Yes, this Autumn’s must have fashion accessory can only be these fantastic Phone Fingers!

Also useful for when you’ve run out of contraceptives*.

* Probably not actually, I’d rather not get fingerprints on my iPhone.

Am I glad that I’m a rugby fan?

Yes.

Come on England!

And this week that is easy, we are playing at The Rhythm Factory on Thursday.

If you want a fun night out midweek, join us on Thursday, if you can’t make it, have a listen and let me know what you think anyway.

The basic plan is that Jason posts about an item that he is giving away, if you want to win it, you leave a comment and when there are 100 comments a winner is randomly selected. It couldn’t be simpler. I have already entered myself for an antennae to boost my wireless connection and a laptop bag.

I’ll be looking out for more stuff too, there’s only one thing better than gadgets and that is free gadgets!

Found via Andy Skelton.

England, world champions on bad form having lost 36 - 0 to South Africa in the opening stages, surprised the Australians with a 12 - 10 victory. It went down to the wire, with a final chance for Stirling Mortlock on the 78th minute, but a missed kick and a final two minutes of nail biting saw England triumph.

Then France, playing tournament favourites New Zealand in Cardiff, pulled off the second, and arguably bigger, surprise of the day by winning 20 - 18. It seems that refusing to call the New Zealand team “The All Blacks” throughout this week followed by a defiant stance at the haka was the perfect build up to a giant killing.

What does this all mean?

This means that next weekend I will be faced with more nail biting tension, sitting on an even thinner edge of my sofa and screaming even louder as England face France. I can imagine each teams’ PR people trying to convince everyone that their team is the underdog, based on today it seems the best way to win.

A return to form for the English has got me all excited now. Could we win the World Cup again, becoming the first side to do so twice in a row? I better calm down before I get ahead of myself. There’s two more quarter finals to enjoy tomorrow. I’d like to think that the results will be more predictable, but after today I’m giving up any sort of predictions in the rest of the World Cup.

How geeky.

This week I will not be taking my eyes off my feedreader (except to watch the Rugby World Cup quarter-finals) waiting for posts from ProBlogger. Why? It’s ProBlogger’s 3rd birthday and Darren Rowse is giving away more than $54,000 worth of prizes!

How Much?

Yes! $54,000! The full list of prizes is too long to read, and most prizes are very tempting! I’m not sure what I’d do with a year of access to Book Test Online or assorted baby and kids items from Lille Punkin, however I would love two, not one, but two 20″ LG monitors from DisplayLink.

The best thing is that this post is not just about the excitement about the competition. It’s also my entry into the competition for the monitors! All you need to do is blog about the massive giveaway then leave a comment on the post.

Good luck if you enter for any of the prizes!

Did I hear that right, did Google just paraphrase Ukrainian gypsy punks Gogol Bordello?

Admittedly “Think Globally, Clean Locally” is a little more environmentally conscious than “Think Locally, F*** Globally” but I appreciate the cultural reference anyway. And if you are going out to clean a park with Google, good luck and have fun!

A Close Second

Not the worst example on this particular piece of packaging, but I thought it deserved an honourable mention. My dinner didn’t think I knew what fish was, or perhaps conversely what was fish. Directly below the ingredients, which stated that 62% of the dish was rainbow trout, I was told that the meal contained fish. Further down the pack I was also told, “Important! This product contains raw fish.”

I took a deep breath and continued preparing, but it wasn’t until I put the trout (fish that is) into the oven I found out something truly unbelievable about my prospects for the evening.

Bleeding Obvious

Take care when eating as filling may be hot.

I read the line again. I’d like to note at this point that the line appeared below the cooking instructions. The very instructions that told me to place it in the oven at gas mark 4 for 35 minutes.

It may be hot! After 35 minutes in the oven, it may be hot? Perhaps the packaging should have also stated that if the filling wasn’t hot then you may want to get your oven checked as it isn’t doing it’s job properly.

Lawsuits and Compensation

As I said above, I understand that companies have to cover their backs against stupidity, this is why I’m going to let Marks & Spencer off with the fish remarks. However, I’d like to see the look on the face of a judge when a “victim” tries to tell a court about the frightful and unexpected burns they received to the mouth when stuffing a forkful of trout and crab into their mouth straight from the oven. I could only imagine a ripple of laughter around the room, dying out as the amused realise that the “victim” is serious.

I’d like to see a case like that get turned around, with our “victim” being sentenced to attend school again, from reception year onwards, paying special attention in home economics (or whatever they call it these days) when discussing the properties of food once it has come out of a hot oven.

In My Defence

In my defence, I do normally cook with fresh food (in fact I do a very good lasagne and I’ll be getting a pork stroganof on tomorrow night), but it was Sunday and I could not be bothered. However, this could be another good reason to cook your own food. Forget healthy eating or buying locally, cook using fresh food to avoid offence from the ready meals’ small print.

Been offended by produce or packaging recently? Let it out and maybe we can start a support group, or something. It probably would need a warning though… I’ll stick with “May contain nuts.”

Soup

I started myself up a soup page the other day. Soup bills itself as “Your online scrapbook,” though it can really be defined as a tumblelog or even a lifestream. It’s not a bookmarking service, like del.icio.us or StumbleUpon, it’s not just a link blog, it’s both!

Now, every time I bookmark or stumble or digg a site it will appear in my soup, also every blog post I write, on any of my blogs, will appear there too. Soup also allows you to import eBay, Flickr, LiveJournal, Twitter, Vox, Youtube, Zoomr, Tumblr and any RSS feed you want, so it caters for anyone! Read/Write Web had a good write up on the subject too.

It is a record of all my activities online and, as it has it’s own RSS feed, it means I can post the whole stream anywhere else on the web I fancy. You may even see it appear in my sidebar here eventually.

Twitter

I noticed that Soup allowed you to post your tweets to it, so I thought, “Why not?” and started up a Twitter account too. Now I’m blogging, microblogging and tumblelogging all at once and they are all intertwined!

I like the idea of Twitter, even though I’m late to the game. I’ve always enjoyed updating my Facebook status and Twitter is a much better version of that. I also heard that you could use Twitter to set yourself reminders or to-do list items (or maybe I dreamt it). I’ll be looking into that soon!

Last.fm

I always liked Last.fm, but never got round to installing the iTunes plugin last time I changed computer. However, this week I have started recording my music again and you can see what I like at my Last.fm profile.

I love finding new music and I plan to use the service to the fullest of it’s ability now. I’m already picking up some tips from my neighbours and today I discovered for the first time that you can download a selection of mp3s every week for free! I already swelled my music collection by 9 tracks earlier and I’ll be going back for more.

Your Turn

If you use any of these web 2.0 services, come and find me (my links are all littered throughout the post) and say hi! Do you like using any of these sort of services? Do you have any different ones that you prefer? Are they just another distraction? What are your thoughts?