Toys

I had a birthday celebrating a numeric amount that is evenly divisible by 10. Western culture increases the significance of this even simply because of the nature of the number being evenly divisible by 10. Well 16, 21 and probably even 18 has their own reasons for attracting importance. 21 detracts a lot from 20.

I elected not to have a large party with all the friends and so forth. In fact, I very very rarely have a birthday party with all the friends. The celebrations are more of a family affair. And only then because they all know my birthday, and insist on doing something. I almost was able to contrive being out of the country over the allegedly significant day, but decided against the expense, and was thwarted by the family's insistence that celebrations would simply be delayed. It's not that I don't appreciate the family's efforts, I just don't want so much fuss made over simply having survived to this point. My family is full of great people, so a get together is nice.

We all got together and because of the divisible by 10 nature of my age, I got some uber gifts. The Nintendo Wii is an awesome video game platform and I highly recommend it to everyone. That isn't just people who enjoy video games, but people who enjoy being entertained. The bundled Wii Sports is an absolute hoot and a wonderful way to exercise - yes! A video game that requires gross physical effort. Dump that XBox 360 and the PS3 and get your obese children a Nintendo Wii. And a bicycle.

My fiance has seen me making eyes over the new iPod Touch, and took me out to the largest Dick Smith's store that I have ever seen to pick up this little box of wonder. I have read the reviews, looked at the iPhone and bemoaned the issue of the device being tied to an evil telephone carrier. The iPod Touch looked like the device I wanted, and I was so very right. Sure it has some features that are messed up because Apple is playing silly-buggers with their customers, but the features that are working are just phenomenal. I have demonstrated this device to friends and family and they are all blown away. My mother, who is over 60, but looks much younger :), was easily able to figure out how to work the device in seconds. To me this is a mark of how intuitive and simple the interface is. The video is clear, the screen is large enough to read web pages and small enough to slip into my pocket. So simply to browse the web (slashdot, digg, flickr, ebay) and watch some video podcasts (Ask A Ninja, Totally Rad Show) from anywhere in my wifi range. Awesome. I love it!

Recently some bright person has figured out how to "JailBreak" the iPod Touch, which means you can install a number of fantastic third party applications and fix the short falls of the system yourself. I have been hesitant to do this at the moment because I love the features already built in and I also want the next update that Apple has promised to fix the Calendar to allow you to actually enter information (this can be fixed with JailBreak).

A couple weeks before my birthday, I was heading to the Philippines. I always spend some time in the airport duty free but rarely do I ever purchase anything. I noticed the Nintendo DS on sale with the "More Brain Training" software. I had convinced an Uncle to purchase this little monster about six months ago and he has been raving about it ever since. Brain training sounded like an excellent excuse to pick up one of these devices as I am starting research for a PhD and will need all the brain power I can get. Maybe I don't need the distraction but I certainly need the brain power. So my brain did a tricky thing where I justified the purchase on the terms of brain exercises, fun for my fiance as well as myself, and there was a quickly approaching birthday that was evenly divisible by 10. Another factor was that the Brisbane International Airport duty free is actually very good value and I often regret missing out on taking advantage after I leave the airport. So I bought a baby blue Nintendo DS with the "More Brain Training" game - and had a blast. According to the device, my brain is getting younger :) Another highly recommended device.

All these guys along with filling my Flickr account with images taken with my new Canon EOS 400D + lenses have made for a wonderful set of toys. (I still love the Canon IXY!)

Creativity, entertainment and exercise. Getting older is cool!

Sugar vs Artificial Sweeteners

Looking at my eclipse mints tin, I noted that it didn't have the usual nutritional information on it, was probably on the plastic that I tore off to get to the minty scrumptiousness contained within. So I checked out Wriggley's poorly constructed browser specific web site to see what made these mints sweet (I sent them a note to sack their web monkeys who are Microsoft whores that are alienating the rest of us alternative browser users [!!! NOW FIXED!!!]).

• Malitol
• Sorbitol
• Mannitol
• Glycerol
• Aspartame
• Acesulfame K
• Carnauba wax
• BHT
• Acacia

Oh yummy. Quite a bit of alcohol in there. Some of the toxic type.

Then I thought about the various health warnings and possible links of artificial sweeteners to cancer, tumours, joint destruction etc that we keep hearing about through the old-wives-tales hotline.

