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We got new cellphones today! Wahey. I said the battery on my phone didn’t last more than half a day and so our boss got us new phones but that was after another colleague commented that it also didn’t have any English:

OK! It really wasn’t that bad and I was forced to learn Japanese, which is good. And any guy can pull off having a pink phone, accessories or other apparel in Japan. Haha! But it wasn’t something I shouted about.

So we got given a new Nokia FOMA NM705i. There was a choice of three colours but one (orange) wasn’t suitable for work (and pink is?) so there was either black or white. Knowing me, I chose black:

It’s only available in Japan (I guess) but works around the world. It’s a bit plasticy because it’s quite light (89g) but pretty simple to use as a) It’s bilingual b) It’s Nokia. It should have a decent battery life too and it’s smaller than my old phone so as not to leave a big bulge in my pokect -.^ But it’s not as small as my other Nokia which is about half the thickness:

It looks a bit like my old Nokia 6233 the more I look at it…

Last Friday I woke up with a sore throat. After a few hours at work I started getting all sweaty and felt a fever coming on. During lunch time, we tried a new restaurant. None of us could read the Japanese menu, so I did a lucky dip approach. This is what I got:

It was rather scary looking but was surprisingly tasty. I didn’t eat the lips or eyes though. Just glad it wasn’t moving at the same time!

Anyway, I’ve been ill since last Friday. Much better now but got an annoying cough that’s causing pains in my abdomen and disrupting my sleep! It’s nice to be ill in some ways… I managed to get a few things done around the house. Visited the post office. Paid several bills. Bought a rice cooker. And even went to try out the Japanese health care by seeing a Doctor, who thankfully spoke English. They are typically Asian when prescribing medicines as I ended up with several different kinds of pills. I don’t think any of them did much except act as a placebo but at least I’m better now.

The annoying thing in Japan, or at least with my company, is that we don’t get paid sick leave here so it’s kinda expensive. Every day off sick is deducted from my holiday allowance. Dang!

Even still, I managed to organise a day trip and a camping holiday towards the end of April and during Golden Week in May. Most of it through my Japanese cellphone since I still haven’t got internet installed in my apartment. Lastly, during my sickness, I purchased the Apple iPod touch 32GB from amazon.co.jp for comfort and it was delivered next day! (Quite admire the level of customer service in Japan.) I needed a new gadget or two

…fa la la la la la la la la. Aren’t these the words of someone who can’t remember the words of a song? Anyway, it’s December already! What you see on the left is my new purchase and early Christmas present for myself. I get seduced too easily by high tech gadgets, especially ones that work and look really cool at the same time!

It’s basically the same as my current Nokia 6233, but it got squashed a bit, into a sleek and thin phone.

I would like to have the feature rich Nokia N95 8GB, but it’s just a bit big and perhaps a bit too expensive. And quite frankly, I don’t actually need any of the features. So, the Nokia 6500 Classic seems like something suitable for me. With full 3G and EDGE capabilities, I can still use the internet, send emails as well as not having something heavy in my pocket. After all, I’m not a heavy phone user, especially when I’m usually within reach of my laptop.

Anyone want a 6233?

Well, one week back in the UK so let’s see what I’ve achieved. I’m temporarily back in my own room now that my brother and his girlfriend are on their holiday somewhere on an island in Spain. It really does seem that we have overgrown this little house of ours. I suppose now that all three of us brothers are now studying at uni it won’t really matter for a few more years, and then we should be in the position to “move out” – even if mum says so otherwise.

I’m still slowly getting through papers that I need to read for my project, and hopefully sometime this week I can start writing up a literature review for it. But one minor achievement is that I think I’ve managed to reduce my spam in my Yahoo Mail account by over 80%. The 10 days I was on holiday in Croatia, with absolutely no access to the internet, I received 2000+ junk messages in my “bulk mail” folder. Given that Yahoo automatically erases them after 7 days, it works out at approximately 300 spam messages a day – which seems about correct given the rate at which I usually delete them when I do have access to a computer. Now, I seem to receive less than about 50 spam messages a day. How did I do this? After painfully recording every email address used by the spammers over a period of a week, I collected the most frequently used domains, and blocked no less than 499 of them. The 500^th being just a plain email address that I wanted to block (no one personal btw). However, I know this is only a short term measure to tackle spam, since spammers will normally change their email addresses, or even mask it with someone else’s. At least I have less spam now.

As with my new laptop, everything’s installed and working great. Well pleased with it and I think money well spent. Haven’t managed to find any problems with it yet and no complaints so far. Since dissecting my previous desktop computer, and getting my brothers to sell bits of it on eBay, the only useful bits I kept were my hard drives. It’s taken quite an effort to sort everything and reorganise all my data. I’m gonna keep my 250gb drive and use it as extra storage for my laptop. Seems like a lot of space, but I do store a lot of digital photos (as well…ahem…other things). My other 80gb drive has now been reserved by Katja. I’ll try to get that review done on the laptop within the next couple of weeks, for those contemplating purchasing a W3V.

I arrived back home with little trouble last night. It was another nice flight from flyniki.com – in-flight drinks and sandwiches included with the flight, light entertainment from Mr Bean and Goofy and a choice of magazines and newspapers, all for only 39€. You can hardly complain with that – which is exactly why I ticked very good in all the boxes they had on the survey they did during the flight. Can’t really say the same about the coach journey from Stansted to Cambridge though. No air-con, just heating – I was sweating so badly.

