Teuful virtual Advent Calendar - big prizes to be had every day!
Bored at work?
Feeling like the Christmas spirit is missing a little?
Drooling over some gadgets that you really can’t quite justify buying for yourself right now?
The solution for all of this might be found via the link in this blog post. Teufel, a leading brand name in Germany in the Hi-Fi / Loudspeaker market, have designed a fabulous virtual advent calendar for all their fans. However this is no standard virtual advent calendar! If you pop on to their site each day, enter your details, you’re in with a very good chance of winning one of their products which they’ll happily ship out to you!
Interestingly enough, this advent calendar (or the competition with it) isn’t overly hi-lighted on their homepage – but there is a small graphic to the right of the screen. This link will take you to it directly.
I’ve no idea how many people know about this little gem nor how many will take the time to log on each day but I suspect compared to the lottery, you’ve got a fairly good chance of winning something… Uh, hang-on, why am I telling you lot about it?! Pah, me and my Christmas spirit!
I’ve just done it and lo and behold, it’s 30 seconds of fun, scrolling around the screen to find the right date and click – which then shows you what the days prize is. Lovely!
So, if you’d like a little fun, a little more Christmas spirit in your life and a chance to win a well deserved gadget prize, go and get stuck in!
*pops off to program a reminder in her calendar*
Equinox by Sony Ericsson
Yesterday I was sat in a cafe having a meeting. In fact between you and me, I sit in that cafe an awful lot!
It’s brilliant. Really comfy, genuinely food to die for and with the most eclectic clientèle I’ve seen for a long time.
Of course, it also has Wi-Fi. Oh, and the staff are lovely too!
Oops, back to the point.. whilst sitting in the cafe chatting with my Web Manager and sipping a delectable double shot latte, my Blackberry endlessly blinked before me. Every email, Blackberry message, text message, phonecall caught my attention with a little red flash.
I had three choices:
1. Ignore it.
2. Check to see why it was flashing
3. Turn the dang LED flash off.
The problem was that none of these was the perfect fit as I was waiting for a notification from just one person and I didn’t want to miss that. Vibrate, individual tune and a red flash for all wasn’t going to cut it.
Sony Ericsson, it appears, have recognised this with their launch of the Sony Ericsson Equinox – currently available stateside. I’m not too fussed about where it’s available to be frank because the phone itself doesn’t interest me but an idea they’ve incorporated in to it, does. You see, Sony Ericsson have given the Equinox the nifty power of having 5 individual – and by all accounts quite snazzy – flashing alerts, of different colours.
Cool!
That would so work!
Problem is for Sony that it’s a great idea but loaded onto a dud phone (in my opinion … it looks boring and aside from this one well considered addition, is god awful bland)
Now, I think I recall in some dim distant past that there’s app’s out there that you can upload for various phones that will do this…? but I love the idea of a phone having this facility pre-loaded. Yes please and thank you.
In this fast-paced, overly complicated World, it’s so often the simple things that are just right.
Dear RIM / iPhone,
I hope this finds you well.
I’m writing to ask …. 
PI wants to check out the pulling power of DJ-style headphones… read on and enjoy the shocker at the end
“Big DJ style headphones aren’t my normal wear outside of watching True Blood at 12am when my partner is asleep.
One fine day however, I decided to steal Alex’s Urbanz headsets and wander the streets with my iPod to see the reaction I got. So there was all 5’4 of me, huge khaki and red headphones bopping down the street, and how much attention did I get?
None.
Not one look, not even a side-ways glance.
I did however get very warm ears.
Once I’d got over the shock of being invisible, I decided it wasn’t me. That it’s actually due to the fact that big headsets on women are not an unusual sight anymore. It used to be that size mattered – and that size was small. Small enough that if you took them off and dropped them into your handbag they’d disappear. Not anymore. Now your oversized headsets are as much a fashion statement as your shoes or your bag, and everyone is wearing them.
In the tube was Bling Girl with her makeup spread out over her lap, metallic gold Minx nails and big branded headphones.
On the bus was super-chic Casual Girl, short spiky hair, worn-in trainers and a cool silver headset.
On the streets was Corporate Girl, groomed hair, classic bag and her headphones at odds with her business attire.
How was I ever going to compete with all that?
And what is the appeal of DJ Style headphones for girls anyway?
Do they look sexy for boys?
According to one music forum I found myself in, they do. Someone else informed me that it’s the improved quality of the music which is the deciding factor. I also rather suspect that it can be a statement as well. Here is a woman who is serious about her music, and is confident enough to wear musical earmuffs in the street.
A quick look on Amazon tells me that it’s not just the big girls getting into it either. There are pages of pink and Disney headphones for the little people among us as well.