Most of the approved artificial sweeteners have been thought to be linked to cancer, but tests that show they are linked have used extremely high amounts of the chemical or have been faulty in the conduct of the experiment. However - there still may be a link, and if it is 1 chance in 10,000 of causing cancer then I want to know. And that would be about the chance of increased cancer risk, given the levels we use - which is why the causal effect is so hard to detect.

Some sweeteners aren't thought to be linked to any health problems at all. Yet.

Also note that some sweeteners are banned in the US despite tests showing they are safe because of alleged pressure from the powerful US sugar industry.

A list below is provided for your entertainment. Keep in mind that indeterminant chance of getting cancer doesn't mean that the product doesn't cause cancer. It is just hard to detect.

You should, at the very least, check out the last one I put in.

• 950 Acesulfame_K Poor aftertaste.
• 951 Aspartame Possible link to headaches, brain tumors, lymphoma.
• 952 Cyclamate Possible links to cancer.
• 954 Saccharin Nasty aftertaste. Possible links to bladder cancer.
• 955 Sucralose aka Splenda. Organochloride / chlorocarbon. Probably dangerous.
• 956 Alitame by Pfizer.
• 957 Thaumatin Naturally isolated from the katemfe fruit.
• 961 Neotame by nutrasweet. Produces toxic methanol.
• Stevia Natural plant extract. Possible mutagen of liver.
• Xylitol Wood / birch alcohol. Kills dogs.
• Maltitol Sugar alcohol. Low GI.
• Sugar Proven links to obesity, heart disease, diabetes. Possible links to hyperactivity. One of the largest killers of modern humans.

Yeah. Artificial sweeteners may slightly increase your chances of cancer for SOME artificial sweeteners - and there are a LOT of them. Eating sugar based products has a very strong chance of putting you in the ground early.

When I asked a nutritionist "What would be better, sugar based fizzy drinks or artificial sweeteners?" the first reaction was of disgust and "Don't drink fizzy drinks at all!", which is sound advice given recent developments on the effects of Sodium Benzoate (Presevative 211) which will destroy your liver or stuff your brain with parkinsons and a possible plethora of other nasty effects. However, after much discussion that involved the nutritionist refusing to believe that you need to choose between the two by my postulation that the average schlepp wants the fizzy stuff, the nutritionist begrudgingly conceded that she would recommend artificial sweeteners, given the slight unproved concerns of health issues versus the devastating problems associated with high processed sugar intake.

Yes I eat Eclipse mints and will continue to do so, even tho they seem to be mostly alcohol, artificial sweeteners and gooey crud they scrape off some tree :)

I also drink Pepsi Max, Coke Zero, LA Ice Maxi and so forth. The chances of sweetener related problems are so small compared to sugar related problems. However ... again ... Sodium Benzoate ... maybe I won't drink fizzy stuff any more.

Ideally, I reduce fizzy drink intake to nothing, consume water instead and simply brush my teeth when I want fresh breath, but the world is set up to make that more awkward or stupidly expensive in the case of water.

It's simple. Exercise more and eat less! And ... it's hard. Exercise more and eat less!

"Greater consumption of sugar-sweetened and low-calorie sodas was associated with a significantly higher risk of stroke." - Bernstein 2012. Soda consumption and the risk of stroke in men and women.

"consumption of diet soda at least daily was associated with significantly greater risks of select incident metabolic syndrome components and type 2 diabetes." - Nettleton 2008. Diet Soda Intake and Risk of Incident Metabolic Syndrome and Type 2 Diabetes in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA). Atrayee 2008. Genotoxicity Testing of Low-Calorie Sweeteners: Aspartame, Acesulfame-K, and Saccharin.

"artificially sweetened soft drinks may increase the risk of preterm delivery." - Halldorsson 2010. Intake of artificially sweetened soft drinks and risk of preterm delivery: a prospective cohort study in 59,334 Danish pregnant women.

"The results of this mega-experiment indicate that APM is a multipotential carcinogenic agent, even at a daily dose of 20 mg/kg body weight, much less than the current acceptable daily intake." - Soffritti 2006. First experimental demonstration of the multipotential carcinogenic effects of aspartame administered in the feed to Sprague-Dawley rats.

"cola consumption may increase the risk of chronic kidney disease." - Saldana 2007. Carbonated beverages and chronic kidney disease.

