Tech Toys

As soon as I got my iPhone I was keen to start downloading iPhone music tracks onto it. I signed up for what seemed like a great iPhone music service and I was really pleased with myself.

Except I appeared to have signed up with a dud. Not only was it very expensive, but I just couldn’t work with it at all. Here are some of the reasons why I couldn’t live with my chose iPhone music service.

Size and variety of the music library. If you’re into country and western or drum and bass, then I could perhaps recommend this service to you (notwithstanding the other problems); if you’re not then don’t bother. I’m not, as it turns out.

File formats. The file formats provided were not even compatible with my iPhone. For a service that purported to offer iPhone music downloads this seemed a little poor. I could convert the files pretty easily with some free software but this doesn’t sound like what I signed up for.

Horrible download interface. I really struggled to work out what was going on; actually I couldn’t see what iPhone music I was currently downloading so quite often I’d have three or four copies of the same track.

Ugh. This is horrible.

I hadn’t heard of Salvia until very recently. As soon as the media started spouting stories about this legal hallucinogen that must be banned immediately I became interested. As did a lot of my friends.

It seems strange that we hadn’t heard of it before now so I did a little research. It turns out that Salvia has been used for a lot of years by the Mazatec natives in Mexico (Mexico being Salvia’s home territory, as it were) to give them spiritual insight. Did it work? I was about to find out.

The effects of Salvia are difficult to explain: whilst my friends and I all experienced hallucinations of some description, they varied in strength and. I felt like I was dropping rather quickly upwards. To say this felt a little odd is a bit of an understatement. One friend said he say a fairy in a pink dress and yet another said he just felt very disorientated and a bit ill.

We all smoked the Salvia we had and this – apparently – is the quickest way in which to get the stuff into your system and working. The Mazatec natives were generally ‘chewers’ rather than ’smokers’ but it all goes down the same way in the end.

I passed a shop yesterday that just sold things for iPods and iPhones (and some other Apple gear but mostly just these two). I knew these things were popular but to have a shop dedicated to iPhone accessories seemed a little overkill. I was shocked that they could fill a shop just with iPhone accessories, in fact, and it was this that encouraged me to walk in and take a look. What a shop.

Apart from the standard accessories you’d see with any phone – Bluetooth headsets, protective covers and the like – there were some real stonkers. There has been a lot of work put into the development of iPhone accessories by Apple and by the independent companies that deal with it.

The comfy pillow/headphone combination is a wonderful example of the types of iPhone accessories you can pick up. The pillow means that you can sleep while listening to your favorite music. I don’t know about you but I pretty much need music to be able to block the sound out on long journeys on public transport. This fits the bill perfectly.

Up market goods were also available and the Bose headphones – though they’d set you back a pretty penny – look great and sound even better ( tried some).

I definitely enjoyed my trip into the shop. Well worth a visit.

I spend quite a lot of my time using various bits of software to share music and other interesting files. This means that when I download Ares I really like to make sure it’s the correct version for the job. The software controlling the many versions of Ares changes at such an alarming rate I simply cannot keep up with it. Fortunately my good friends (they don’t know that they’re my friends, but let me assure you that they are) over at Official Ares keep on top of it all for me.

The reviews section on Official Ares is essential reading for anyone wanting to download Ares. The site compares different versions of the Ares software so that when you download Ares you know you’ve got the right one. The reviews are stunningly impartial and you know these guys have your best interests at heart rather than those who make money from the software.

The news section on the site makes interesting reading of a morning (or while you’re waiting to download Ares) and you can be sure that the Official Ares writers will wow you with their witting remarks and interesting take on the news of the day.

This is the best place on the Internet to download Ares from; it’s far more than just that though.

Some days when I’m traveling to work — an hour’s drive which is fraught with stress — I just have to ask myself what it’s all for. Why do we put ourselves through all of this stress? It’s those days that really keep me going with my planning. What am I planning for? My home business, that’s what.

There are so many ways that a home based business is superior to working 9-5 for ‘the man’ at the office; the complete lack of a commute is just one (excellent) reason. I’d really like to enjoy life while I still can. I know that a home business — if I do it right — will give me the opportunity to do this.

The planning is hard work and I need all the help here that I can get. One of the Internet forums that I go to on a regular basis pointed me to the CitizenCorps.com website. I wanted a home business review and I found this to be a great place to start looking. As well providing a section dedicated to the home business review, CitizenCorps.com gives a lot of good information on starting a home business.

I find the home business review particularly helpful as I know that I can reuse the research performed by other people. If I see a bad home business review then I know that there’s somewhere I don’t need to spend my time and effort.

Sometimes there’s nothing for it but to throw out the old and welcome in the new. This is what had to happen with Ares Ultimate (the new) in favor of Ares Galaxy (the very, very old).

