Chirundu Jason

Best Birdwatching Binocular 2010

2010-12-09T07:45:00.000Z

At this time of the year many industries, especially in entertainment and sports like to look back over the year and go over some of the highlights as well as the best in a particular category - The BBC Sports Personality of the Year springs to mind.

So I thought why not do something similar within the field of binoculars and highlight some of the best binoculars in a range of the most common uses, including Best Birdwatching Binocular. Nothing new here as it turns out that with a little research Binoculars.com, on of the best on-line retailers of optics already has one.

Why I bring it up is in their choice of the best bird binoculars for 2010:

Pentax 8x43 DCF SP Binoculars
Now don't get me wrong, I think that these are a cracking pair of binoculars and they have a bunch of excellent features including aspherical eyepiece lenses, high-resolution phase-coated roof prisms, scratch-resistant hydrophobic coating on exposed objective and eyepiece lenses and multi-coated optical elements.

Where the lack a little is in one of the most important areas of any really great birding binocular and that is in their field of view. These Pentax binoculars have a field of view of 330ft at 1000 yards (110m at 1000m) or an angle of view of 6.3°, which to be honest in my view is only just above average - really great 8x42 wide angle binoculars like the Swift Audubon binoculars (see below) can have a field of view as wide as 430ft @1000 yards (8.15°)

The winner of the Best Binocular Reviews Best Birding Binocular 2010 was indeed the porro prism version of the Swift 8.5x44 Audubon ED Binoculars that does have a massively wide field of view as well as a host of other great features including BaK-4 Prisms, fully multi-coated optics and extra low dispersion glass (ED) that all add up to produce a very high quality and bright image.

For more take a look at the Best Binocular Reviews Annual Binocular Awards 2010.

Side Note:
For those who are interested the short-list for the BBC Sports Personality of the Year 2010 is below:

Mark Cavendish
Tom Daley
Jessica Ennis
David Haye
AP McCoy
Graeme McDowell
Graeme Swann
Phil Taylor
Lee Westwood
Amy Williams

Friends of Hwange Trust Screensaver

2010-08-26T07:57:00.002Z

Working on Chirundu.com, I get a lot of requests for me to publish appeals for help for the many charities in Zimbabwe and for the most part, I am happy to do what ever I can to help.

The other day one came in that really struck a cord with me as wildlife and particularly the Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe is close to my heart as it is where I first really got interested in wildlife photography. It is also where after spending a week there with a guide, I for the first time knew that I would really like to become a field guide (safari guide).

That is why I am posting about the Friends of Hwange Trust (FOH), who need your help:

The riends of Hwange Trust is a group of dedicated Zimbabwean conservationists who have taken into their own hands the care of the wild animals and maintenance, particularly water supply, of Zimbabwe’s largest national park.

Since 2005, FOH has been responsible for 10 key northern waterholes in Hwange National Park. These are Kennedy One, Kennedy Two, Makwa, Sinanga, Tshebe Tshebe, Mabuya Mabena, Shumba, Tshompani, Inyantue and Shapi.

Because of the price of diesel (a single borehole engine uses around 500 litres a month) alternative methods of pumping have been explored. Since 2007, five Poldaw windmills have been established at Kennedy One, Shumba, Mabuya Mabena, Shapi and Tshompani waterholes. Whilst the windmills are robust and affordable, their pumping capacities are limited. Their function is to provide a head start for the waterholes so that they are at least as full as possible by the start of the long dry season, thereby reducing diesel requirements for the drier months.

In the dry season (July – November) the pressure for available water increases, especially from elephant. The Lister engines are kept running continuously and the need for diesel is at its maximum.

How you can help
Link South Africa, a company in New Zealand is selling a wildlife screensaver to raise money for The Friends of Hwange Trust.

So please sacrifice a couple of coffees this week, spend 10 Kiwi Dollars downloading our screensaver, and help The Friends of Hwange Trust save many many animal lives in Zimbabwe, while you get to enjoy Zimbabwe’s beautiful wildlife on your computer screen every day!

Click here For more information and to download the screensaver

Related Links

Friends of Hwange Trust Website
For a list of all the Zimbabwe Charities on Chirundu.com
The Chirundu.com Profile on Link South Africa

Evernote

2010-08-26T07:35:00.001Z

I have been using Evernote for about a week now and it seems that almost every day I find another useful use for it.

What is Evernote?
Well basically you can use Evernote to save your ideas, things you see, and things you like. Then find them all on any computer, phone or device you use, and all For free.

Evernote is a note-taking, idea-saving application that has now been adopted by over 3 million people.

What is cool is that it syncs up your notes with a remote server, so accessing your latest notes on multiple devices is automatic. When you upload images, Evernote will OCR (optical character recognition) them to make them searchable. You can embed files as well, though only PDFs, .txt and images with the free version. The premium service enables a few additional features such as embedding any kind of files and increasing the amount of bandwidth allotted to you per month.

I tend to use it a lot for my to-do lists and it make organising my daily tasks really simple.

I love it - you should try it and no, I'm not getting paid to write this!

http://www.evernote.com/

Safari-Guy’s Posterous

2010-08-17T16:11:00.000Z

Just discovered a new blogging platform, called Posterous and it is interesting because to add a new entry all you have to do is email your account and the post gets created for you. Now I know that you have been able to do this on other blogging platforms for a while, but to be honest I never really bothered to set it up. With posterous, it is easier to do it this way than use their fiddly interface.

Anyway foe SEO purposes, I have created a new account, that you may want to check out: Safari-Guy’s Posterous, where I plan to post most safari related stuff.

New Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ100 Camera

2010-08-03T08:19:00.000Z

Panasonic have just brought out their newest cameras in their Superzoom Lumix FZ series, with the awesome looking Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ100 Camera.

I know there are many people out there that may say that I am crazy and that I should not even be considering buying another compact superzoom camera, rather I should get a digital SLR. Yes, I know that the SLR takes better quality photos... but can they also take full HD quality video, and how much do they cost and then there is the added expense of buying a even half decent telephoto lens. Add to this the size difference making a SLR a pain in th but to carry around, I think that for my purposes, a super zoom camera is the way to go.

I think the choice is between the FZ100 and the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ45 (FZ40), which has also just been announced and is actually the real sucessor to the FZ38 (FZ35), but is a little cheaper than the FZ100.

If you are interested, I have done a bunch of research on it, which you can read on the photo section on my Safari Guide website:

Busiest Day Ever!

2010-06-12T05:09:00.000Z

Wow, I may even have to do some stretching for today's couch marathon:

Rugby
New Zealand v Ireland, 8:35
Australia v England, 11:00
South Africa v France, 13:00
Argentina v Scotland, 19:45

Cricket Twenty20
Zimbabwe v India 12:00

Formula 1 - Canadian Grand Prix
Practice 3 15:00-16:00
Qualifying 18:00

Football- World Cup
1230: South Korea v Greece (Port Elizabeth) - ITV 1
1500: Argentina v Nigeria (Ellis Park, Johannesburg) - BBC One
1930: England v US (Rustenburg) - ITV 1

Indy Car > Formula 1

2010-05-31T06:57:00.001Z

Well I am not sure that Indy Car racing is better than Formula 1, but one thing that is for sure this accident in the 2010 Indy 500, where Mike Conway has a Huge Airborne Crash into the Catchfence is fairly spectacular!