"Cases are presented demonstrating the early initiation and rapid progression of dental caries in three adolescents. A common factor is the ingestion of high amounts of caffeinated-carbonated soft drinks." - Majewski 2001. Dental caries in adolescents associated with caffeinated carbonated beverages.

Word DOC to HTML

It seems that whenever I try to find some simple piece of shareware or freeware ... especially freeware, on the internet using a search engine, I get a list of pages that invariably don't have what I want in their list of dodgy, overpriced software. I aso get for my trouble, at least 50% of the page splattered in eye wrenching advertisements that turn me off even casually browsing the descriptions of the software. Most of these pages will try to launch a pop up advertisment, and all of them will be running at least one set of tracking javascript. I loathe the authors of these pages.

There are some nice exceptions, SourceForge being a favourite. TUCOWS used to be excellent but now has joined the stinking pile of ad riddled sites.

A great idea is to get an ad blocker for your browser like AdBlock for FireFox or Safari Block for Safari.

I was looking for freeware to convert a folder full of MS Word documents to HTML. A simple task that I could have easily coded in VBScript (yes, it is useful for something). If you are any sort of HTML coder you will know that Microsoft products tend to generate the most ugly and bloated HTML code possible that will probably be least compatible with browsers available from companies other than Microsoft.

I spent 30 minutes looking for software, and found myself unwilling to download anything because if the web site looks dodgy then the software on it is probably dodgy. Phht. So then I start the search for VBScript to do it. I mean it should have been done a dozen times before and why reinvent the wheel, even if it is an easy wheel to invent.

Well I spent a while browsing, getting distracted by various other scripts and in the end just gave up and wrote it myself. Sure, this is easy, short, but since I really didn't find it anywhere else I am going to share my work in the hopes of saving some other poor slob the drudgery of creating it.

Option Explicit
'==========================================================================
' Word2HTML
'
' COMMENT:
' Converts all of the DOC files to HTML files in the specified folder and subfolders.
' DOC files are not destroyed or altered (unless MS Word messes with things)
'
' RESOURCES:
' http://www.microsoft.com/technet/scriptcenter/resources/qanda/hsgarch.mspx
' http://www.activexperts.com/activmonitor/windowsmanagement/scripts/msoffice/word/
' http://www.wizardwrx.com/CommonTypelibs/O2002_MSWORD.CSV
' http://www.helenfeddema.com/CodeSamples.htm
' http://www.pcsupportadvisor.com/Windows_scripting_host_page2.htm
'==========================================================================

Const SourceFolder = "Q:\PROJECTS\DocFolder"

' Alter the SourceFolder to point to your folder containing the DOC files
' *** Do not change the code below

' NOTE: You can Save As any of the below formats
' Const  wdFormatDocument=0
' Const  wdFormatDOSText=4
' Const  wdFormatDOSTextLineBreaks=5
' Const  wdFormatEncodedText=7
Const  wdFormatHTML=8
' Const  wdFormatRTF=6
' Const  wdFormatTemplate=1
' Const  wdFormatText=2
' Const  wdFormatTextLineBreaks=3
' Const  wdFormatUnicodeText=7
Dim thisFormat
myFormat = wdFormatHTML
myFormatExt = ".html"


Sub DocSaveAs (thisDocName, thisFormat)
Dim sDocFile, fso, wdo, wdocs, wdoc, sFolder, sOutFile
WScript.Echo thisDocName 
sDocFile = thisDocName
Set fso = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set wdo = CreateObject("Word.Application")
sDocFile = fso.GetAbsolutePathName(sDocFile)
sFolder = fso.GetParentFolderName(sDocFile)
If Len(sFolder) > 0 And Mid(sFolder,Len(sFolder),1) <> "\" Then sFolder = sFolder + "\"
sOutFile = sFolder + fso.GetBaseName(sDocFile) + myFormatExt
Set wdoc = wdo.Documents.Open(sDocFile)
wdoc.SaveAs sOutFile, thisFormat
wdo.quit
Set wdo = Nothing
Set fso = Nothing
End Sub


Dim strComputer, objWMIService
strComputer = "." ' can be altered to a network computer name eg: sph-simonf
Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")