I was having trouble getting Ares connecting yet again. This happened a lot in late 2007 and 2006 for some reason, and there has clearly never been a satisfactory resolution. Apparently – so someone who knows about these things tells me – it’s to do with the list of connected nodes that Ares keeps in its memory. When Ares fires up it remembers these ‘good’ nodes and Ares connecting is just a matter of talking to these good nodes and establishing the relationship. Unfortunately the old Ares Galaxy was remembering an old list and, when it started up, there were problems with Ares not connecting.

Getting Ares connecting again was reasonably simple: I dumped the old version and picked up Ares Ultimate. It was a toss up between that and Ares Vista. Ares Ultimate just took my fancy (and I don’t have Windows Vista, though that doesn’t appear to be a requirement for it to work). I must say I couldn’t be happier with my choice; I wish I just done it before!

There are few jobs more exciting than analyzing the referral logs of the very popular OfficialAres.com site. At least I think so.

My mission for today was to find the most common misspellings of the popular ‘Ares‘ keyword.

Top of the list was Aires. This was closely followed by Aries. Both of these are ’standard’ words in English but interestingly (see?) it was users from Latin America that used these misspellings most often.

Next we take a trip over to Greece where the most common misspelling there – and in south Eastern Europe as a whole – is ‘Areas’. This is a common misspelling throughout the world, in fact, and it seems that A and S being close together on the keyboard does confuse some people.

Arez is obviously the French version of the same word and this crops up a lot with users from France and Canada.

Other misspellings – perhaps less frequent but generally being used across the world — are Aeres, Aris and Aers. The last is my favorite: where does that come from?

I’m no spelling or grammar teacher, and I wouldn’t win any spelling bees, but Aers doesn’t sound much like Ares to me. Wake up please people!

The week I spent in Patong was possibly one of the most emotional I’d ever had the dubious pleasure of experiencing. At the root of my problems were my attempts at trying to understand Patong girls.

I met the girl of my dreams in a nice little bar in the middle of Patong town. Me and my buddies went into the bar to get a beer and there she was, sat at the bar. She had a fabulous figure, fantastic smile, wonderful, wonderful eyes. I knew she was special from the start. She was sat on her own and was smiling at me from the moment I went through the door. I had, until that point, made no attempt at trying to understand Patong girls.

After a while she approached me – when does that happen in the Western world? Not enough, that’s for sure! – and invited me to a game of Connect-4. She loved playing, apparently, and one thing I now know when trying to understand Patong girls was that they loved these little games.

We played and I won easily; great fun and so lovely to hear her laugh. She liked me.

6 games later I was down 5 games to 1 and, ultimately, 5 very, very expensive drinks (which she never seemed to actually get). I agreed to meet her there the next night but she was playing connect 4 with another man. Shattered to the core, I went home, none the wiser from my attempts at trying to understand Patong girls.

Have you tried smoking Salvia? It’s by far the most effective way to use the drug, and while chewing the leaves does work it’s by no means anywhere near as potent.

One of the beauties of smoking Salvia (as well as a potential drawback, depending on which way you look at it) is in the short time it takes to get from normal to absolutely messed up and back again – a round trip of about five minutes, by my watch. If it weren’t for this short time span then I’m absolutely sure that Salvia would be in the same league as LSD and mushrooms (and would, therefore, be completely illegal).

The trip I got from smoking Salvia is as strong and as potent as anything I’d ever tried – and I’ve done my fair share of hallucinogenic drugs.

When I first tried smoking Saliva I was surprised at how quickly everything moved. I was feeling funny and then watching my own body from afar. I was laughing inanely unable to think clearly at all. I was honestly not myself for a short period of time, and it’s easy to see why the Shamans thought that smoking Salvia gave you all sorts of mind bending abilities.

Ares Galaxy is well known in the industry as being the ‘gold standard’ of Ares P2P filesharing software. How did it get this reputation? Simply by being the best out there for quite some time. Until now, when there are a number of Ares versions that are simply better; they have copied the best bits and improved on those that are lacking. These versions are now challenging Ares Galaxy for its user base and the only thing that is really preventing a mass exodus is loyalty the legacy of the name.

There is nothing wrong with Ares Galaxy, it just hasn’t changed much in six years; take customer service, of which Ares Galaxy has none. The newer contenders have well and truly got this area wrapped up.

The proof that Ares Galaxy is still a good piece of software is that clones like Ares Gold and Ares Destiny – both seemingly distributed with adware, by the way – pale in comparison to this old master. None of these – Ares Galaxy included – can hold a candle to the technological advances seen in Ares Ultra, Ares Vista and Ares Ultimate et al. It is to these that customers will slowly flock as the old boy lays down and prepares for his rest.