So will I be wearing DJ style headphones while out and about again? Why would I not? A quick look in the mirror when I arrived home showed me that surprisingly enough, they suit me!”
Ed’s Note: A quick check on Google for standard research purposes – after PI had been for a bop down the street - revealed some results we really weren’t expecting!
Scroll down …
First page results - c/o Google.
Needless to say, PI doesn’t seem put off by this at all…
I used to work on an all-male team in a corporate environment. A group of guys from a mix of cultures and a good range of ages were my companions day in, day out. I was the only female to sit amongst them. Invariably the morning would start with jackets being dropped on to the back of chairs and
“Did you see that goal last night, Dave?” or
“Bet you’re p*ssed – Liverpool slaughtered you, mate. Where’s my tenner?“
It was in essence football, football, football.
Throughout the day quiet but ferocious arguments would rage about the best striker, defender, maverick … on and on it went. Lunchtime would find the team huddled around a singular computer screen watching replays of the match the night before.
Weekends were organised around travelling to Old Trafford or … wherever the match to be at was going to be.
Mobile phone footage was shared.
You get the idea?
So, let me ask you this – what has a womens gadget blog, Cancer Research UK, and football got in common?
Shall I give you a moment to think about it?
Clue – it’s two words. One person.
Bobby Moore.
No matter the arguments that raged in my office, the mere mention of this mans name ensured a sudden respectful silence. I recall once a colleague of mine from India, more up to speed with his cricket than football, asked who Bobby Moore was. The look of shock was extraordinary and wordlessly the team stopped work as my colleague Paul booted up his internet and showed our colleague just who Bobby Moore was. Others chimed in with information and accolades.
However, if you’re still at a loss as to the relevance of all this and this blog … here it comes.
Guys love their football.
There’s little escaping this.
They also love their gadgets.
Us women tend to struggle all too often trying to find the perfect gift – and we also tend to like presents that say a little more than “Here’s that gadget you wanted. Love you.“
Bobby Moore died at the very young age of 51 from cancer. However his name and status is now associated strongly with Cancer Research UK and voilà, the whole thing starts to slowly come together.
Bobby Moore Gold Plated iPod Touch - Cancer Research
The Bobby Moore Fund which works with Cancer Research UK to combat and highlight bowel cancer in this country have just released a gold plated iPod Touch.
Not just the smartest thing on the block, sporting Bobby Moores engraved signature and the Bobby Moore Fund logo but 10% of the purchase price goes straight to the Fund.
Now there’s a gift that says a little bit more, in so many ways.
My concern frankly when I heard about this was “What the hell’s the price going to be?!“
It’s gold plated, for christsake!
However the prices are pretty damn good -
£264.50 for the 8GB,
£356.50 for the 32GB and
£433.81 for the 64GB
If you’d like more information, please promptly click on this link: www.goldgenie.com/bobbymoore
London by Tube. 2008.
Harry Beck.
You may not have known his name until this moment but chances are that if you’ve travelled through London at any point, you’ll have seen his work. In 1931 Harry Beck was an employee of the London Underground (Tube, as it is commonly called) and he designed the Tube Map, pretty much as we know it to this day.
Cheers Harry – it’s helped me enormously across the years. xx
However, as of 2010 and with the implementation of the now relatively familiar Oyster Card which is about to stretch its powers of entry and exit far further afield, there’s talk that the Tube map will become defunct…? Hmmm.
Sure, it remains valid for the Tube itself but with Overground and buses now all qualifying the Tube Map does perhaps seem a little antiquated…
So, what next?
Frankly, I have no idea how anyone will try and replace the Tube Map and incorporate the breadth and range of the Oyster Card – a challenge indeed! I hope they manage something that’s at least tidy because for all I admire Harry Beck, I’ve still had to help out endless tourists in deciphering it!
Nonetheless, there’s a chance that those funny little leaflets, freely available from each station, will soon disappear. No more will we find them wedged into corners of escalators, skid on them as we rush on to the Tube or have them blow across our feet as we exit rush hour stations.
I think tomorrow, I will take a quiet stroll down to my local station. I will stand to the side as people rush by. I shall look at the system we have in place currently; a system that has changed with little acknowledgement from me across the years (except when my Oyster didn’t cap or they decided to charge me £3.00 for getting one – bastards! Bloody technology 
) and I’ll pick up one of those tiny Tube Map leaflets and tuck it carefully away in my pocket.
In times to come, I may re-visit this blog post and be grateful. Cheers Harry.
Hands up all of you who have purchased a mobile phone from Tesco’s.
*keeps on typing*
Nah, me neither.
Irons, yes. Steam cooker, yes. Egg poacher – ah, now that was a bargain, yes.
iPhone?
What?!
