Thanks to Saul Klein I just joined Dopplr. It’s a sort of travellers network, I think! I’m not really sure, I can’t do much with it because I only have 1 friend. 
If you’d like to join, let me know, I’ll invite you and you can be my friend!
My cousin Kelly was married to her partner of 12 years Tom today. It was a beautiful wedding. Here’s the newlywed couple.
I’m leaving Edinburgh next week so having a farewell soiree on Sunday from 8pm at Dragonfly Bar. All welcome.
It’s confirmed. The contracts are signed, the flights are booked, I’m going to Montreal. I fly on Monday 8 October. I’ll be working with ReflexCRM on SmartHippo, a social network for financial products.
I discovered a great service recently called AuctionStealer. You enter an auction item number from eBay and it will submit a bid for you in the closing seconds of the auction. You get 3 free snipes a week, or you can sign up for their premium service for $9 a month. Wonderful! 
Andrew Chant sent me a link to an article Notorious nobodies at the Times Online. It’s a great piece about Web 2.0 and how the user generated content revolution is changing the world. Well worth the read I thought.
I was at Emma’s last night. She’s house sitting while her parents are in Aviemore, looking after the cats and the Nintendo Wii…
It’s the first time I’ve used a Wii, possibly even the first time I’ve seen one up close and personal. The device itself is rather unspectacular. It’s a square box and the controllers look like old fashioned, square remote controls.
However, fire the thing up and start using it, it’s a whole different story. The controllers can sense which way up they are, you can use the controller to literally point at the screen, they can sense movement, and all sorts.
For games like boxing, you can literally punch and the character on the screen punches. Playing tennis you literally swing the controller like a racket and it hits the ball on screen.
I don’t know if it has the graphics power of the xbox 360 or the Playstation 3, and it may not have the range of games, but personally, it’s the most impressive games console I’ve seen in a long time. Top marks Nintendo. They have delivered the biggest innovation in home gaming I’ve seen in a long time.
Now I’m working on convincing my family to get one…
Thanks to James for introducing me to the Govan Law Centre and their Unfair UK Bank Charges information. I’ve taken up the fight. I’m writing to Smile demanding the refund of £430 of charges and to Bank of Scotland demanding the refund of £110 of charges.
If they are unwilling to refund my charges I plan to take them to court in 14 days. This is war. It’s on. Bring it…
Note: I have not provided links to the aforementioned banks websites because I believe those banks suck and I do not wish to offer them any sort of web-recognition!
I was in Oxford over the weekend for the wedding of my good friends Alex & Claire. The wedding was a great success, it was a great day all round. I was the master of ceremonies and people were generally where they were supposed to be, when they were supposed to be there, so I think I did ok!
Both Alex and Claire have decided to change their names, so they’ll be Mr & Mrs Rennie-Lis (they’re currently Lis and Rennie respectively). I think the tradition of women changing their names is ridiculously outdated, I’m really impressed by their decision to join names. Although, I can’t help but wonder, how will it work if their children decide upon the same idea Mr & Mrs Smith-Jones-Rennie-Lis?
With my little camera being on the blink (aka, the screen is broken) I’m not carrying it any more, and so I don’t have any photos of the happy couple to share. If anyone would like to donate to the “Buy Callum a Camera Fund” please contact me and I’ll send you my PayPal details!
I flew from Hong Kong to London last Thursday with Oasis. The flight was very pleasant indeed. We left Hong Kong’s wonderful airport, with free wifi throughout, around 1am, and landed early in London about 6:30am. The flight was about 13 hours, so you get a chance to sleep while arriving early in the morning. It’s pretty painless.
The airline itself was very impressive for a budget carrier. The flight cost £105. They served a light evening meal before turning off the cabin lights and a light breakfast shortly before we arrived in London. I hadn’t expected any food at all. Additional refreshments were available, and seemed reasonably priced. A can of beer was £2, most snacks were £1.
Overall, I was impressed, I’d definitely fly with Oasis again. Now they also fly to Vancouver from Hong Kong.
YouTube is an amazing source of entertainment. I’m just loving it. The internet here in Hong Kong is actually fast enough that you don’t have to wait for the video to load, and it’s uncensored, which is a breath of fresh air!
Goodbye Thailand, hello freedom of speech. Now to watch that controversial video of the King again…
I went water shopping this morning. It’s 4 or 5 flights of stairs to the ground, so we drew straws as to who would make the trip. I got to the supermarket and began comparing the $9 bottles of water with the $5 bottles (Hong Kong dollars that is, otherwise that’s just crazy expensive!).