Sub ProcessFolderHTML (thisFolder)
Dim  colFolder, objFolder, strFolderName, colFiles, objFile
If Mid(thisFolder,Len(thisFolder),1) = "\" Then thisFolder = Mid(thisFolder,1,Len(thisFolder)-1)
Set colFiles = objWMIService.ExecQuery ("ASSOCIATORS OF {Win32_Directory.Name='" & _
thisFolder & "'} Where ResultClass = CIM_DataFile")
If IsNull(colFiles) Then Exit Sub
For Each objFile in colFiles
 ' PROCESS FILE
 If objFile.Extension = "doc" Then DocSaveAs objFile.Name, myFormat
Next
' RECURSE SUB-FOLDERS
Set colFolder = objWMIService.ExecQuery ("Associators of {Win32_Directory.Name='" & _
 thisFolder & "'} Where AssocClass = Win32_Subdirectory ResultRole = PartComponent")
For Each objFolder in colFolder
 ProcessFolderHTML objFolder.Name
Next
End Sub


WScript.Echo "Word2HTML: Processing folder '" & SourceFolder & "'"
ProcessFolderHTML SourceFolder
WScript.Echo "Word2HTML: Conversion complete"

Europe: my guide

Long time no post - well I went to Europe for a while. This is my second trip to Europe, but this time we were determined to see more places over a longer period than the first two week trip allowed. I thought I would share some tips. You may want to check out my photo collection hosted by the wonderful people at Flickr or on my .Mac website while it still lasts.

European capitals are expensive

But that still does not mean you have to be ripped off. Expect to pay more for food and accommodation, however, do some investigation. We travelled during low season so we were able to haggle prices down. Other things like food can get you though, people really want you to pay top euro for cola. Grab some in larger bottles from grocery stores before you go out. Fill up bottles with water, apparently it is safe - I had no problems doing this and I even used a public fountain in Venice. Don't buy food or drink around tourist attractions. Certainly don't get your money changed under the Eiffel tower where an obnoxious little man sits in his booth, pretending not to speak any English but apparently understanding everything we said, adding extra charges for no readily apparent reason. I wish I took a pic of his grey bearded angry red face for the blog. Just to balance it out, everyone else we met in France was extremely friendly and helpful.

If you have a Eurail pass make sure you investigate time tables on the internet before you go. Also, check out alternative times and train types. There are a couple private train companies that like to think their trains are so much better than the standard ones that they can charge a very large premium above the Eurail ticket. Don't go on these, there is always an alternative and every standard train that we went on was fine to at least as good as the private company trains.

Accommodation

My partner found a great site called Trip Advisor which shows reviews posted by the general public about hotels. We were initially very concerned as many of the hotels we were looking at had some poor reviews in amongst some glowing reviews. Then after looking at some five star accommodation I realised that some people complain about anything. You have to read the negative review with suspicion to try to determine the psychological state of the person who wrote it. Some people will tell you the hotel is a write off because the desk clerk wouldn't pay them enough attention. Phht, welcome to Europe you self indulgent idiot. Others find a stain on the carpet or a crack in the wall and think they whole place should be condemned. Or perhaps the bathroom isn't an acre wide for their fat American backsides to fit in. Some are legitimate, like the one I am going write about the appaling Brodies Hostel in Edinburgh.

Again, low season is great. In Edinburgh we abruptly left the horror of Brodies Hostel and I decided to splurge. I knew the train station was close by, which had a "last minute" hotel booking place. They mentioned a couple places and I asked if she could get us in for 20 pounds less, a quick call confirmed that this was fine and we were in a very pleasant four star hotel rather than the barely better than a dumpster zero star Brodies Hostel.

To save ourselves a night of accommodation we decided to try a sleeper cabin from Zurich to Venice. I had never been in a sleeper before and was quite happy that we were trying it out. I was surprised that it was 100 euro over the eurail pass, but thought that was reasonable ... until he explained that it was 100 euro each. I was hesitant, I still wanted to experience a sleeper. Then the attendant said "I would not regret it, the sleepers are wonderful." So I got the sleeper tickets. He lied. They were crap. It would have been much better to travel in on an earlier train and get an extra night in Venice. Still, now I know. Maybe there are better sleeper cabins around but I won't be game to try them.