Flame Lily ( Gloriosa superba )

2010-04-24T06:21:00.002Z

Flame Lily ( Gloriosa superba )
Originally uploaded by rickinzim

Gloriosa superba
Common name: Flame Lily
Family: Colchicaceae

The Flame Lily is a wild deciduous perennial, that is the national flower of Zimbabwe. It is a protected plant species, and there is a law prohibiting the picking of them.

Zimbabwe Photography 2010

2010-04-24T06:03:00.000Z

I have been away in Zimbabwe for a while:

I am very lucky in that every year I go home to Zimbabwe, I usually spend most of the time in the Zambezi valley and mostly on Lake Kariba, where apart from the excellent fishing, I can spend loads of time on my hobby: wildlife photography.

Kariba for me has it all:
Wonderful scenery including some of the best sunrises and sunsets you could ever hope to photograph.
Plenty of mammals and is especially good for elephant photography.
Birds - This is where Kariba really excels, there is a huge variety of mostly water birds, but if you go a little walk, many land species as well.

If you want to see a few of the photos I took on the trip, take a look at my photos of my Zimbabwe trip 2010

RuggaChick - Super14 Rugby Roundup

2010-04-23T12:27:00.001Z

A babe that knows her rugby. Hell yeah!

In all honesty she's a bit ditzy, but we don't care.

Zimbabwe Dreaming

2010-03-01T10:56:00.001Z

No words, just music and great photos..

Make Money on a Travel Blog

2010-02-18T15:20:00.000Z

I was recently asked by a friend who is going travelling this summer, if they should set up a blog about it to make some money, that will pay for their extended holiday:

My Advice to her is below:

I think writing about your trip is a great idea and yes you can make money from it. I would however cation you if you think it will make you loads of cash quickly.

It is not that it can't, but I do it full time and it is a full time job. It also took me over a year of doing it before I got to the point where I was earning enough so that I could quit my day job and work on it full time.

If however you just want to earn some pocket money - You could easily set up a blog and then add some Google Adsense and Affiliate advertising onto it. This is not to say that in the future you could not earn a living from it, but this summer may be too soon to really make good money from a blog.

Nerdy Nomad: http://www.nerdynomad.com/ is good for inspiration and plenty of advice as she pays for her travels with her blog

Free Blogging Platforms
Besides wordpress.com, that this blog is hosted on, Google have a good free blog host: www.bolgger.com

Build Free Websites

2010-02-17T14:45:00.000Z

For SEO purposes, I am always on the lookout for "places" to add content on the web, get it ranked and then point it towards my main sites. If these "places" are free, so much the better.

There are a number of sites that offer you the chance to build and Create a free website, some of the better ones include:

Of these, wix is my least favourite as it builds the site in "flash" which looks nice, but is pretty rubbish in regards to getting high rankings on the search engines.

MP3puzzled.com - The MP3 Downloads Price Comparison Website

2010-01-17T05:23:00.000Z

These days, there seems to be a price comparison website for just about everything and this morning, I came across another one, it has nothing to do with meerkats and I think what sets it apart, is that it is pretty useful:

MP3puzzled.com is a MP3 Downloads Price Comparison Website and yes, by comparing prices you can save money. For example:

Killing In The Name by Rage Against The Machine will cost you:

£0.99 on itunes
£0.89 on Amazon.co.uk
£0.79 on HMV.com
£0.70 on Play.com
£0.67 on Tesco Entertainment

Amazon.co.uk Widgets

Simba and the Muntjac Deer

2010-01-14T11:57:00.000Z

I was lucky enough to spot a pair of Muntjac Deer feeding at the bottom of our garden this morning.

Simba (our cat) also spotted them, braved the snow and stalked right up to them. She got within a meter before they spotted her, had a staring match which Simba eventually lost and then as only cats can do, she walked away as if to say "I didn't really care anyway!"

Pity I could not get any better photos, especially of the Buck, as he has some stunning markings and antlers. But here are a few of the better ones.

Originally from China, they escaped and been released from zoo's and wildlife parks and are now spreading all over the country. The Muntjac is the smallest deer in the UK (about the size of an average dog).

Simba (in the foreground) returning from her Muntjac "hunting" expedition!

Self Drive and Car Hire Namibia

2010-01-01T09:35:00.000Z

The 1st of January 2010! Time for new years resolutions....

I have recently been doing quite a lot of research on Namibia, mostly for my Safari Holiday Guide website. It is a place full of contrasts and not that I think that I will be able to go this year, but going on a self drive camping holiday in Namibia is definitely on my lifetime to-do list.

With it's excellent places to camp like the Etosha National Park and generally a good road system, it is ideal. My hope is I will eventually move back home to Zimbabwe and then be able to drive over from there in my own vehicle.

For overseas visitors, Namibia does have some really good specialist vehicle and car hire companies, that offer 4x4 vehicles fully equipped for camping that are mostly located around Windhoek. And as far as I can ascertain, hiring a car in Namibia is pretty simple and not that much more expensive than what you would expect to pay in Europe. Specialist and 4x4 vehicles are more expensive, but will still be much cheaper than staying at lodges. And even if you don't want to camp Namibia has plenty of really good guest houses and B&B's.

For some inspiration take a look at this excellent trip report, with loads of useful information: Namibia and Botswana 2006.

For more the vehicles take a look at my article on Vehicle Rental & Car Hire Namibia

...now back to deciding what this years resolution is going to be.....

Free Web Hosting

2009-12-17T20:24:00.001Z

If I have an idea for a site, it is great to be able to test the concept without having to spend too much cash. I have used a number of Free Web Hosts, many are terrible, but there are a few good ones out there as well.

Good ones to look out for offer more than just hosting, with extras like Php functionality as well as at least one MySql database, per account.

My favourites are:

http://www.000webhost.com/ - I haven't been using it for long, but so far so good. One of my test sites, Zambezi Safari is hosted with them.
http://www.awardspace.com/ - This is another very popular free webhost. I have often used them in the past and indeed have upgraded on of my free acounts to a paid for version.

GUK Publishing

2009-10-14T07:12:00.003Z

It has been a while since my last post, mainly because I have been really busy and as such, plenty has happened.

The biggest news is the start of GUK Publishing, a company that I, along with two other guys have started.

It is still very much in it's infancy, so much so that the name is not 100% fixed yet and we don't yet have a website, but the whole project is very exciting. As the name suggests we will be publishing useful content on the web and we have already stared on a few projects:

Weddings in Newbury
Hotels in Newbury

Both websites focus on local business and aim to provide useful information to the people of Newbury or those visiting Newbury (in the case of the hotels site)

Guest Posts
All our projects will also allow guest posting, guest articles should be relevant and useful. The advantage for us is good quality unique content from a different perspective and the advantage for you is a link back to your site on the "about the author" section. So if you would like to write an article for either, please feel free to contact me.

Spotify on iPhone and Android

2009-09-07T19:51:00.002Z

I am a big fan of Spotify, the device that streams music to your PC so quickly that there is almost always no delay to when you can start listening. Well now they are going to produce an iPhone app as well as one for Android phones.

Just like the PC version, Spotify Mobile will let you listen to music from Spotify’s roster of artists and albums, just like you can on PC or Mac.You will need a 3G or wifi connection to stream, but because they know you might want to listen in places where a signal is weak or impossible – such as on a plane or the tube – Spotify Mobile can ‘cache’ the music from your playlists onto your phone for offline playback.

