Kindle

Ooh look!

No, it’s not a rubbish flower, it’s the new Wi-Fi Kindle and also the 3G Kindle (which also does Wi-Fi).

These are something I’ve never tried. I do love the feel of books, and the fact one can flip between pages, inserting a finger or locally available piece of paper, and you can stick post-it tabs on the page edges. I bet these are all possible with the kindle. I guess what isn’t is the ability to lend books to your friends.

So I’ll probably have a look one day, but for now I’ll stick to books. If you have a kindle and love it, then please let me know in the comments. I don’t want to be a complete luddite – especially when I’m ignorant of their features and benefits.

If you don’t have a kindle and want one, then there are your links up there to go ahead and pre-order today!

A Rubbish Flower

Only five days left to bid on this auction:

Show Her You Couldn’t Care Less – Awful Plastic Flower

Go on! Dare you!

Here’s the artist’s impression of the conversation in the boardroom…

A: Let’s start a pyramid marketing scheme to make money.
B: Um… don’t you think that would damage our credibility?
A: Not at all… we just have to name it something like “Blackberry Elite Alliance”
B: Excellent. That sounds nothing like a pyramid scheme.
A: Great… I’ll get it all in motion. It’ll take £50,000 to get it to market.
B: Um… we can’t allocate that much funding. Can you save somewhere?
A: Sure… we’ll get the work-experience boy to make the logo.

Later…

B: Um… oh forget it.

This week’s Photo Challenge was forks. To get out of my comfort zone, I thought I’d have a go at some landscape photography, with a nice panorama of the fork wolds…

Cats are pretty clever. The only reason they have survived as a species is because kittens are cute. Here is the issue in diagram form:

The Cat Delusion in diagram form

Wow… a week without a blog. Sorry! Been busy. More about that later, probably. Anyway…

I’ve managed to lose the habit of going for a morning walk, so I’ve picked it up again from today. Walking to work is an excellent way to fire-up the braincells in the morning. It also reminds you that there’s a world out there that’s interesting and fun and has lots of things going on. I don’t think I’ll ever manage enough regularity to have a route named after me.

Anyway… it was pleasant today – I went through the town centre where they were setting up a collectors’ and car-boot kind of sale in the market place. That had my £zero challenge brain going, but with only 67p in liquid assets I didn’t really have enough to buy anything there.

What really made the trip worthwhile was seeing the selection of films available at the cinema.

Film Selection

I’m not sure that someone hasn’t been fiddling with the board in some way.

Ok. What am I missing?

I’ve been looking at the function to calculate repayments on a loan, given a principal sum, interest rate, and number of payments. It seems pretty straightforward, and can be used to calculate over any time period with any payment schedule required. But I studied maths at school and we learnt that due to compound interest, if the annual rate is X, then the monthly rate is X^(1/12) (where X is the decimal interest rate – where, for example, 12% interest becomes 1.12).

Every single site I’ve looked at describing the PMT function as it’s known says ‘divide the annual rate by 12 for the monthly rate’. And I mean every site… wikipedia, yahoo answers, ehow… the list goes on.

So… here’s what they’re suggesting…

£100 principal @ 12% annual interest. 12 months of interest gives:
£101.00, £102.01, £103.03, £104.06, £105.10, £106.15,
£107.21, £108.29, £109.37, £110.46, £111.57, £112.68

That’s an annual interest rate of 12.68%.

If we take the 12th root of 12%, that gives at monthly interest of 9.489%. Then 12 months of interest gives:
£100.95, £101.91, £102.87, £103.85, £104.84, £105.83,
£106.83, £107.85, £108.87, £109.90, £110.95, £112.00

Exactly 12% annual interest.

Can someone more financially literate than me explain why everyone states the former method?

We were walking along the road one day and spied this truck. Nothing strange there.

A Truck, The Other Day

However, after we passed, I noticed that H was no longer with me. Now that was strange.
It was ok, though. She had just stopped to read the sign in the window:

A Sign

Seems like it was penned by a reasonable fellow. not.

We should do more melon-splitting here in the UK.

And I’ve learned a new Japanese word… うま (uma) is not only horse but also a colloquial way of saying yum. うまそう (uma sō – it looks yummy!)

A Tin Of Spam, Yesterday

I set up a ‘contact me’ form on my photo websites yesterday. I wondered if I should introduce a ‘captcha’ – one of those things where you have to type the numbers or letters into a box to prove you’re a human.

Hold on, I thought, why should I punish my genuine customers for the few people who might try to spam my contact form? That seems silly. Real customers don’t want to type numbers into a box. My conclusion was that I’d not use a captcha unless the volume of spam that I may eventually see were getting too great for me to sift the real customers.

I had my first contact from the form today, less than 24 hours after putting it up.

Of course, it’s spam.