Personal

Ooooh, the blog has been up for a whole year :D

TalkTalk (from the Carphone Warehouse) are offering “free” broadband.

The deal is you sign up to TalkTalk as your phone provider (£11 line rental a month - the same as BT), take out one of the call plans for 18 months (£9.99 a month which includes unlimited* local, national and international** calls) and pay a £29.99 setup fee. For this you get up to 8Mb broadband (very likely to be lower though) with a 40Gb download limit and an ADSL modem.

Total cost (for 18 months): £407.81, about £22.66 a month. Seems like a good deal. TalkTalk

* Calls must last less than 70 minutes. ** To a list of 28 countries including America, Australia and most of Europe.

I have content from various ad companies on my site that I get paid for. It’s not much but it can add up and at least pays for the hosting. I realised I was owed some money from one of them that I hadn’t logged into for ages. So I logged in, checked my details were correct, set payment to “PayPal” and left. Unfortunately I changed it over too late. They sent my first payment as a cheque. As I said it isn’t that much; yesterday I received a cheque for $4.33. I’m not even sure I can deposit that in my account - whenever I’ve done it before with foreign cheques there is quite a large charge (larger than $4.33).

Silly company.

Somewhat disappointingly, but not exactly surprisingly, Bret Hart was not at Wrestlemania 22. There was some vague announcement by Howard Finkel before the Hall of Fame inductees were present about Bret being uncomfortable with the show.

It’s that day again, April 1st, and boy the internet make it more fun. And of course Google are at again. Personally I don’t think they’ll ever beat Pigeon-Rank but they have to try.

The first thing I have to point out about Google is be very careful around April 1st. They have launched a number of genuine services on April 1st (including Gmail) that turned out to be real. None the less I’m fairly sure Google Romance is less than sincere…

And another thing, GameFAQs have decided it’s bad to cheat.

Just as an update, the interview I had before had an odd outcome. It was a success but they didn’t have a position for me. In the meantime I got another interview with somewhere else.

Within three hours of the end of the interview I got an email offering me the job :D

It gets better: the following morning (less than 24 hours later) the original place call me and offer me that job too :D I took the second one.

Sorry to seem obsessed :P

My opinion of learning a language with the Michel Thomas CDs has improved - as well as the “Complete Course” 8 hour sets you can get the “Advanced Course”, an additional 5 hours designed for people who have done the first 8. Although I think he only does it for French and German…

13 hours of material. Considering the density this begins to rival Pimsleur’s 50 hours (only available for Spanish and German).

He also seems to have lead an amazing life, albeit slightly less amazing than he claimed. But still. Go read about him on Wikipedia.

I picked up Michel Thomas’s 8 hour German course from the library today. And it’s cool. It might even be better than Pimsleur. The learning idea is basically the same as Pimsleur with no writing and no memorizing but the format of the audio itself is different.

Firstly in Pimsleur I’m guessing they use voice actors reading out a script for both the English and foreign speech. In this Michel himself talks. Also this is not scripted word for word at all. I’m assuming he has notes of some sort to keep him on track and there may be judicious editing that we don’t hear, but basically everything is presented as is.

This is an important factor considering exactly how the lessons are presented - as a private lesson with Michel and two students new to the language. The benefits of this are you hear the sorts of mistakes people make (ranging from slight pronunciation problems to missing out a word to saying something completely different or nonsensical). It also makes it quite funny since (in the German at least) one student is clearly doing better than the other).

It loses out in ease of use though. Pimsleur comes with built in pauses, with Michel you have to pause it yourself. It does mean though that 8 hours of Michel is denser than 8 hours of Pimsleur.

One final not is he has a slightly unorthodox order of teaching but one that makes sense in some ways. For example the (almost) first thing he teaches is “Do you want…” (“Wollen Sie”) which is normally left until quite far along because of the complication of modal verbs and their effect on word order. There are at least two advantages to this: first it gets the students used to the whole verb-at-the-end-of-a-sentence idea and secondly he focuses on words that are similar in English and German, and most modal verbs are (muss - must; kann - can).

Overall it’s cheaper than Pimsleur, £70 in bookshops. Another glaring advantage is that I have actually seen it in bookshops, even W. H. Smiths. My usually suggestion applies hear though, get it from a library. Most libraries will order books from other libraries for a nominal fee (my local library charges £2.50 but they had it in themselves anyway).

The final drawback is it is only available in four languages: German, Spanish, Italian and French. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if versions starting from something other than English are available (French -> Spanish for instance).

Oooh, Feedburner have put my new Item Age feed flare unit thingy on their 101 Flare Ideas for a Better Tomorrow page (#10).

It lets you display the age of an item in a Feedburner feed in a nice human format (17 minutes old, 4 days old) etc. It’s really dead simple but I figured Feed Flare might be useful and it was good idea to practice before writing something really cool.

You can see it in action in my feed.

Ooh, I checked another site of mine and suddenly noticed it had a PR of 4, instead of none.