Again just like the PC version, the app is a free download, but unlike the PC version, you will need to have a premium Spotify account.

Force India without Fisi

2009-09-06T07:21:00.002Z

Giancarlo Fisichella has recently announced that he will join Ferrari until the end of the season, which is great news for him and for Formula 1, but I wonder who will now drive for Force India.

Even though Force India have put a brave face on it (see the official statement below) I bet they must be gutted to let him go, especially as they and Fisi had such a strong showing (2nd) and their first points in the Belgian GP in Spa-Francorchamps last weekend.

-------------------------
Official Statement from Force India

Following extensive discussions over the past 24 hours, the Force India Formula One Team has agreed to release Giancarlo Fisichella from his contract to join the Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro team for the remainder of the 2009 season, starting with immediate effect.
Dr Vijay Mallya, chairman and team principal, commented, ‘Giancarlo and his management team approached me yesterday with the proposal from Ferrari. For any Italian driver, a Ferrari race seat is a long-held dream and for Giancarlo it was no exception. No one should stand in the way of this. Furthermore the agreement will secure Giancarlo’s long-term future with Ferrari and it would be incorrect to jeopardise this, particularly when Giancarlo has made such a vital contribution to Force India.

‘We would like to stress that we have not agreed any financial settlement with Ferrari. This agreement has been made in good faith and for the good of Giancarlo and the sport in general. A competitive Italian driver in a Ferrari for Monza is a positive story for Formula One, which can only help raise the sport’s profile in these difficult times.

‘We would like to thank Giancarlo for all his help over the past one and a half seasons and for delivering us our first World Championship points last weekend. He has been an integral part of the team and we owe him a great deal for his input behind the scenes and performance out on track. We wish him all the best for the future.

‘For Force India, this sport is a team effort and removing one part, even a major one, will not significantly affect our performance. The competitiveness of the team seen in Belgium was a result of hard work in the factory and wind tunnel and we have further developments coming for the final races, so we are confident this momentum can be sustained. We are now looking forward to a strong finish to the season.’

Giancarlo commented, ‘I am very grateful to Vijay Mallya for allowing me this opportunity to drive for the Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro team. It is true that it has always been an ambition to do this, and for Vijay to have allowed it to become a reality is very generous. I hope in my turn I have helped Force India grow up and be on the right path to achieve their own ambitions. They are now a very competitive team and I wish them all the very best.’

A decision regarding the driver of car number 21 will be made in the coming days and no further comment will be made on this front.

Bolognese Sauce Recipe

2009-09-01T18:13:00.003Z

Nothing too special about a good bolognese sauce (except the taste that is), but what felt good is that I have just finished making one where I used home-grown tomatoes, garlic, carrots and onions, which makes it taste all the better. With a new addition of a greenhouse to my garde, next year I hope to also have the peppers added to the list.

If you are interested here is my easy peasy Spaghetti Bolognese Sauce Recipe:

Ingredients

1 onion, peeled and finely chopped
1 carrot, peeled and finely diced or grated
225g/8oz minced beef
2 tbsp olive oil
1 green pepper, seeded and finely diced
2 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed
1 tbsp mixed dried herbs
4 ripe tomatoes
Few Dashes of Worcester sauce
Tomato Paste
Tomato Sauce
salt and pepper

Method

Heat the oil in a large pan and cook the onion until it starts to soften.
Add the mice and cook it until it is just coloured
Add the Worcester sauce, Tomato Paste, Tomato Sauce, carrot, garlic, pepper and tomatoes and a small amount of water if necessary and cook for a few minutes
Add a glass of water and simmer gently for 40-50 minutes until thick. Use to make lasagne or serve with Spaghetti pasta.

The View from my Office

2009-08-10T17:07:00.005Z

When I first came to the UK and used to work in London, I had an in-house joke with some friends where we would email each other photos of the 'views from our office', just to prove how dull our jobs were!

Now, I am lucky enough to be able to work from home and whilst it does have many benefits, there are also many distractions, especially if you are like me and enjoy wildlife photography.

On a few of the sunny days this spring and summer, I have often taken my laptop along with my camera, to do a little work outside.

I have seen plenty of birds, including the usual common UK birds and have also managed to spot two of the three woodpeckers that you get in the UK, the Green woodpecker and the lesser spotted woodpecker.

As well as the birds, I have seen plenty of butterflies, a Grass Snake (Natrix natrix) who lives in my compost heap, the occasional sighting of a pair of Monkjack Deer and a young fox who has taken to stealing my shoes and planting them in my vegetable garden!

Whilst I still miss all the wildlife from back home, I am really enjoying the wonderful nature that has taken to visiting my urban garden here in the UK this summer.

My Love Hate Relationship wih Google

2009-08-03T08:40:00.003Z

Recently Google decided that it no longer liked my Best Binoculars & Binocular Reviews website and keywords that I was previously ranking in the first 5 places for, were now down to the tenth page or worse.

I was totally gutted, because I have been doing a lot of work on this website for many months now and it was slowly starting to pay off with the traffic to it, steadily increasing and as such so has to has my income

So what I had done to incur the wrath of Google?

In my opinion nothing, because I am looking at this site as a long term project I am purposely keeping away from any shady ways to improve my search engine rankings and producing quality unique contenet that I feel is genuinely useful should you be looking for advice on binoculars.

I did wonder if I may have too many internal links on the homepage, Google's own Webmaster Guidelines recommend that you keep it to less than a hundred and mine is pretty close to that, but surely this is not the worst crime in SEO?

After racking my brains and not coming up with anything and as a last resort, I submitted a Reconsideration Request from my Google Webmaster Tools account. This was done in frustration more than anything else as I have written to 'Big Brother' in the past and never received a reply and so was not expecting much.

Five days later
Yeagh \o/ - all my rankings have now returned and I even have a very generic reply from Google that says:

----------------------------

We've processed your reconsideration request for http://www.bestbinocularsreviews.com/ July 30, 2009

We received a request from a site owner to reconsider how we index the following site: www.bestbinocularsreviews.com.

We've now reviewed your site. When we review a site, we check to see if it's in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines. If we don't find any problems, we'll reconsider our indexing of your site. If your site still doesn't appear in our search results, check our Help Center for steps you can take.
-----------------------------

I still do not know what (if anything) I did was wrong, but at least now I now once again have people visiting my website although I have a horrible feeling it may happen again.

So if someone in the reads this from the Google Search team reads this, thanks guys, but to improve it, why not tell us why it happened, this would help people who are genuinely not trying to trick you to to produce better websites for your search engine and for the billions of people who use it.

Discount Binoculars

2009-07-02T04:41:00.006Z

I have been working hard on my Binoculars website lately and it seems to be paying off with the amount of visitors up buy just over 87% for the month of June as compared to May and this in turn is converting into an equal increase in sales.

One of the most recent features that I have added is a page where you can quickly compare discounted binoculars, these are real discounts on binoculars found on either Amazon, Binoculars.com, Eagle Optics, Optics Planet or Jessops here in the UK.

I think that it helps users of my site quickly check to see what is available at a discounted price and so far according to my analytics, it is being used a lot which is great.

Leica Binoculars
Also new to the site is a page on Leica Binoculars - not cheap, but definitely some of the best quality binoculars out there.

Skinny Blonde Looses Bikini

2009-06-14T19:10:00.002Z

... thought that title may get your attention!

