Foot binding was an ancient Chinese custom and considered a status symbol. The act of foot binding involved wrapping the feet in tight bandages at a young age such that they would break and become highly deformed resulting in feet that were not larger than 4-6 inches!

You can read a more in-depth explanation of the custom on Wikipedia. Photos of this custom are shown below. If you are a bit squeamish, I’d advise skipping the photos. Keep reading →

Anyone who has worked in the IT industy will appreciate the comic strip below.

Bored with the idea of forcing a soon-be-married Bachelor to wear a ‘funny’ t-shirt or phallic symbol on his Buck’s Night (aka Bachelor Party or Stag Party), I decided to make my own ‘Ball and Chain’ and attach it to him for the entire night. Keep reading →

David Jones is a major Australian department store that targets the middle to upper class demographics. It prides itself on customer service and it’s ‘quality’ image. So I was somewhat surprised when an unsolicited David Jones email appeared in my inbox …
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I ‘upgraded’ to Vista a few weeks ago and unhappily discovered that utorrent ran like an absolute dog. I would try to download the same torrent on two identically configured utorrent clients on the same connnection - one running on my Vista desktop and one running on my XP laptop. What I would see on Vista was:

• It struggled to find seeds, yet on XP, it found plenty.
• Download speed hovered around 0.2 kB/s whereas on XP it would happily do 50-350 kB/s.

I looked through a lot of forums for solutions to my slow downloads, googled a lot, played with connection and firewall settings - all to no avail. It was driving me nuts!

That fixed it - I now find plenty of seeds again and have got download speeds of 50-300 kB/s in utorrent.

According to the utorrent website, ‘net.bind_ip specifies which adapter to use for incoming connections.’ I don’t make any claims as to understanding why this works - but it does. If you are having problems with slow torrent downloads on Vista, I hope this post helps you.

I was going through some past bookmarks and came across some YouTube videos from ages ago. Let me start by saying that I have never been a fan of Australia Idol. I think the concept is fantastic, but the talent pool in Australia is limited (especially now that we are in series 4 or 5), and the way they run the show is so drawn out that the show is pretty much unwatchable.

Having said that, I remember watching one show (series 2) one night (it must have been really bad TV on the other channels) and two performances really blew me away. It was a ‘Contestants Choice’ night and Ricki-lee Coulther and Anthony Callea did two songs that I think have yet to matched in any other performance of Australian Idol.

Ricki-lee Coulther - I Have Nothing

Anthony Callea - The Prayer

These two performances alone have made me watch Australia Idol on the odd occasion hoping for similar performances. Unfortunately, every show since has been a big disappointment.

This is the view from my hotel window in Sydney overlooking Sydney Harbour (the Opera House is on the far left). It all looks very pleasant and normal …

However, on closer inspection … oops! … what is wrong with this picture?

I saw the middle car racing along the road, get confused as to which lane to take, decided not to make a decision and then proceeded to drive straight ahead … right up on to the concrete barrier! The driver managed to wedge his car quite solidly on the barrier such that he had to wait 45 minutes for two tow-trucks to drag him back onto the road.

There has been much discussion on the final book in the Harry Potter series - much of it focussed on ‘Will he die? Will he kill Voldemort?’ This is too narrow a focus, and the bigger focus should be on the total destruction of magic. Here is the plot for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (well at least what I think it will be ): Keep reading →

If you have ever watched media on media players such as Quicktime or Windows Media Player, you will probably have come across the situation where the volume is too low (even with the volume slider at max). Sure, you can adjust the volume controls in your OS or on the speakers, but sometimes this is either too fiddly or the volume knob is at max.

Update: If you are using the standalone Quicktime player, hold shift and press the up arrow - it will increase volume even when slider is at max. If volume is above max, hitting either up or down arrow (without shift) will instantly bring it back to max. So that’s a quick way to fix the volume if you set it too high and a loud part comes on. Thanks to eridius on Digg for this additional tip.

I’m sure people will tell me that this ’secret’ volume control is really old news - but meh, I was only shown this today so it’s big news to me :).

However, on the 2nd April 2005, the fiercest lightning storm I have ever seen (in person, and on TV) was unleashed across the city of Melbourne, Australia. It lasted for two hours during which the sky flashed continuously with lightning and the boom of thunder was never-ending. Sounds like an exaggeration? Well check out the short video I managed to capture.

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