Anyway, it was nice to see family again. Mum seemed happy and said I got fatter…in that same moment she patted my belly…hmmmmmm.

Got my hands on my beautiful new laptop. An Asus W3V-H007P. It looks nice and performs pretty well too, although nothing to match a desktop replacement. I reckon it has quite a good balance between size, weight and spec. Weighs around 2.2kg, 14” Widescreen, Pentium M 1.86GHz, 1GB DDR2 ram, ATI X600 graphics and 80GB hard drive. Check back in a few weeks and I’ll probably have a full review with pictures on my website. (Must finish an essay first!)

I think I’ll make that a permanent feature on my website – a reviews section. I had signed up to ciao.com previously where consumers can write reviews about products. At the same time, I got paid almost £100 in total, although nowadays the financial incentive isn’t really there. Nevertheless, I believe reviews play an important part in anyone’s buying decisions, especially for expensive items where you don’t want to feel like you wasted your money and wished you’d been warned about some of an item’s flaw. So watch this space.

So I finally got into revision now. Currently trying to get my head around four-vectors and tensors. Crazy stuff for Advanced Classical Physics. What fun. Still got lots to do. Read notes, problem sheets, past papers and the dreaded comprehensive papers. Getting a little distracted these days. Last week, we (brothers and myself) managed to change the flooring in our dining room to laminate flooring. We thought it would have been a 2 hour job, as seen on tv, but no. It took us the best part of 2 days. It wouldn’t have been so bad if we were able to “knock” the boards in place without the ends chipping. We’re experts for next time anyway.

So that done, we also dug out an old classic. Starcraft Broodwars! Plenty of LAN gaming goodness. In between revision of course.

Apart from that, not an awful lot happening now. Parents are in Hong Kong, and my yougner brother hasn’t got a car anymore, so we’re struggling with food for lunch and dinner. I’ve almost exhausted the 15 Beef Lasagne’s my Dad brought. Hehe. He thought we’ll starve. He was problably right…

Also been keeping my eye out for a new digi cam. My IXUS 400 has served me well, but I would really like something a little bit more compact and lighter. The Canon IXUS 50, for example. (21st Birthday is coming up btw…) I remember when hiking around the Swiss mountains that whenever I didn’t need my camera, I would put it in my trouser pocket, since I was too lazy to put it back in my backpack, and I wanted it ready to take a picture quickly. It did bulge a fair amount in my pocket, and probably weighed in excess of a quarter of a kilogram. Good thing I wore a belt!

The IXUS 50, is basically the same thing, except slightly faster with a new processor, and one extra megapixel. Oh, and it’s about half the thickness of the 400 and weighs about 100g less and able to record videos almost to an unlimited length. I’ve seen it going for about £220, but interestingly I’ve also seen the new IXUS 700 (7.1MP) going for only an extra £30. So a little puzzled, as it’s a slightly higher spec’d camera, but also a tiny incy wincy bit larger than the IXUS 50…….anyone still reading or have I bored you all to death?

Anyway, nothing interseting to say for now. Will update later….maybe even in a months time just before my exams telling you how unprepared I am and how much I will fail. Such confidence I have.

It was another lovely day today. Beautiful sunshine, clear skies and nice and warm (maybe a bit too warm). So I got up at 7:30am, brushed my teeth, sorted out my hair so I didn’t look like a freak, put on some shorts and T-shirt, grabbed a bottle of water and went jogging!

Yes, you read that correctly. I figured that since I have no more exams and no computer to play with (since I moved everything back to Cambridge on Sunday) I may aswell ‘try’ and do some exercise.

My original target seemed easy. Jog directly across Hyde Park and then walk back.

So I set off from my door, and started jogging along the streets heading towards Hyde Park. By the time I got to the traffic lights, probably only about 400m, my legs were aching and I was already out of breath.

But my will to make it across Hyde Park kept me going or maybe because I got a short breather whilst waiting to cross the road.

Now, I live not too far from Gloucester Road, and those of you who have entered Hyde Park by this entrance (it’s the one by Kensington Palace) will know what came next. A nice short but steep hill, which to be honest, took the life out of my legs. I kept jogging along until I got to the top of the hill and realised how far the other side of Hyde Park actually was. It was at this point I gave up and decided to walk round the lake instead.

We all have to start somewhere I suppose. Hopefully I can keep it up, although I don’t plan to go tomorrow - I need a rest!

On top of all that walking, I went shopping round Picadilly today. Then I started walking down Regent Street, then down Oxford Street then through Marble Arch and Bayswater, before cutting through Hyde Park (again!!) - all on foot and on probably the hottest day so far! I reckon I covered over 10 miles today, just walking back and forth.

Switzerland is closing in…only 5 more days! Managed to get a few hours practice using Matlab aswell.

So a very productive day I think. *Pats self on back*

Oh and is England just unlucky or what? I thought they might actually win a game for once, but unforetunately not. They never seem to be able to last the full match. Well done France.

…and if there are loads of spelling mistakes in this post, please forgive me. I’m using my Sony Clie via WiFi which is a bit like trying to text someone an essay with your mobile phone.