Kooler Box - Jou Moer

2009-06-03T08:04:00.001Z

Too Good...

Fledgling Blue Tit

2009-05-22T12:24:00.001Z

Just saved this little guy from the jaws of my nasty cat! It had obviously just fledged and so was an easy target. I got it back onto a tree near the nest and it's parents are now feeding it again so all is good.

The species is a blue tit and I took the photo with my Panasonic FZ18, the older version of the Panasonic DMC-FZ28 with a 1x7 Tele Converter attached.

Bark at the Moon - Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt

2009-05-22T07:25:00.001Z

I just love the way unplanned marketing works sometimes, sales of this Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt went up by 2,300% after a spate of ironic reviews went viral. The t-shirt is listed on Amazon.com, where the general public can write reviews on any product being sold.

The first review gave the shirt five stars, saying it "Fits my girthy frame, has wolves on it, attracts women" but "cannot see wolves with arms crossed".

This then prompted hundreds of others to write ironic reviews and as of today there are now 449 customer reviews of this T-shirt.

One of the most popular review which 5720 have found helpful was written by B. Govern "Bee-Dot-Govern" of New Jersey:

"This item has wolves on it which makes it intrinsically sweet and worth 5 stars by itself, but once I tried it on, that's when the magic happened. After checking to ensure that the shirt would properly cover my girth, I walked from my trailer to Wal-mart with the shirt on and was immediately approached by women. The women knew from the wolves on my shirt that I, like a wolf, am a mysterious loner who knows how to 'howl at the moon' from time to time (if you catch my drift!). The women that approached me wanted to know if I would be their boyfriend and/or give them money for something they called mehth. I told them no, because they didn't have enough teeth, and frankly a man with a wolf-shirt shouldn't settle for the first thing that comes to him.

I arrived at Wal-mart, mounted my courtesy-scooter (walking is such a drag!) sitting side saddle so that my wolves would show. While I was browsing tube socks, I could hear aroused asthmatic breathing behind me. I turned around to see a slightly sweaty dream in sweatpants and flip-flops standing there. She told me she liked the wolves on my shirt, I told her I wanted to howl at her moon. She offered me a swig from her mountain dew, and I drove my scooter, with her shuffling along side out the door and into the rest of our lives. Thank you wolf shirt.

Pros: Fits my girthy frame, has wolves on it, attracts women
Cons: Only 3 wolves (could probably use a few more on the 'guns'), cannot see wolves when sitting with arms crossed, wolves would have been better if they glowed in the dark."

Other classics include:

"Unfortunately I already had this exact picture tattooed on my chest, but this shirt is very useful in colder weather. "

"WON'T PLAY ON MY CD PLAYER & WHEN I EMAILED THE DUDE HE SAID I WAS A NUT. I"M LIKE, WTF MAN EVERYONE ALWAYS SAYS THAT EVEN GRANDMA & MR CHRISTIE FROM UP THE STREET WHO LOOKS OVER THE FENCE BUT IT CAME WITH A PRETTY COOL SHIRT"

"Look, you can find a bunch of different wolf T-shirts on the market, but this is THE one to get. You get three wolves plus one moon. More realistic than the three moons plus one wolf model. Just thinking about this T-shirt and its wolves-howling-at-the-moon motif makes me want to ... well ... go outside and holler at the moon! It's THAT good."

Check out the Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt on Amazon.

Live Giro d'Italia

2009-05-12T13:14:00.003Z

I have just found this excellent website, Universal Sport that will be streaming every stage of this years Giro d'Italia live on the web and is open to view from anywhere in the world. The commentary is in english.

http://www.universalsports.com

Exploring the South of France

2009-04-29T07:14:00.006Z

For the summer holidays, a group of us are planning on exploring some of the South of France by car his year.

There are a few things on the must-do list and these include timing it so we catch a mountain stage of this years Tour de France, do a little canoeing in the Ardeche, some camping in a wilderness area (national park) and check out at least one great French beach, possibly along the French Riviera somewhere.

The plans are very much in their infancy, but there will be six of us travelling (3 couples) and so what we thought we might do is hire a people carrier type car here in the UK and then catch the ferry crossing to France, drive down to the south and take it from there.

Another option is to catch a ferry to Spain, this leaves from Portsmouth and arrives in Bilbao in Northern Spain and whilst it takes 2 nights to get there and costs more, you do cut out about a 1000 kilometres of driving.

We had wanted to go towards the end of July, but because the Tour de France is starting in Monaco and travelling around France in an anti-clockwise direction this year, they will be in the Pyrenees mountains pretty early on in the race (the 5th, 6th and 7th I think) meaning that if we want to see it, we will have to travel a little earlier than planned, or wait until right t the end of the Tour when on the penultimate day it will be climbing the massive Mont Ventoux in the Provence region of Southern France and nicknamed the "Giant of Provence", or "The Bald Mountain". see main image.

.... decisions, decisions.....

What do you have a fear of?

2009-02-25T12:34:00.001Z

In a new book entitled "Click", the author Bill Tancer explores how analysing what people search for can give us a better understanding of what people really think about a particular topic. Using Hitwise, the author took a look at what people have a fear of, by exploring searched for keywords that contained the words "Fear of" in them.

Search results form all the major UK search engines were used over a period of 12 weeks ending on the 14th of February 2009. Some of the finding were quite surprising:

During this period, there were over 8,500 distinct terms containing the phrase ‘fear of’.
The most searched for fear was ‘fear of flying’
Fear of Cats? The most feared animal it seems is cats at number 2 on the list. As there are no films, bands or books that I can find that have this title, it does seem that lots of people really do seem to have an irrational fear of cats!

Top 10 Fear of Searches:

1. fear of flying (2.27% of all ‘fear of’ searches)
2. fear of cats (1.72%)
3. irrational fear of cats (1.34%)
4. fear of clowns (1.10%)
5. fear of long words (1.01%)
6. fear of heights (0.86%)
7. fear of the dark (0.62%)
8. fear of death (0.61%)
9. fear of spiders (0.43%)
10. fear of crime (0.36%)

You can buy a copy of Bill Tancer’s excellent book Click: What We Do Online and Why it Matters on Amazon.co.uk.

ACDC - Money Made

2009-02-19T13:20:00.001Z

From the new AD/DC album Black Ice

One reason Why Firefox is better than IE

2009-02-17T14:56:00.001Z

Gspace Firefox Add-On

Here is just one of the many good reasons to use Firefox rather than Internet Explorer:

Gapace is Firefox extension allows you to use your Gmail Space (4.1 GB and growing) for file storage. It acts as an online drive, so you can upload files from your hard drive and access them from every Internet capable system. The interface will make your Gmail account look like a FTP host.
After the installation, you'll get an option called "Gspace" in your "Tools" menu, which opens the GSpace window.

It's great for storing/sharing files with your friends. Also very good to backup photos and music files (as you can view/listen to them from Gspace).

For more information go to G.Space and to install the plugin: Gspace Add-on

Battle of the Films

2009-02-11T16:41:00.001Z

Pink Panther vs. Street Fighter vs. Wolverine vs. Star Trek

In the next few months there are a few new films due to be released:

The Pink Panther 2 (Feb 13th)
Friday the 13th (Feb 13th)
Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (Feb 27th)
X-Men Origins: Wolverine (May 1st)
Star Trek (May 8th)

So before their release, do you think it is possible to tell which film will be the most popular?

