I signed up for the Windows Live Mail beta a while ago but heard nothing further about it until last night when I received this email:

Thanks so much for your interest in Windows Liveâ„¢ Mail beta

This is kind of embarrassing to admit, but we have a bug that won’t allow us to make the Windows Live Mail beta available to you at this time. We know it stinks but, if we set you up with this beta, there is a risk that you might lose some of the best stuff that comes with your MSN® Hotmail® Plus account. We are working hard to get this bug resolved and once it is, we will send you a mail and move you to the beta.

Best regards,
The Windows Live Mail beta team

It must be one hell of a bug if Microsoft has delayed launching Live Mail. After all, bugs in their software haven’t stopped them from releasing software in the past (sorry, couldn’t resist).

One of my goals for this week is to improve the design aspects of this blog. I’m bored of how it looks. The plan is to make it look a bit more interesting and to follow the guidelines laid out in Jakob Nielsen’s article The Top Ten Design Mistakes.

I don’t have the time, or the inclination, to do my own design because 1) I’m not an artist and therefore graphically incompetent 2) Learning how the templates/styling works in WordPress seems too time consuming for what I want to do. As I am not a designer (although there are times like these when I wish I was) I am going to have to rely on finding a theme that somebody in the WordPress community has created and donated to the public. I had a look a few months ago but didn’t really find anything that suited my tastes; I’m a bit of a minimalist when it comes to design. It would be nice if WordPress had some sort of tool that would allow me to modify an existing design without having to hack the templates and CSS; some sort of drag-and-drop interface perhaps.

Anyway, look for changes during the week and let me know what you think.

I’m currently reading The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki. In Chapter 2 there is a section devoted to how you should choose a name for your business. I found some of his points particularly interesting given that I have tried to come up with a name for my business in the past and failed miserably. Here are some of the more interesting points:

• Have a first initial that is early in the alphabet His reasoning behind this is that some day your organization’s name will appear in an alphabetical list. He also recommends avoiding names that begin with X or Z because they are difficult to spell out after hearing them.
• Pick a name with verb potential Examples given here include people “xerox” documents instead of photocopying them and, more recently, people “google” for something instead of searching for it. I also came up with my own examples. People often use the term “hoover” to mean vacuum; Hoover is the brand. Kleenex is another good example; again, it’s the brand name and not a hankerchief.
• Sound logical The name of the business should “match” what you do. He cites the names of some Pokemon characters as good examples of this; Geodude and Lickitung, for example. I can see what he means by this. I know what Pokemon are and I don’t watch it but I could probably take a good guess at what each character does based on its name.

Here is an interesting tool that allows you to generate a map of the countries you have visited. Here is a map of the countries I have visited so far:

That’s 18 countries, which is about 7% of the total. Looks like I still have a lot to see!

Continue reading →

A friend of mine just started a telecoms business and I said I would give it a plug on my blog so here it is:

Telefonics offers cheap long distance calls at rates that are up to 70% cheaper than other carriers.

There, done. All I have to do now is collect my fee 🙂

It’s the beginning of a new year. Time to reflect on the previous year and look ahead to the new year. The highlights of 2005 for me had to be spending 2 months in Madrid improving my Spanish and visting Google’s headquarters in Mountain View (I saw Larry Page in the canteen too); the remaining 10 months or so were rather shit.

As is traditional at this time of year, I thought I would declare some of my New Years resolutions; they are more goals for 2006 really. I’ll strike them off the list as I achieve them. In no particular order:

• Learn to play the guitar.
• Achieve fluency in Spanish.
• Get involved in an open source project.
• Get something published in an established publication, either in print or online.
• Sleep with Jennifer Lopez.
• Stop being delusional (see item above)