There’s an article on the BBC with the headline “Billionaires rule US richest list”. Well duh! Isn’t that kind of obvious? You would expect billionaires to top a rich list because, well, they have the most money 🙂

And finally, why is it that the predicitive text feature on my mobile phone doesn’t recognise the word “damn” but it has no problems predicting the word “git”? Answers on a postcard please.

On Saturday evening I attended “An interview with Carmen Maura” at the Institut Francais. Carmen Maura is one of Spain’s most famous actresses – she has appeared in several of Pedro Almodovar’s film. She’s the one in the middle of the photograph below.

The interview was part of the Spanish film festival that has just recently finished here in London – don’t ask why it was held in the French institute. The interview was quite interesting. She talked about some of her films and she came across as very down to earth and quite funny – normal. At one point she was asked by the interviewer why she had decided to take a particular role in a film – I can’t remember the role or the film – and she replied in Spanish, “Because it was a fucking good role”. It made the translator’s job more interesting at least.

I decided that it would be a good time to try out the camera on my mobile phone. As you can tell from the quality of the photograph I haven’t quite mastered the camera settings yet. You would think the picture would have come out pretty good when you consider that I was sitting in the third row from the front but alas no. I won’t be giving up my day job to become a photographer just yet!

… Aeron chairs really aren’t that great! When I used to work for Arsdigita, Aeron chairs came as standard and I remember thinking how great they were – it was a long time ago. A few years ago I was looking around to buy a decent chair for myself. I went to several “specialist” shops that sold ergonomic chairs and they all told me that Aerons are crap from an ergonomic perspective. At the time I didn’t believe them. In the end I opted to buy one of these because they were recommended and they cost about 500 quid less than an Aeron! Anyway, I have just recently moved into an office and have been using an Aeron for a couple of weeks now – there are more Aerons in the office than people – and I am surprised to say that having been using one for the last few weeks they really aren’t that great! I refrain from using the word “crap” because they are comfortable but give me my chair any day of the week! I think part of the problem is that the Aerons don’t have a forward tilt mechanism and my hips feel as though they are below the level of my knees – not a good thing!

One thing is for certain: the next time I feel like splashing out on an expensive chair, I certainly won’t be spending my hard-earned cash on an Aeron.

One of the first things I tried to do when I received my new phone was to add the contacts from my address book and put them on the phone. However, when I tried to do this iSync complained that the device wasn’t compatible and it wasn’t going to sync my address book with the phone. Sure enough, my phone wasn’t on the list of compatible devices. I could have waited until Apple released a new version of iSync that supported my phone but who knows when that could be and I certainly wasn’t going to add my contacts by hand – too many of them.

Thankfully a solution does exist: a phone plugin you can find at mobile.feisar.com. It costs 1.49 GBP but it works fine and now I can sync my contacts, calendar events etc so it’s well worth it.

I came across Feisar via this blog post.

I received my new mobile phone this morning: the Sony Ericsson K800i. Looks pretty good and it’s got loads of features. I got it from T-Mobile. So far I am pretty impressed with their service: I only ordered the phone online last night at around 7pm and it arrived at 7.30am this morning. They even threw in a 256 MB memory card for the phone for free. Now that’s what’s I call customer service!

I opted for their Web ‘n Walk package so now I’ll be able to check my email and surf the web on my phone. Needless to say once the phone has charged you can probably guess what I’ll be doing for the rest of the day!

[Update: I just cancelled my contract with O2. They were surprising helpful although they did put me through to somebody who spent about 10 minutes trying to make me stay with them. That was to be expected I guess. I am keeping my existing number so if you need to call me you should be able to still get through to me on it.]

A few weeks ago I posted something about a jockey headbutting his horse. I also mentioned that there was a video of the incident on the BBC website but I couldn’t find a URL for it.

Anyway, I sent an email to the BBC explaining my dilemma and asked how I could link to a particular piece of video footage. To my surprise I received a response from the BBC this morning. Here’s an extract of the relevant bit:

Unfortunately we are unable to provide direct links to pieces of audio and video on the BBC Sport website. Instead we would suggest you link to our AV Search result page for Paul O’Neill:
http://search.bbc.co.uk/cgi-bin/search/results.pl?q=paul+o%27neill&scope
=all&edition=d&tab=av&recipe=all

So there you go: if you want to link to a piece of audio/video on the BBC website, point your users to the search results page.

Thanks BBC.

And check out the clip: it’s quite amusing; well, I thought so but then I would!

I thought this would be a fun thing to do so I wrote a list of random facts about myself that you may or may not know. It’s quite possible that there are even some things you never wanted to know! I’ll let you be the judge.

Here is a link to an article “Break The Silence” that discusses the current situation in the Middle East. It is written by a friend of mine, Miriam Azar who is half Lebanese — I don’t recall which half.

It was interesting to read the article to get a perspective on the situation from a Lebanese point of view. Usually I myself have no interest in politics or political statements; I find they tend to be subjective and biased towards whatever “beliefs” an individual may or may not have. I like to look at the cold, hard facts so I can form my own opinion. In this particular case I agree with Miriam when she says that the Israeli attacks are disproportionate in reaction to having two of their soldiers captured. Yes, that’s right: two soldiers. Not twenty, not two hundred. It seems to me like just a convenient excuse to allow Israel to “justify” their attacks. What I don’t understand is that if the problem is Hezbollah, as Israel claims, then why can’t both the Lebanese and Israeli governments co-operate to flush them out? Perhaps send in ground forces. It would appear to be a more effective and certainly less destructive solution than air strikes! Why hasn’t this been suggested before? What if the Lebanese government has no interest in getting rid of Hezbollah? I will leave you to ponder that one as I certainly don’t have an answer.

Finally, while reading an article on the BBC website about the current situation in the Middle East, I came across a comment that I found amusing made by somebody called Steve Goss:

” Israel is acting with tremendous restraint, were they targeting civilian populations there would be thousands upon thousands dead.”

Restrained? Interesting point of view. No prizes for guessing which country he is from! I guess everybody is entitled to their opinion; we live in a democracy after all as politicians like to continually remind us.

First Zidane, now this guy. Whatever it is it seems to be catching!

(There was a video of the incident on the BBC website but I couldn’t find a URL for it)