Most Popular Film Search on Google
According to Google Insights for Search, over the past 30 days, slightly more people are searching for Street Fighter than Star Trek. If you combine the searches for Wolverine and X-men, it shows that this film is pretty popular in as far as web searches, with the Pink Panther lagging a little behind.

I am not sure if the amount of people searching for the films on the web will have any bearing on the box office, I guess only time will tell, but it is pretty interesting all the same...

Darren Rowse Video Interview

2009-02-10T09:12:00.001Z

A little nerdy, but interesting interview with Darren Rowse, owner of ProBlogger and Digital-Photography-School blogs, which I have actually guest posted on before.

He has taught me loads, not only about blogging, but SEO and marketing in general and it is always good to listen to what he has to say. In this video he mostly talks about what it takes to make a successful blog. Most of it is obvious, things like always producing quality, worthwile content, but there are other gems in there aswell.

Darren according to Wikipedia:
In November 2002, while working as a part-time minister, for an on-line department store, and as a casual labourer, Rowse started LivingRoom.org.au, a blog about living in Australia, religion (mainly the emerging church movement), politics and other topics that he found interesting.

Rowse contributes to around 20 different blogs, although he is only actively blogging on two, - including topic specific blogs such as the Athens Olympics and the Michael Jackson court case - he runs with other bloggers.

His two personal blogs are Digital Photography Blog with reviews on digital cameras due to lack of views of his own photography, and ProBlogger which features tips on blogging. These two blogs get around 15,000-20,000 page views a day and over $20,000 in total ad revenue a month. Rowse attempts to contribute around 25 blog posts a month.

As of 30 January 2007, ProBlogger was listed as number seven on Technorati's most favorited blogs list and number 48 on the most linked to blog.

In 2006, Rowse was awarded the Best Web Development Weblog blog award in 2006 for ProBlogger.

Rowse is currently the vice president of training and development for b5media, the blog network he founded in September 2005 with fellow bloggers Jeremy Wright, Shai Coggins and Duncan Riley. The blog network claims to have over 200 blogs, and one of the largest new media networks in the world with one million page views a day in 2006

Velentines Ideas: Sexy Costume?

2009-02-09T16:51:00.001Z

Ok, here's a good idea for valentines day, why not surprise the man of your life in a sexy costume... well, you didn't think I was going to suggest that I should dress up in a sexy fireman costume or something did you?

If you do plan on dressing up for valentines day, I would go for a Leg Avenue costume, definitely the sexiest and best quality costumes out there.

Loving Lovely Charts

2009-02-09T12:15:00.001Z

Here is a fun simple way to impress your boss, with Lovely Charts, you can very quickly create flowcharts, network diagrams, sitemaps and wireframes. I know the diagram above means nothing but I created it and exported it as an image in only a few minutes

Other similar online programs include Gliffy, Flowchart.com and Draw that enable you to create diagrams and more in your
browser with drag-and-drop functionality. The main differentiator
between LovelyCharts and other online services is that it actually
makes your complex processes look incredibly good. Better yet, it’s
completely free and since last week, out of beta.

In terms of features, LovelyCharts has pretty much all the basics
covered, but you really need to try it out to get a feel of how rich
the web-based app really is even with its relatively simple feature
set. You can draw, align, insert symbols and icons, snap, zoom, import
& export, and so on - for a good overview, check the tour and the video demo.

I think one improvement that could be made would be alow you to upload a custom symbol, but other than that I think it really works well.

LovelyCharts was developed by RIA developer and user architect Jérôme Cordiez.

How to increase your carbon footprint

2009-02-04T15:31:00.001Z

Introducing the Pizza Pro Circular Saw pizza cutter that could not only pointlessly increase your carbon footprint, but also the art of carving up a pie for eight infinitely more enjoyable.

Translate Your Blog into 34 Languages

2009-01-23T09:53:00.001Z

I stumbled upon the Global Translator yesterday - A plugin for WordPress blogs that will translate your blog posts into 34 languages with the added bonus of being completely free!

I know that it is not going to help this blog, but I think it could really help my travel orientated blogs like on The Safari Holiday Guide and Beach Holiday Guide where through analytics I have noticed not only many readers coming from non European countries, but also that they then view my pages through the Google Translator.

For more information and to download the Global Translator follow the link below:
Global Translator

What not to Wear on Safari

2009-01-20T21:18:00.004Z

Just a quick post to mention a page that I put together recently, firstly on my safari holiday guide website: Safari Clothing Advice and then this Squidoo lens on What Safari clothing and Equipment to take on your holiday.

I guess I put these pages together after remembering an amusing couple that I collected from the gates of the private game reserve I worked on in South Africa. He was originally from South Africa, but now worked in Russia, in the casino business. She was Russian and worked in the casino...... I think as a dancer.

What was amusing is just what she wore, it was as if she was going out on the town, high heels, lipstick and not much else left to the imagination. I won't deny that she was hot... it was just a wee bit out of place!

Anyway apart from that they were a really friendly bunch and we had an excellent time, I just thought that she could have done with a little advice on what to bring to the bush on safari.

Merry Festivus

2008-12-22T10:12:00.002Z

Here is wishing you all a merry Festivus, the holiday for the rest of us.

Check out more on Wikipedia

Leveraged Investments

2008-12-22T09:26:00.001Z

I found this example on a post entitled Borrowing to Invest Vs Saving to Invest on John Chow's blog of how a leveraged investment can not only make you more money, but is no more risky or cost any more than the standard “save and invest” method of investing for your future.

The Money Saver
The saver is someone we’re all familiar with. He likes to save a certain amount of money every month into investments so he will have a nice nest egg when he retires. He likes to avoid debt at all cost because that is what everyone who don’t know squat about finances tells him.

Let’s assume our saver socks away $500 per month, every month for 20 years, into long term investments (stocks, bonds, mutual funds, etc). Let’s also assume our saver average a return of 10% per year. Some years will be up, some will be down but over the long term, 10% is about what the stock market has returned to investors.

At the end of the 20 year period, and after socking away $120,000, our saver has a nice retirement nest egg of $378,015. Not too bad!

The Leveraged Investor
In this scenario, our investor wants to be like the saver and put $500 per month into long term investments. However, instead of putting the $500 directly into investments, he goes to his bank and sets up a home equity line of credit for $120,000. He takes the $120,000 and uses it to buy the long term investments. So, instead of spreading the $120,000 out over 20 years like the saver did, the leveraged investor borrowed $120,000 to invest everything right now.

Every month, our investor needs to make a payment to the line of credit. Payments can be as low as interest only to as high as the entire outstanding amount. Interest on a line of credit is generally done at Prime. Let’s assume it’s 5%. Prime is a lot lower than that right now but over 20 years, it will average out. If our investor pays interest only on the line of credit, he would need to pay $500 every month to maintain the line.

Because the $120,000 was used to buy investments, the $500 interest payment is tax deductible so our investor can look forward to a $6,000 tax write off every year. That will result in a $3,000 tax refund if our investor is in the 50% tax bracket. If our investor was smart, he’ll put this refund back into investments. But let’s assume he’s just blows it on women instead.

Comparing The Numbers
If we assume our leveraged investor makes the same 10% return as our saver, that $120,000 will turn into $807,299.99 in 20 years. At this point the investor can take out $120,000 to pay off the line of credit and will be left with a net of $687,299.99.

