and I’ll miss it more than I’d like to admit.

The plan of attack? For now, the aim is to continue building on my current websites and also look to build/acquire some more, whilst enjoying the benefits of not being restrained to be physically located in any particular place (location independence). Progress report to come.

The inspiration:

With Google Cache as my witness, I made the promise at the beginning of 2009 to make amends with Ms. Gaia and offset the carbon that’d I consume during the year.

Well here I am, ready to make my offerings. During the year, I kept a log of all my travels and have since plugged the details into this handy flight emissions calculator. The tally came to a total of 44-flights and 37,330 km travelled (just 1 flight short of my 2008 total, but with 50% less distance). In carbon terms, this amounts to 10.9 tons of C02.

Picking a company to offset the carbon with proved tricky and I ended up opting for ClimateCare.org – mainly because they’re backed by JPMorgan and that their website is pretty snazzy. The final bill came to 96.06 regal pounds. Does my soul feel a little bit better? Not really, no.

Us islanders opt to describe property in terms of its number of living areas and bedrooms, whilst of course making liberal use of deceiving adjectives (cosy, charming etc). Our continental cousins however, also talk about square footage – something we simply struggle to fathom.

I had a poke around the interweb for some guidance and bar installing fancy home design software, there wasn’t much I could find which would help me appreciate what exactly one could do with a 23m² room and whether or not you could swing a cat. With MS Paint (or rather, a nice Mac equivalent) in hand, I chucked a few furnishings into a 15m² room (which seems to be the lower quartile point) to see the results. Scaling this up to 35m² gives a sense of how much additional space you’d have to play with. Here’s the image:

Verdict? 20m² is ample for me and my random collection of rubbish.

I vow to never sell out and stick ads on the blog. But that doesn’t mean I can’t try and make some money out of it, does it?

You may have seen that I’ve loosely scattered a few ‘buy-me-a-coffee’ buttons across the blog. Well, despite just realising that most of these weren’t actually linking anywhere, to date 5 random soles have made a donation. The Interweb is a crazy old place and receiving money from folk you’ve never met is quite odd, but also nice and warming. Of course, you’re not really buying my a coffee (ghastly stuff), but it’s a symbolic gesture that demonstrates your gratitude. It’s pretty neat to know that some of the information I’ve shared has actually been of use to someone.

I stuck a similar button on BusSongs.com some months ago, but have yet to receive a single donation – even though it gets x860 more exposure. I guess you’ve really got to help, rather than entertain, to get into peoples wallet.

I recently made a rather shocking observation. On one of my sites (I’ll gloss over the finer details), I ask users to register with an email address and a password. As you’d expect, many email addresses were from simple webmail providers such as Gmail and Hotmail. So, for educational purposes only (I must stress), I switched over to one of these said providers, popped in some random soul’s email address and password, and surprise surprise, it worked like a charm. In around 10-minutes of trial and error, I had successfully infiltrated around a dozen email accounts.

Now, most people’s inboxes are pretty unexciting, but once you have access to one’s email you effectively have access to every web service they use, and well, pretty much their entire identify. How? Well, practically every site with a login has some sort of ‘Forgot your password?’ feature. Hit that a few times across the web, and you’ll quickly find yourself with login details for dangerous things like Paypal, Facebook, or an ecommerce site (which may have your credit card details stored). From there, an unscrupulous character can cause all kinds of havoc.

Of course, this lesson is nothing you’ve not heard before. Most experts recommend using a super-difficult-to-crack but insanely-difficult-to-type-and-remember password – oh, and make it unique for each site you use. This is somewhat unrealistic, so I guess I’d recommend the following practical measures:

• Use super duper cryptic passwords for really important financial sites like Paypal and your bank. Don’t even think about using these passwords for anything else.
• You’re probably best having a completely unique password for your email too. If it’s never compromised, it doesn’t make all that much sense to change it regularly.
• Use a simple throwaway password for simple websites where any risk is really small.
• Never use a password for a random website, however innocent it may look, that you’re also using for something potentially damaging (email account, Facebook, etc.).
• Perhaps keep track of your passwords in a handy spreadsheet (mine has 254 entries, which is somewhat disturbing) or a notebook.

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.

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 assess 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.