Philip Nicosia

I sold my VW Beetle and decided to get a Mercedes SLK230 to run around in during these hot summer days. The Beetle was okay but we didn’t find it that comfortable and even though it had air conditioning it wasn’t powerful enough to keep cool. Whether it was because it needed recharging or the sheer amount of glass in the Beetle letting all the sun and heat through I don’t know.

So I got the Mercedes and as with any car you get I guess you have to get used to things being different.

The first thing that caught me out with it was on returning to the car with bags of shopping I couldn’t figure out how to open the boot. No matter what I did I couldn’t unlock it. We managed to get it open in the end but it was more luck than judgement. It turns out that when you unlock the car with the key fob remote it only unlocks the drivers door and you have to press it again to unlock the passenger door and the boot. I should have expected that really as my Beetle was the same. Must be a German thing?

Now what really puzzles me is that I kept struggling to get the ignition key out. The engine had stopped, the hand brake was on and the gearbox was in park but it wouldn’t let me take the key out. Eventually I did manage but wasn’t sure how I did it so I got the manual out to read if there was anything in particular I had to do to get the key out.

Now here is the puzzling thing. It turns out that even though the engine is off, hand brake on and gearbox in park if you have your foot on the brake it wont let you take the key out? Now why would that be? I’m sure there must be a perfectly logical reason for this but I for one cannot think what it is. Perhaps someone could let me know.

I love the summer holidays. Not because I’m a student but because for 6 weeks whole of the year the roads are so much quieter. No Mums taking the kids to school in their big 4 x 4’s clogging up our already congested roads and adding to all the greenhouse gasses. On a journey that would normally take me 30 minutes now only takes 20. Think of how much extra time you have on your hands over the course of the holidays.

Whatever happened to kids walking to school? When I went was younger we all used to walk to school, rain shine or snow. It was about 1.5 miles each way and took about 30 minutes. Now the furthest most kids walk is to the car. No wonder there are so many fat kids around nowadays. They just don’t get the exercise anymore.

I bought a second hand car a couple of days ago and noticed that it had a Parrot bluetooth hands free kit installed. Great I thought and I tried to pair my mobile phone with it only to get a message “Memory Full”. Now I didn’t have the instructions for the kit with the paperwork I got with the car so I did a quick search on Google for “Parrot user guides” and low and behold the number 1 result was for the user guides at www.parrot.biz.

Clearing the memory was as easy as pressing the red and the green button together. Now I was able to pair my phone to the kit and can happily use my phone hands free now and not break the law.

Where would we be without search engines?

I bought a baby Harley Davidson last year and its just had its 1st birthday which means I have to get it serviced. Embarrassed about the fact I have never cleaned it once since I got it so I thought I ought to do that before I got to the Harley dealership. I like things to be clean but sadly don’t have the patience to do it myself unlike some people I know. I have a friend who bought a Ducati from a dealer who delivered it to his house in an enclosed trailer and he spent the next 2 days in his garage taking it apart to clean it “properly” as he told me.

That’s something I’m never going to do so I searched on the internet for:

Motor cycle cleaning
Motorbike cleaning
Motorbike valeting
Motor cycle valeting

but couldn’t find anyone in my local area to do it.

Then I thought on the off chance I would call the guy who recently valeted my car for me to see if he did bikes and much to my delight he said yes.

He came round to my house and after a few hours I couldn’t believe the difference. It didn’t look like my bike at all and it was if it had just left the showroom.

Now I don’t feel so guilty taking my bike to the dealer anymore

So if you are in the Aylesbury area and you need a motor bike or a car cleaned I would highly recommend David Hadley who did mine. He can be contacted on 0808 178 7117.

In a previous post I mentioned that one of my sites, XML-Sitemaps according to Alexa was the 6707th most popular website in the world. Now I know this isn’t true as I know exactly how many visitors this site gets a day. I also have other websites which receive 5 x the amount of daily visitors yet rank between 50,000 and 60,000.

So why is my site with less visitors showing such popularity? My guess would be that the majority of people who have the Alexa Toolbar installed which collects the data are webmasters who are interested in seeing what their Alexa rank is. As my site XML-Sitemaps is geared towards webmasters this really makes a nonsense of the figures quoted as it isn’t representative of your average surfer.

Apart from the Alexa Rank figures the toolbar provides a convenient search box so you can search the internet without having to go to Google, etc, first. Now this used to be okay when Alexa was using search results powered by Google but recently they changed and now there search results are powered by Windows Live. If there was ever a reason to delete the Alexa Toolbar this would be it.

I’m sorry but Windows Live as a search engine just isn’t cutting it for me. I’m sure they are trying hard but for me its a waste of time. I’ll give you an example:

Searching for “free ringtones” (without the quotes) 5 of the top 10 results (including the top 2) are disabled blogger accounts presumably as they were spam pages designed to fool search engines, another 1 is a disabled homestead page, presumably disabled for the same reason as the blogger pages, the 3rd result is another disabled domain which says “Domain deleted - reason abuse”, another 2 are made for adverts pages which only have adverts on which you can click which just leaves 1 genuine website left.

At least with Google generally I find at least 9 of the top 10 results are genuine sites and the ones that do slip through are normally removed quite quickly.

It makes you wonder how many people will now delete their Alexa Toolbar because of this. It might be the only people left using it are the webmasters to check on their Alexa rank which is only going to make their figures even more unrepresentative of the general surfers.