By taking average of good debt, our leveraged investor managed to build a nest egg nearly twice the size of the saver, with the same $500 per month. In addition, the $500 per month the investor paid was tax deductible, while the saver got no tax benefits. Had our investor put the $3,000 yearly tax refund back into investments instead of blowing it on women, he would have made $996,307.49 at the end of 20 years. Women are expensive!

Most financial planners won’t tell you about leveraged investments because they are prevented from doing so. Unless you’re an Accredited Investor (net worth over $1 million or income over $200,000 per year for the past two years) a financial planner cannot legally show you some of the more sophisticated investments available to people with money. This access to higher yielding investments vehicles is one more reason why the rich get richer. It was never a level playing field.

I am not sure if this is possible in the UK, but is well worth looking into.... another new years resolution....

What we searched for in 2008

2008-12-15T10:00:00.001Z

Towards the end of the year Google, publishes it's Zeitgeist, letting us know what internet users are searching for on their search engine.

As usual there are some pretty obvious terms as well as a few interesting ones:

The most searched term for Google users in the UK was Facebook while the BBC came second and its iPlayer service was the fastest rising query. Social networks accounted for four out of the top 10 global fastest-rising queries while the US election held everyone's interest all around the globe.

Fastest Rising Search Terms (Global)

1. sarah palin
2. beijing 2008
3. facebook login
4. tuenti
5. heath ledger
6. obama
7. nasza klasa
8. wer kennt wen
9. euro 2008
10. jonas brothers

A nice feature of the Zeitgeist is that you can look into what people are searching for in different regions around the globe. Unfortunately for me they don't feature Zimbabwe, but the statistics for South Africa are still fairly interesting:

Top Newsworthy Searches from people in South Africa

1. load shedding
2. fifa 2010 world cup
3. beijing olympics
4. barack obama
5. global warming
6. euro 2008
7. xenophobia
8. adt (home and office security service)
9. zimbabwe election
10. cope (congress of the people political party)

For me it was interesting to see that the elections in Zimbabwe were obviously pretty important to the people of South Africa, it's a pity that their government did not seem to feel the same way and continued with their stance of "quiet diplomacy"

Top Sports Teams (South Africa)

1. the sharks
2. kaizer chiefs
3. the lions
4. mamelodi sundowns
5. bafana bafana
6. orlando pirates
7. stormers
8. the springboks
9. cheetahs
10. proteas

You can check out all the most popular terms from around the globe on Google's Zeitgeist

Seth Godin's Funnel

2008-12-10T06:55:00.006Z

Seth Godin, Funnel? Seth who and what funnel you may ask, it will all become clear in a few minutes, so let's Start with the who:

Who is Seth Godin?
No he is not a Jean-Luc Picard stunt double or a mentor to all those with a shave head (me included), he is according to Wikipedia an American author of business books and a popular speaker with appearances at Google, TED and a number of charities. Godin popularized the topic of permission marketing.

He is also the creator of Squidoo - a community website which allows users to create pages which are called "lenses" on subjects on just about anything.

What About The Funnel?
Seth's funnel is a theory whereby instead of spending tons of money on advertising and marketing your company or product as in the traditional way, you can turn it all around and use the power of people to turn the "funnel" into a megaphone, thus getting people to shout about your business or product.

The web is an excellent place to do this and it can even be done for free especially with all the social media sites out there, the Facebook, Myspace, Squidoo and Flickr's of this world.

Seth goes on to say about his funnel: "Once you see the funnel, it's easy to understand how valuable your existing customers are, and easy to think about how you want to spend time and money in promoting and building your site. Most marketers are running a flat campaign. Embracing the funnel changes the way you treat people. And treating different people differently is what consumers demand."

You can download his ebook for free: Flipping the Funnel and in my book, even though it was published in 2006 is still highly relevant and a must read for anyone interested in marketing.

Google releases Friend Connect

2008-12-05T09:33:00.001Z

It has been announced on the Official Google Blog that Google Friend Connect is now available

After expressing my interest by signing up a few months ago, I received an invitation yesterday for Friend Connect from Google.

The invite basically said: "We appreciate your interest in Google Friend Connect and would now like to invite you to try the service. You can get started by visiting our homepage and clicking the "Set up a new site" button."

So what is Friend Connect?
Friend Connect is another way of keeping in touch and connecting with people that have similar interests as yourself. It hopes to make easy for people to instantly connect with other people on websites that they already enjoy and visit.

The goal of friend connect is to foster an open social web by using common standards like OpenID and OAuth. Websites that use Friend Connect on them will become OpenSocial containers, capable of running applications created by the OpenSocial developer community. So because it is open source, we should see many different applications being developed in the future, so who knows where all this will go..

It will be interesting to see in a year or so if Friend Connect has become the next big thing.

New Forest Lapland park a Scam

2008-12-02T09:57:00.002Z

Last week I went with a work mate to the New Forest Lapland park in Dorset to do some filming. Described on their website as a "winter wonderland" it was meant to be the backdrop to the Christmas version of Jokers' Masquerade TV

We arrived to a pretty desolate scene, but the fact that we had been given permission as "journalists" to come a day before opening, I initially put it down to the fact that they probably still had some setting up to do.

Once we were inside, things did not get any better. Their "tunnel of light" was merely a path between some trees with a little fake snow on them, a few plastic polar bears and some Christmas lights above. The nativity scene (pictured) looked to be in the middle of a huge muddy field and as such we decided not to trudge through it. I was particularly put off by the Husky pen, to me it seemed that these poor dogs had been chained in the middle of a field for who knows how long.

We decided to get what shots we could out of the place and leave as quickly as possible.

We did not have to pay an entry fee, but Ian told me that it was to be about £25 to £30 - I am sure that you could find much better places and things to spend your hard earned money on this Christmas.

Since it has opened there have been many complaints about the place and it has even been reported on the BBC and the Southern Daily Echo and blasted in the Essential Travel blog - I can easily understand why!

Check out the December edition of JMTV, some of which I filmed at Lapland New Forest in Dorset.

Canoeing Down The Zambezi River

2008-11-29T08:07:00.002Z

I found this video found on YouTube this morning which brings back many fond memories of our honeymoon, where we went on the exact same trip, canoeing from Chirundu down to Nyamepi Camp in Mana Pools. It was excellent and a trip that I would really like to do again one day.

Like everyone, I just hope Zimbabwe can return to normal one day...

Lost Astronaut Tool Bag Spotted With Telescope Orbiting the Earth

2008-11-26T09:25:00.001Z

The toolbag lost by astronaut Heidi Stefanyshyn-Piper last week is quickly becoming the most famous piece of $100,000 junk floating around in space. In fact, countless nerds have pointed their telescopes into the night sky attempting to catch a glimpse of the backpack-sized bag orbiting the Earth.

Christmas Fancy Dress Search Terms

2008-11-24T16:17:00.001Z

I do SEO work for Jokers Masquerade, the UK's largest on-line retailer of fancy dress and Halloween costumes and often use sources like Hitwise, the web's leading competitive intelligence service and Google Trends to check what are the most popular keywords people are using on the major search engines like Google and Yahoo at any given time. Hitwise has the advantage of allowing you to break this down into different or even customisable industries.

We use this data to to make sure that there is enough stock available for the most popular types of costumes that people are looking for as well as optimising the website so as to make sure that the website ranks well in the natural listings on the search engines for the most commonly searched for terms.