Time of year

Low season has fewer and smaller crowds, more free seats at events and on trains, you don't get hot and sweaty while trudging around, most things are cheaper or negotiable, you get to see snow (except global warming seems to have prevented that for our trip) or at least frosts and fogs. The downside is that some places are closed (the chocolate museum in Belgium) or close early, you have a lot less light to work with, fountains are empty in the north (Venice and Rome were fine), many trees are leafless and no flowers (although Amsterdam still had heaps), it can get bloody cold and windy. Despite the cold, we had an awesome time! Frankly I gladly accept the chill to avoid the crowds.

Travel guides

Travel guides are hugely useful. Lonely planet, Frommers and Let's Go seem to be the common ones about. I got the "Let's Go" guide and picked up plenty of great tips on what to see, eat and places to stay. Not all the places to stay are that good, but a little research on your own and you will find plenty of accommodation bookable over the internet.

One of the tips in the guides was about pick pockets and how they worked. Very interesting. So when we encountered them I knew exactly what they were and how they were going to operate. We actually encountered them in Rome at about the exact place that the guide told us we would. I was so amused that I stopped in my tracks and said to my partner "Oh! They're pick pockets! Cool!" and then realised that there were about to make a grab for my pocketed camera so I launched into a run, knocking them out of the way. I reported them to a nearby policewoman who only spoke Italian but understood my mime. So rather than be the event where I lost my camera, it was the event where I foiled pick pockets thanks to the warning from the guide books.

Europe is enormous and there is lots of good information to put in these guides making them quite bulky. You can get pocket guides which are specific for only one city which have the same sort of information, usually in more detail, as the large guides, as well as containing really good quality maps. Certainly the pocket books fit into my pocket, but I was wearing a nice warm winter jacket with deep pockets. During summer they would be more of a pain. You would have to carry them around in your backpack, but they are far easier to carry than the complete Europe guide. Each hotel usually has a good tourist map for free which is usually pamphlet size and often the hotel clerk can offer you great tips about the local area.

Non-smoker's guide to Europe

Only go to Italy, everywhere else stinks. Switzerland was particularly nasty because of the combined effect of the very smelly cheese fondue. In each country we visited we were told that they were considering or about to ban smoking in public places / bars and restaurants, but nobody could name a specific date. In Italy this had already taken place. We also noted on the news that Hong Kong had gone smoke free. Really, Europe would have you believe they are all about high culture, but I think they are an oldish culture that plays catch-up on many issues. They have their fair share of rude, ugly, ignorant, aggressive, unhelpful people like any other culture.

If you have to visit France, Amsterdam, Germany, Switzerland or what ever country that has not yet been enlightened about their responsibility of keeping the local air breathable for others then your best bet is to have dinner early and ask the restaurant about the non-smoking area. If you get placed out of the way in an ugly spot near the toilet or the kitchen doors then just get up and leave - there are plenty of restaurants about. One particularly lovely Indonesian restaurant in Amsterdam put us way at the back almost in our own private quiet softly lit room - it was excellent, as was the meal. Alternatively, a restaurant in Wales had the non smoking area next to the kitchen surrounded by the smoking area, at which we just chuckled at the waiter, politely informed him of our disapproval and left.

You should not be impolite as these people are not as well educated on the issues of smoking so you must make allowances for their immature cultural differences.

You must go!

Apart from the caveats ... just go to Europe, have a big budget, make sure you check out the hotels somehow before you go. It is awesome. Europe is a romantic setting - the perfect place to pop the question. She said yes :)

Electronic Arts

In Brief:

* Electronic Arts make it difficult to sign up and use their facilities
* Electronics Arts makes it difficult to get updates for their software
* Electronic Arts has a faulty feedback script, they don't want to hear from you
* Electronic Arts install spyware on your system (except, possibly, Australian versions)
* Electronics Boutique is a rip off in Australia
* Australian middle man importers/distributors are money-grubbing bastards
* I'm in a grumpy mood

Computer games

I have been known to play a few computer games in my time. I used to have over three shelves full of game boxes alone until I decided to discard the mostly empty boxes and just keep the manuals and disks, possibly even the covers of the box. I stashed them all into a cardboard box hidden away in my wardrobe. Only current games that I dabbled in would grace the shelf.

