Nicholas Clarke

At work we just had the cleaning people in to break, sorry I mean clean our computers and this spawned into an interesting conversation into how effective it was.

Dave aka Mr Google then went off and found an online calculator to work out how many germs we all had!

I gave it a try only to find out that I had the equivalent of 324 toilet seats at my fingertips! Now that’s a happy thought just before lunch

My total was 1,617,840, click below to give it a try:

1,617,840How Many Germs Live On Your Keyboard?

Last night I left my IM open and was greeted this morning by someone’s career ambition, which I have to say is the most random comment I have seen in a while.

“I want to be employed as a GZIP compressor, stamping up and down on packets as they travel around the web!”

This person is still online, so I guess they have yet to start their world journey.

It is not every day that you read something and it really hits home and make you think have I been stalked?

Well this is what happened when I read a post called “The Nerds Handbook“. I would have never said that I fit a stereotype but I do appear to tick quite a lot of the boxes mentioned.

Some points that stand out:

“A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff”

“Your nerd has built himself a cave. I’ve written about The Cave elsewhere, but here are the basics. The Cave is designed to allow your nerd to do his favorite thing, which is working on the project. If you want to understand your nerd, stare long and hard at his Cave. How does he have it arranged? When does he tend to go there? How long does he stay?”

No lie, I guess you could say that I’m sitting in my cave now! If I look around me I’m surrounded by books (in no order), lots of paper, pens of all kinds, bits of computers and other stuff I never use. If someone moves anything in my cave it definitely feels odd for a bit.

“Your nerd has an amazing appetite for information”

O my! I may have N.A.D.D…..

I’ll stop there, but have a read and see if you also should print out this handbook and pass it around to all of your friends and family members.

You got to love it!

Someone has created tesla coils that can play the Mario theme tune

via Coding4Fun

All I could think about was Command & Conquer and Nintendo Acapella:

While working my way through the MSDN blogs I keep seeing these cool little IT web comics.

This one hit home and made me feel a bit guilty!

Be sure to keep your eye on the Office Offline blog for more installments.

I normally only buy books + the odd CD from Amazon but today I noticed that Amazon is starting (or could have been for quite some time) to sell a lot more than just paper items and CD/DVDs.

The .co.uk site seems to sells less than the .com.

Still it is quite amazing how many different markets they are into.

.CO.UK:

Surprise: Shoes

.COM:

Surprise: Groceries

Fruit and Veg from Amazon! Whatever next

Be sure to also check out their little carousel control:

I have just got back from holiday and thought I would share an odd shop front I saw while in Greece

Not too sure how this shop makes any money:

I guess everyone changes their mind from time to time. Today it is my screensaver day

I was prompted by seeing Steve Clayton post about the cool looking FlipClock.

Smashing Magazine has a large collection of links to help you burnout some pixels also.

At the moment I have picked the PolarClock:

image from Smashing Magazine

Looking for some great tips for improving your writing skills no matter of your media?

“Many of these tips can be useful no matter if you are a blogger, writing reports at work/in school or quietly spending your nights secretly working on that great novel that will astonish the world.” –www.positivityblog.com

Here are some great tips by the slightly eccentric writer Stephen King.

Not sure if Microsoft has started a new blogging drive but in the past week the msdn blogs have gone crazy. Normally when I check the feed there is approximately 200 to read, which using Google Readers keyboard shortcuts I can zip through quite quick. But not any more:

This is just over the last couple of days! Maybe I now need to rethink about subscribing to all public msdn blogs Shame as there is always a good mix of information in there.

Would be great if it was possible to strip out all non-English posts maybe in the feed or via Google Reader.