Yep, the news is, way before Vodafone get their grubby mitts on the iPhone 3G and 3GS Tesco’s is going to beat them to it. In fact, Tesco’s is looking to sell the iPhone, both pay-as-you-go and Monthly, pre-Christmas.
I’m trying to think of a joke.
It feels like it warrants a joke.
I can’t think of one.
However I did pop on to the Tesco Mobile website to have a closer look – feel free to register your interest here and found the following – which I thought wouldn’t help their sales
£376 *MILLION* bills c/o your kids... Oh & here's iPhone.
There’s nothing I like better than finding a really expensive program (say, £200 worth) legitemately available for free. Lovely.
Better still, this one feeds in to my love of dreaming planning, which I tend to do a great deal of – especially come the New Year. You can keep all your parties and the endless flowing booze – just let me loose on a free mind-mapping program and I’m as happy as a pig in muck.
By the way, whilst I appear to be veering off on a tangent, let me continue with a fabulous little piece of advice I picked up a long time ago, that finally science is also catching up with – if you’re going to make grand dreams and want them to work, then also list the likely obstacles you’ll encounter on the way. Doing this increases your chances of success unbelievably! If only more self-help books mentioned that point! Tsk.
Anyway, back on course, if you were to pay for Mindmapping software, no joking you’re often looking upwards of £200. Granted, several of these programs have lovely added extras like full intergration with MS Office etc but not all of us need nor want that (I don’t).
I just like to mindmap my businesses, my relationships, my diary and my things-to-do – oh, and the contents of the books I read (It helps me remember them!)
Therein I was kindly sent a link to FreeMind and I’ve been using it extensively for more than a month now, with great success. Completely free and with more than enough options to keep me happy, I thought I’d better get off my jack-sie and share it with you.
Oh, and one final tip – when you download it and you get a page requesting your details – feel free to ignore it – the program downloads just fine without all that needing to be filled in
Here’s to MindMapping heaven and a very successful 2010 
I like the word “Twotted“.
It’s a polite slang word, often misconstrued to imply something quite rude – a hybrid of another word, which unless asked specifically to enhance upon, I’ll just avoid for the moment. Uh-huh. Scuse me.
Anyway, back to “twotted“. Urban dictionary lists one of its definitions as being hit over the head with a three legged stool… My point, precisely. Metaphorically.
You see, rumours abound that Twitter membership, retention and use is on the decline. Rapidly. It’s running out of steam and overall, if these rumours have any substance, Twitter appears to be veering about like someone having just been twotted. Now you understand my choice of language?
I can understand, in part. I recall when I first fell across Twitter. I thought “What the hell’s the point? What a stupid phenomena – it’ll never last. It’s for a bunch of egocentrics [woohoo, over here, dear!]“
The interface didn’t help. What are you doing? Like, since when did I give a blind monkeys about what my buddy was doing right now let alone somebody I hardly knew? I recall watching an instructional video about Twitter and that certainly didn’t inspire me further. Not one jot. I just couldn’t fathom the point – until I started to read tweets from others and then I thought “Oh, that’s useful!” and promptly got involved.
Sort of. I don’t think I did so very fast. An occasional tweet and then I forgot all about it. Until people started to ‘friend’ me on Twitter. Oh, now it was getting interesting. I started to get more involved myself but all too soon I got overwhelmed. I don’t think I’d even reached 50 ‘friends’ and I was finding I couldn’t keep up.
Of course, along came Twitter Lists … but I’ve neither had the time nor energy to get particularly involved in that either. *sigh*
So, even my own interaction on Twitter has dropped off somewhat of late.
It appears I’m part of the current statistical trend…
Worse still, Twitter is slowwwwwwww. So slow.
Day after day I’d get a server overload message. It was a nice message, I’ll give them that but like those cruddy “clear your debt” adverts on TV, bloody boring in their repetition.
So, what does Twitter need to bounce back to its former glory?
Without putting too much thought into it, it strikes me that Twitter has a potential billion+ dollar future (ok, I’m guesstimating but I like the idea) but it has a $10 interface. The Search is crap, the explanation of why use it is crap. In fact, unless you’re familiar with Twitter or bored or tolerant, the facility to get to grips with the potential of Twitter is .. crap.
In fact, stopping for a moment and thinking about it, it’s almost laughable!
Goodness knows how many people across the World use Twitter – millions, I’m sure – but it’s just so boring in its actual usage.
Here, let me write out 140 character message, maybe add a hash tag, a link, picture or video and uh, read some other peoples Tweets. Uh, done. Um, now let me …what? Use that aforementioned crap search facility? Bring it on. Not.
Twitter needs to upgrade itself rather than rely on external app’s to make it more fun. Why? Because unless you’ve time or inclination, you’re never going to find the amazing array of external app’s that can make Twitter a far more interesting place to hang out.