In late September and October there is a large increase in searches of Halloween and fancy dress related keywords like zombie, witches and ghost costumes. I have now just finished researching the fastest rising keywords within the fancy dress industry over November so far. The list of keywords below is not the most searched for terms, but rather the keywords that are have the biggest increase in how often they are being used. Many of the Christmas related search terms are pretty predictable, but there are also a few surprises:

1. santa costume
2. pirates costumes
3. showgirl fancy dress
4. santa suits
5. indian costume
6. egyptian costumes
7. christmas fancy dress outfits
8. cinderella costume
9. cow costume
10. mermaid fancy dress
11. wild west fancy dres
12. bugsy malone costumes
13. convict costume
14. santa hats

I best make sure our purchasing department have enough cow costumes in stock this year!

Monty Python Takes on YouTube

2008-11-24T09:32:00.000Z

Monty Python and the Holy Grail has to be one of my all time favourite films and obviously I am not the only one. If you search on YouTube for "Monty Python" there are literally thousands of Monty clips with everything from their films to The Flying Circus and home made re-enactments. I guess with all this, Monty Python figured that there was to be some money to be made by all this some how, so what the have done is started an official Monty Python Channel on YouTube. Their spin on it is that they are taking on YouTube, but I guess it is the old adage of "if you can't beat them, you may as well join them"

The Monty Python Channel on YouTube

Paul Lekakis Boom Boom Anniversary Video

2008-11-21T11:15:00.002Z

Serious 80's cheese...that is soo bad I think I may pretend that I left earth and joined the rebel alliance during the 80's

If only SEO was this simple: Google Custom search

2008-11-21T10:16:00.003Z

Google have just announced their new SearchWiki where you can customise your search results by moving your favorite or useful websites to the top of the search results. You can even delete your least useful websites from the search results altogether.

I spend most of my working day trying to get the website that I am working on to rank as high as possible for a particular search phrase. To do this there are a gazillon things that need to be done and it takes plenty of time and effort as well as a little luck to get to the top for competitive search terms. Sigh if only it was this easy to get to the top, I could spend the rest of the day at the beach!

Obviously it is not going to be this easy because to move your search results up and down the list you need to be logged into your Google account and only you will see your personalized results.

I do think though that sometime in the future, Google will look at phrases that have been customised by large amounts of people and tweak their results to match what most people think are good websites for that term.

For more info and a short video on how to use it, check out the Official Google Blog: SearchWiki: make search your own

LIFE Photo Archive Online

2008-11-20T09:00:00.003Z

Some of the worlds most incredible photos, many of which have never previously been published are now available on line thanks to Google image search and Life magazine.

At the moment there are said to be only about 20% of the estimated 10 million photos online, but it is their aim to have them all up on the web for all to see.

So far one of my favourites is this fantastic photo of a lion sleeping on the rocks, you can find it as well as all the other photographs on the life photo archive. To find this lion image search for "lion sleeping."

More on this story from Google can be found on the official Google Blog

Aerial View of Our House

2008-11-14T22:25:00.003Z

Nice aerial shot of where we live, funny thing is, I think that that van parked next to our neighbours is the Mr Whippy Ice Cream van that annoys the hell out of me with it's annoying "Ice Cream Man Music"

Flickr Tags: house

Crazy Emergency Tent Teardrop Thing...

2008-11-14T21:43:00.004Z

When you’re stuck out in the elements or simply get separated from a group, staying in place and waiting for help may be the best idea. The Cocoon Emergency Shelter from designer John Moriarty is intended to keep you warm and safe until help arrives. You simply hang it from a tree or any other off-the-ground location, then climb inside and let the insulated materials keep you warm.

...Not sure how i'd like to spend a week in Camping in Kenya in it though!

13 November 1983 - Asteroids

2008-11-13T12:37:00.003Z

This story takes me back Eskimos, put put and Daily Thompsons Decathlon:

Way back in 1983 a Fifteen-year-old named Scott Safran from New Jersey in the US, sets the world record score in Asteroids which is still the longest lasting video game high score in history.

Scott, who had been practising non-stop at the game for the previous two years and agreed to play a marathon session of Atari's popular outer-space shooting game as part of a charity event in Pennsylvania. His mother drove him to the event and lent him a quarter, which he dropped into the machine Nov. 13.

Some three days later, having taken only brief bathroom and food breaks, Safran finished his game with 41,336,440 points, nudging out the previous world record held by famous old-school gamer and actor Leo Daniels.

What makes Safran's score amazing is that it has gone 25 years without being broken, giving it the longevity record for a video game high score, according to the authoritative game-record keepers at Twin Galaxies.

Asteroids is a very difficult game. Players have to contend not only with the eponymous giant rocks that veer at their spaceships and with enemy laser fire, but also with the touchy control scheme. You have to rotate your ship and fire a single thruster to move anywhere, and momentum can carry you right into disaster if you don't have nimble fingers.

Setting a high score on any video game requires exceptional skill, as illustrated in the recent documentary The King of Kong. But setting an Asteroids record also requires superhuman endurance, because it literally takes days to do.

Unlike Donkey Kong, which has seen serious challengers step up one after another, only one person has made a serious attempt at the Asteroids record in recent years. An Oregon man named Bill Carlton settled in for a marathon session in 2004, which ended in failure when his machine broke down after 27 hours of play. He had scored more than 15 million points, placing him 15th in the record books.

In 1998, as Atari was planning to release a new edition of Asteroids, Twin Galaxies' head referee Walter Day attempted to locate Scott Safran, with whom he had fallen out of touch. It took Day four years to discover that Safran had died in 1989, at the age of 21, due to injuries sustained when he fell from the roof of his Los Angeles apartment.

Memories of a Safari Guide at Welgevonden Game Reserve

2008-11-03T18:34:00.004Z

This is a video I put together some time ago containing some of my photographs, as well as those of a few of my guests during the time that we worked at Shidzidzi and Nungubane lodges on the Welgevonden game reserve in the Limpopo province of South Africa.

African Jacana (Actophilornis africanus)

2008-11-02T06:35:00.003Z

I took this photo on Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe in June 2008 of the African Jacana (Actophilornis africanus) as it waded at the waters edge as it searched for food which consisted of mostly insects, but will also eat fish, crabs, shrimp and other aquatic animals like frogs.

I thought I would write a post about it not because this photo is anything special, but for me the African Jacana (Actophilornis africanus) is a pretty interesting bird:

It is only the male who incubates and raises the chicks, the female has nothing to do with it after mating, infact she polyandrous and can mate with up to four males in a season!

The job to build the nest is also left to the male, which he makes from leaves and other plant material and uses floating vegetation as the foundations! (The success rate of raising a chick to adulthood is pretty low!) The female will then lay about four speckled glossy brown eggs.

Birdwatching Binoculars

2008-11-01T08:29:00.002Z

For the past month or so I have been working on a new website, with the snappy name of Best Binoculars and Binocular Reviews - ok so that is a bit of a mouthful but it is so that it can hopefully rank well on search engines for those keywords.

The idea of the site it to honestly review binoculars for specific needs and provide links to where you can buy them, so that it makes it easy for price comparison. Ok so yes I do receive a commission for any purchase made, but will only recommend binoculars that feel make the grade.