BattleField 2

Recently I have taken to occasionally playing Battlefield 2. This is currently selling for around $70 (all prices in Australian dollars unless specified) at Electronics Boutique, but was available from Pizza Hut in a $35 combo deal which included two large pizzas, garlic bread and Pepsi. Awesome value that disappeared quite quickly. You could also get Sims 2 + University, or some awful car game ("Need for Speed Most Wanted" I think) instead of Battlefield 2, but who cares; the local Pizza hut still had Sims and Need For Speed left over and were selling them for $15 on their own. All the while, Electronics Boutique continued to sell Battlefield 2 for $70-$90 depending on if they had a sale or not.

Battlefield 2142 demo

Battlefield 2142 is a futuristic setting battle ground. The game is basically the same as Battlefield 2 but with different graphics. I downloaded the >1Gig demo from one of a suggested mirror, but it was corrupted, so I downloaded again on a different computer from a different mirror and had the same corruption. I tried to report the download problem, but met with issues details below (complaints). I eventually found the 2142 demo file on an unofficial torrent site which downloaded over 10 times faster than either of the official mirrors, and voila, installation! Unfortunately the installation from EA was incomplete and required you to diagnose an error message which you can figure out with the help of Google to get to a Microsoft article that allows you to download and install a missing DLL.

Battlefield 2142 full version has spyware

Battlefield 2142 was to be available to the world as a download then simply get an activation code for US$50 which is Aus$65. Naturally Electronics Boutique has it for sale at $110. Unfortunately, Electronic Art's online purchase form does not have Australia as an allowable selection, so I cannot purchase legitimately online. I have to wonder if I need to change the region settings on my machine, do the servers have the smarts to pick up the country when looking at the IP and will the software stop working because of it. I actually contacted them about being in Australia and being excluded from online purchase but never received a reply. This is the only time that their contact-us support system worked for me.

I find out later through a wikipedia article that Battlefield 2142 is spyware laden but was prevented from distributing the software in Australia because installing the spyware would be illegal. Does this justify the price hike from a game that should to $65 to be sold for $110? Electronics Boutique has dropped the price to $99.95 recently. Still, they are a pack of bastards and I will never shop in there again. I will, however, report their extortionate prices and better ways to get the software.

Buy elsewhere

You can search eBay or find alternative overseas companies to purchase legitimate copies of the software. Such as the good people at Zest (Thailand) who will email you the key if you already have access to the Battlefield 2142 software for Aus$25, or deliver for Aus$40 if you are prepared to wait. Not a bad saving at all! Battlefield 2 is available for $22. Check it out. There is always a level of trust you have to place in ANY online company, let alone one from overseas. In Thailand they don't have to feed the good-for-nothing middle man as much plus the average wage is lower so the software companies can't scam the customers for as much as the market will bear. In my opinion, the marketers in Australia have it so wrong. Sure, we are a smaller market, larger area, higher distribution costs, but that should mean smaller profits and not higher pricing. Poor software marketing strategies are encouraging piracy or forcing customers to look at cheaper alternatives overseas.

I don't think I will be buying Battlefield 2142 any time soon tho. I don't want their spyware on my computer. I don't want to encourage companies that install spyware onto a computer. I am particularly sick of Electronic Arts and all their antics.

Patches

Battlefield 2 is quite buggy until you patch it with the updates available from Electronic Arts. You can online play online with servers that have the same patch level that you have installed, the servers are usually pretty quick to update when a patch comes out so you will see all your favourite online servers vanish. Just recently a new patch came out for Battlefield 2, version 1.41. Unforunately the idiots at Electronic Arts forgot to place the patch in the right spot. You click on upgrade on the Battlefield 2 menu and you get the old 1.4 patch. You search around Electronic Arts and find the same situation most everywhere: patch 1.41 is not listed but 1.4 is. Well it is available somewhere or the servers could not be upgrading. Finally, after prowling the forums I find the 1.41 patch. It also appears that the 1.41 patch is a complete patch from version 1.0, I could be wrong but the patch is >500Meg. Would be much nicer to download a small patch to upgrade from 1.4 to 1.41. Maybe it is out there, but EA have just hidden it. *sigh*

Complaints

So while on their site I thought I might tell them about the patch location problem. I click on the support and contact us links, I go through their hoops about specifying platform, game, problem, etc, filling in every field. The page offers me some bogus information that they think might help and asks if I still want to submit the comment, which I do, then I get a message saying that my javascript is turned off, which is complete crap because javascript needs to be enabled to even fill out their stupid form. I go back and fill out the forms again. Same error. I change computers and use a different browser type. Same fricken error.