To my delight, the $9 bottle said “Product of Scotland”. So in preparation for going home I bought two six-packs of 2L bottles for the great value price of only $66. A little taste of home in preparation for my return on Friday!
While cruising Dave Jones’s blog (he’s a Fedora kernel dude) I happened upon Rockbox, an alternative firmware for a whole bunch of digital audio players (iPods and the like). Check out the Rockbox Screenshot on Wikipedia, it looks awesome. I’ll install it when I get home in a little over 10 days.
Finally my iPod will work as I want it to. It’ll play anything you dump onto it, it’ll play formats other than just MP4, I can install my own themes and do all sorts of other cool stuff. Best of all, it’s GPL code, yay for freedom!
I saw Ocean’s Thirteen this evening. If I had to summarise the film in one word it would be “predictable”. I don’t want to say it wasn’t a good movie, because I enjoyed it, but it was nothing compared to the first two. There was nothing unexpected about the whole film. The idea is great, the gig is funny, there are some good parts, but overall, it was just predictable.
My lil bro got his degree result yesterday, he got a first! Well done bro, keep those brain cells popping!
Thanks to the glorious Ultimate Tags Warrior plugin I’ve gone absolutely tagtastic! Not just my own blog either, I’ve taggified the OpenCouchSurfing.org Blog as well. It’s been a day of taggification I tell you!
It’s all part of my blog upgrades after the discovery of K2. The other little addition that I copied from the most excellent MediaWiki (the software that most famously powers Wikipedia) is the new little icons next to all links that open in a new window. So no longer shall I be issuing the new window warnings, now it’s all automatically taken care of thanks to the wonders of CSS3.
For those interested in the technical aspect, the code is thus:
div#current-content a[target ="_blank"] {
background: url(external.png) center right no-repeat;
padding-right: 13px;
}
This also requires the image external.png to be in the same directory as the stylesheet. You can get the image from Wikipedia here.
I celebrated my second consecutive birthday in Bangkok yesterday. As is my usual custom, I took the day off work and instead attended to a few personal administration issues. First on the agenda, it was getting very out of control…
Then I wandered by Lumpini Park for a little jaunt in the swan shaped pedal boats. I’ve seen the next scene countless times in the park, but it never fails to bring a smile to my face…
Alas I couldn’t bring myself to participate, I just wasn’t wearing the right brand of spandex, but maybe next time!
I’m delighted to announce the launch of The OpenCouchSurfing Campaign. I fully support the campaign, I believe that CouchSurfing very much needs to embrace openness and transparency. It’s been a week or so in the making, and today is the culmination of our preparations. The word is out. Vive la revolucion!
I had heard about it, but I still laughed out loud when I tried to load YouTube in Thailand today. It is blocked. I’m living in a censored democracy.
I absolutely deplore this type of censorship, particularly when it becomes so stupid as to block a site as general as YouTube. I have heard, purely anecdotally, that YouTube is blocked because somebody published a video critical of the King of Thailand. Ironically, I’ve also heard the King himself objects to such censorship.
So, here is my open invitation to anyone in Thailand. If you would like to access YouTube, please contact me and I will personally give you access to a proxy that will allow you to bypass the censorship. Vive la revolucion!
Here’s the current top rated video on YouTube for your viewing pleasure (if you’re not in Thailand of course!):
Thanks to my dearest bro (new window) I’ll be back in Bangkok next week.
My deal here in Christchurch has been brought to a premature close, so it’s time to move on again, just after getting myself sorted with broadband! Still, I’ve caught up on the bulk of my downloading and I have a week left!
Currently the majority of my income comes from RentaCoder.com where I work as a freelance programmer. The freedom and flexibility of the system is great, I can be anywhere in the world, I can move from one day to the next, and as long as I have internet access I can work. The site also supplies my leads and clients, handles the payment, and escrows the money up front thus giving me a level of security.
However, the money is not great. It’s a truly global business, so I compete with people from emerging economy countries. The work can also be simple jobs, not always very inspiring, and not always the best possible work I could produce.
So I am inviting you, yes YOU, my reader, to offer any feedback you might have. Do you know of other nomadic professions which would offer better rewards? More creative work? Can you suggest how I could improve the situation? All comments welcome…
That’s gotta be a bummer when you wake up with a hangover and go looking for your car…
It’s a little embarrassing just how happy it made me to get our new broadband connection set up this morning. It’s a little sad, but it makes me very, very happy. 24/7 high speed internet access. Viva la revolucion!