Why Binoculars, well I noticed that there are plenty of sites that review things like mobile phones and digital cameras, but it is pretty difficult to find decent ones for binoculars and believe it or not there are plenty of people looking for binoculars for all sorts of uses: birdwatching, safaris, sports etc

Anyway I have just finished a pretty long article on a Guide to Buying Bird Watching Binoculars which I hope will be a winner.

Abyssinian Roller

2008-10-31T21:08:00.001Z

Up and down
Originally uploaded by palko72 (in Nepal again...)

Rollers are one of my favourite families of birds, they are called rollers because of the way that they display to there mates by rolling during a steep dive. There beautiful feathers have also been highly prized by many African tribes for use in head dresses etc.

Anyway I jut though that this was a great shot of a pair of rollers.

Halloween Costume Packer

2008-10-27T19:06:00.004Z

Most of you may not know that I work for the fancy dress company Jokers' Masquerade, where I help with search engine optimisation as well as internet marketing. Halloween is our busiest time and as such for the past few days, and probably for the rest of the week until Halloween, it is all hands on deck and I will be working in the warehouse where I am a "shipper" That means I process all the orders and get them ready for delivery.

If over the next few days you want to check out just hard we work the cool thing is that we have a few web cams dotted around the warehouse, the call centre as well as a cool "forklift cam" fitted onto one of our er.. forklifts! During the day up until probably Thursday the 30th of July, you can probably find me on the top right web cam on this web cam page.

Oh and for those of you who don't believe how busy a fancy dress company can get over Halloween, check out this video we put together of an average day in the warehouse:

How to Fill a 40 Foot Container Lorry in 60 Seconds

Check out fancy dress ideas blog or Jokers' Masquerade if you need / want a costume this Halloween

Feel the Burn

2008-10-26T12:17:00.000Z

Winter and the rain have really set in this weekend and as such, Sharon and myself decided to wipe the dust off our squash racquets and enter the house of pain!

I haven't played in what must be three years now and even though I have played quite a lot of golf over the summer and often ride into work on my mountain bike, squash has an incredible knack of being able to find every muscle in your body that you haven't been using! The good news is that I beat Sharon 4 games to 1, but will have burning muscles in the morning to remember this great victory!

Speaking of burning, check out this mega cover version of BURN by Yngwie Malmsteen (on guitar) originally from one of my all time favourite bands... Deep Purple:

Two Zebra's at Duma Manzi Game Reserve

2008-10-24T21:03:00.001Z

Two Zebra's at Duma Manzi Game Reserve
Originally uploaded by chirundu

One of my favourite photos taken on our recent stay at Duma Manzi Game reserve in Natal, South Africa

One Crazy Summer...

2008-10-01T11:30:00.000Z

Contrary to public opinion, I haven't developed some morbid fetish for Smurfs. The company I work for sells fancy dress costumes and to promote a Smurf costume that we produce, we decided to send it on a world and UK tour.

For the most part, a guy I work with was "the smurf" and I tagged along as the photographer. So far we have visited Brussels in Belgium, Paris and Rome. The Tour has also visited Las Vegas, Dublin, The Gambia and a bunch of other places I cant remember.

Later we continued with a UK tour, visiting places like Lands End in Cornwall, North Wales and right up to Scotland. Along the way I seem to remember something about Robin Hood and the oldest pub in England, the set of Emmerdale or something and one hell of a serious pub crawl in Edinburgh that included drinking establishments with cool names like Dirty Dicks and The Black Rose Tavern Rock Bar, although I only remember these because of photographic evidence!

We (Ian in the costume and my photos) have so far also appeared in a bunch of local news papers, The Basingstoke Gazette, The Newbury Weekly News as well as the Sunday Sport! and had a radio interview on BBC radio Berkshire

Thanks to everyone that I have bumped into along the way, especially The Warman family in The Gambia and Brendon and Taryn up in Scotland.

... oh well, Summer is now over and we now all have winter to look forward to!

Best Music Video of all time?? :-)

2008-09-28T13:43:00.000Z

Simba 3 years older

2008-09-24T19:54:00.000Z

Phew, can you believe that my last post on my personal blog was over three years ago on my birthday! Back then I hardly knew what blogging was, and I was only experimenting with it, today I blog as part of my work almost daily. It has been on my mid for a while that I should restart a personal blog, and so here I am.

Well, so much has happened over the past few years, it seems way too daunting to somehow summarise everything, so I guess what I will do is just start from today and possibly refer back as and when is appropriate.

I find it way more difficult harder writing about yourself as opposed to writing in a blog that is work related, but I will give it a try.

I only hope that my next post isn't 3 years away!

Cheese!

2005-04-01T09:52:00.000Z

Cheese!
Originally uploaded by Chirundu Jason.

Well I though that this birthday was going to be really shite, with Sharon still in the hospital and I having to work and all that.

But things are really looking up as it looks like Sharon may be able to come home tomorrow, she just has to see how she feels, so fingers x-ed and I will keep ya posted.

oh and that photo was taken Christmas 2001 at Robz place - was the closest photo to a birthday I could find!

Simba

2005-03-30T11:02:00.000Z

Simba
Originally uploaded by Chirundu Jason.

Well so far today everything is great.

Great because Sharon is still improving and as I keep saying hopefully we are over the worst of it and we (meaning Simba and myself) are looking forward to her comming home soon, hopefully this weekend.

Today is mostly about Simba and things for her aint so great, she is a bit pissed off at the moment (As you can tell by the photo!) this is because it is cold and wet outside. I think like humans, animals get a bit pissed of with winter here, and when winter is over and it is spring and your looking forward to the sun ... what does it do? it rains!

Mazvikadaai Sunset

2005-03-29T18:51:00.000Z

Dreaming of the good old days

2005-03-29T13:32:00.000Z

Things have been a bit hectic around here recently with Sharon having to go back into hospital again, but with the worst bit over (she was operated on yesterday and it all went well) we can now keep our fingers crossed that that is that and life can return to normlity again as soon as she recovers gets out of the place.

I have been amaized with her courage during this time, more often than not she is more worried about how I am dealing with it all than thinking about herself. I think that has an effect on me and helps keep things together ... just!

Yellow Billed Hornbill

2005-03-29T08:45:00.000Z

Yellow Billed Hornbill
Originally uploaded by Chirundu Jason.

Not that this has anything to do with a hornbill, but hey, it is a nice photo. Anyway the national soccer team of Angola lost this Sunday to Zimbabwe, in Harare, by 0-2, a 6th round preliminary match for the access to the African Cup (CAN) and the world championship, both set for 2006.

With this result, the Angolans got their first defeat and lost the lead to Nigeria (13 points), who beat Gabon on Saturday (2-0). Angola is now in the second place with 11 points.

The goals of the match were scored by Kawondera and Wariruware, 59 and 68 minutes, respectively. With this victory Zimbabwe move up to the third place, with 8 points, now wasnt that interesting? Nope... well I cant think of anything else today, so it will have to do.

Long road to the Falls

2005-03-22T11:02:00.000Z

Long road to the Falls
Originally uploaded by Chirundu Jason.

Waterhole in Hwange

2005-03-15T08:25:00.000Z

Waterhole in Hwange
Originally uploaded by Chirundu Jason.

Hwange 2003

2005-03-11T08:43:00.000Z

Hwange 2003
Originally uploaded by Chirundu Jason.

Hwange, Zimbabwe 2003 Click here for all the photos