I keep getting the idea that big companies do NOT want to hear from their customers.

Electronic Arts, I hate you and believe that you are evil in every sense of the word.

Mac articles now at Mac Tech Switching

I have been "invited" to submit articles over on a new Mac blog called Mac Tech Switching so I will probably post none (or very few) Mac based articles here from this point.

My first article was about a list of laptops that met the minimum specs required for my place of work. One of them happened to be a MacBook Pro, which also happened to be the cheapest. I thought this worthy of reporting as people who are looking at high end laptops in the same way that I was might automatically discount Apple as an option. Clearly Apple is an option even if you want to run Windows only. There are a lot of factors that you will want to consider apart from what I listed which has been argued to hell on the blog and on Digg. So many insecure Windows users; which is what I expected: plenty of Apple hate. I use Windows, Mac and Linux. Each has their place and is interesting in their own right.

Digg is a very popular site and if your article makes it to the front page then it will send a LOT of traffic to your site. The very rough view stats as of about 30 hours after posting the MacBook Pro article; we had 6000 views of the blog article which would be mostly digg users, 600 diggs of the article (10%), 60 digg comments (1%), 30 blog comments (0.5%), 6 clicks on Google ads (0.1%).

So Mac Tech Switching is yet another blog I write on including Blogger, .Mac and Vox. I like Vox, excellent article editing and image insertion, however blogger integrates better with my web site thanks to template editing.

I also post items to Whirlpool, Slashdot, Digg and even write to some newsgroups (USENET) when the fancy takes me. Yes, my hordes of fans out there can find my text all over the place. Joy.

70% of casual gamers are females 40+ years old

"Quality" analysis and reporting not at all influenced by marketing or complete rubbish?.

70% of casual gamers are females 40+ years old by ZDNet's ZDNet Research -- "“Middle-aged" women rule the $458 mln US online casual game market, Real Networks and PopCap found. 70% of casual gamers are females over the age of 40.

Are these just lies fudged for marketing?

I can't see how this is a ZDNet research article, when they refer to a Yahoo article that clearly refers to separatete research done by RealNetworks Inc. and PopCap Games. RealNetworks doesn't provide any ready access to such research that I could find. PopCap Games has a press release which describe the survey conducted by Information Solutions Group who appear to be nothing more than a web page hosting company, which is probably just a company with the same name. Yellow pages has "Information Solutions Group 425-373-1111, 227 Bellevue Way NE, Bellevue, WA 98004" but no URL. Odd for an internet research company not to have a web presence.

This alleged "research" has been cited a number of times from many different web sites: Gamasutra, Lexdon, GamePlanet, GameDaily, etc.

The articles also refer to Dr Carl Arinoldo who apparently is an author. Amazon tells me he may not be a doctor, or published before his got his PhD. He has two books on their list: How to Control Your Eating and Essentials of Smart Parenting. If he was a psychologist for 25 years I would have thought that he would have been using the "Dr" for his books. Maybe amazon strip off titles like "Dr". I found 3 articles recorded in PsychInfo by a Carlo Arinoldo, but nothing else. Not very prolific (or I am looking in the wrong places).

Many of the articles say "Leading publisher and developer of casual titles, PopCap Games" and also "leading market research firm Information Solutions Group". Firstly I have an issue about the definition of "casual games" and then that PopCap Games is the leader of said game genre. Secondly, how is Information Solutions Group a "leading" market research firm? I can't even find the buggers. What does "leading" mean?

Now for the results. It is all crap, or at least the interpretation of the results by ridiculous media organisations like ZDNet are crap. To start with, the survey was biased towards females; of the 2191 totarespondentsts, 528 were male and 1,663 were female. Comparisons between gender would have to be done exceedingly carefully, which Arinoldo would have done, I'm sure. If you look at the press reports that cover the numbers well enough (like Lexdon) you will see that all sorts of interesting information can be extracted from the results, but not what the ZDNet is masturbating over. The media headlines highlight the lack of education of the reporters. Or the deceptive intent of marketing.

To me this sounds like an attempt to market advertising space to companies that would like to target the 40+ year old female group. Possibly even selling some PopCap games to companies who focus on this demographic. I have nothing to back this up, it is just my feeling.