Come on, team – grab your bootstraps and give ‘em a good yank! You’ve a good thing here that can be made a whole lot better! Get to it and I’ll be delighted to join you for the ride! You’d be a twot not to
Erotica 2009 at Olympia, London
I’m a huge fan of Erotica. I think I’ve managed to attend every year since I first stepped foot in this country. Erotica 2008 was a huge disappointment.. so my arrival this year was tempered with some trepidation. Had Erotica lifted its game? Would I be titillated? I was there for 3 ½ hours in the end and still feel that after 14 years they have yet to mature.
You’ll find Erotica 2009 at Olympia until Sunday 22nd November. Very spacious inside, this allows a great diversity of stalls and various areas for performers to entertain. In past years Erotica even utilised the galleries above for sexy stalls, but this year everything was kept in the main hall.
Walking through the doors just after 1.30, we were greeted by an assemblage of gorgeous erotic art. The Crystal Wizard walked by with his trademark crystal ball balanced perfectly on his head. As the shows started at 2 we didn’t have a lot of time to look at stalls so we found ourselves talking to punters instead. One complained about the lack of Major Stars on the main stage this year, while another excitedly told us about a vibrating toothbrush he had bought his wife the year before – that was still going strong! We did wonder about the quality of the show considering the lack of big names, but it turned out not to be much of a handicap. Using some lesser known acts such as Roxy Velvet, Empress Stah and The Amazing Ari the show managed to draw a crowd with singing, aerial acts and fire shows with barely a nipple in sight.
After the acts we browsed stalls containing everything from life casts, to penis pots, to suspension sets, to vibrating samurai’s. At 3.15 Alex vanished into the London Room to watch the Fantasy Boys. Despite having six-packs of steel, great taste in music and a habit of dragging random girls onto the stage, they still only get 7/10 apparently.
Lastly, the Gadgets. Go to any huge sex exhibition and you expect to see a large number of them, or at least I do anyhow. Is bondage tape a gadget? If not, then it should be. Sex furniture should also be a gadget, which is how I found myself lying on an inflatable sex chair in the middle of Olympia. There were quite a few male ‘massage’ gadgets which unfortunately we won’t be reviewing. There were a lot more female ‘massage’ devices, including the Sqweel.. a rotor-like device which is supposed to lap you to orgasm. Hmmm. My personal favourites are the vibrating finger attachments which I can’t believe we still don’t have on our site!
So in conclusion, did I like Erotica 2009? I was very worried about the direction it was headed after last year but it seems they are making an effort to get their act together – at least when it comes to quality, if not quantity. Would I recommend anyone else go this year? If you’ve never been to Erotica before, or you need a serious shopping expedition then here’s more information to tease your decision making senses… Erotica 2009
When I first heard the sentence ‘Pilates on a bed’, I imagined something warm and comfortable – like a massage bed which does all the exercise for you. I had been warned that the workout was rather vigorous, however did that put me off at all? No, I was excited! I arrived early to the Heartcore studio in Notting Hill, so when Tom the Instructor arrived, he found me standing outside in the rain.
Once inside I got my first glimpse of the pilates bed itself, aka the Proformer. Huge, sturdy enough to hold two grown men and with various attachments to assist with body conditioning, it looked like the kind of device you could trust to do the job.
5 minutes into the workout I lost my smile. The exercises may only be 60 seconds each, they may only be slow and controlled – but they hurt!
I finally began to understand the phrase ‘working the muscle groups to failure’.
Inside the HeartCore Studio
Some of you may be asking what a huge metal bed has to do with pilates at all. This isn’t a regular pilates class. It has all the pilates basics – like the focus on breathing, the controlled movements and the postural correction – mostly however it’s a circuit workout using resistance. The resistance is produced by the 7 springs at the front of the bed – 4 orange and 3 blue, the blue giving the greater resistance.
To use the machine: You first choose your resistance by attaching the required springs to the bed. That may be 2 blue for one exercise, then 2 orange and 1 blue for another. On the other end of the springs is a movable carriage. To do each exercise, part of your body is employed to move the carriage in order to push against the resistance while the rest of your body is busy elsewhere.
I could try to explain the various movements but would probably fail miserably. To get a better idea, there is a photo gallery on their website Heartcore.co.uk of the Proformer in use. If that’s not helpful enough you could always Register online, which then entitles you to a free session at any of their three studios.
After the workout I could still walk!
In fact I hardly felt I’d worked out at all, which is possibly due to the fact that Tom turned a blind eye every time I collapsed. The next day however I felt it! It wasn’t unpleasant though, as I was feeling muscles that don’t usually get a look-in at my regular gym sessions. Two days on and I was starting to lie to myself about how much it hurt and recommending it to my friends.
Would I go again? Of course! In fact I’m hoping to make it again this week.
