My friend Josh Ziff has uploaded pictures from the little golf tournament (we played scrambles) at Cateechee in Hartwell, Georgia a couple of weeks ago.

Check out the pictures here

My good friend Chris who runs the Min River Tea Farm has this week launched a new product: Sampler Pack Chinese tea

This is brilliant because if you, like me, love some good green teas but don't want to buy a whole bag yet, then get a cute little sampler and decide which of his teas you like the most. Or, for £9 you can buy a couple of these cute little tubs and give away as gifts. That's what I'm going to do.

At the moment you have to be in Europe to be able to order these (delivery done by Amazon UK) but if you're outside of Europe ping them and ask if something can be arrange.

Since Google doesn't really have a bug tracker where I can report bugs I blog about it instead.

Here's a typical example that Google's strife to get rid of duplicate content still needs some work. About 10 different mailing list archive sites have indexed the same email thread. Not very helpful.

I just ordered myself one bag of Jasmine Pearls from The Min River Tea Farm that my friend Chris has recently launched.

As soon as I get my tea I'm going to take a picture of myself drinking it and send in my pic so that £1 gets donated, by Chris, to the Mind UK charity.

If you live in the UK and love genuine sourced Chinese teas do check it out. The ordering process is lovingly easy and safe. Although I'm an Earl Grey fan myself, I love having some good jasmine tea available at home without having to worry about the caffeine in Earl Grey tea keeping me awake.

Best of luck to Chris and his new site! Please take the time to browse and read about his teas. If you're outside the UK and you want a bag, just send him and email.

If you ever wonder, how do I make a website that is just wrong on every front: Turn up your volume and tune into http://industrialpainter.com/ Oh yeaaaahhh...

It's got it all.

• completely irrelevant background music
• epileptic flashing animations
• uber-geeky loading counters showing you how many kilobytes you've downloaded
• new Flash file for each annoying page
• a counter
• blurred mugshots
• telling you want day it is, what date it is and what time it is in three completely different locations on the screen
• marquee text scrolling by
• being Flash

I can't believe I haven't seen this before. wikiHow is a great site. Just look at this article about how to spice up waffles for example.

Interestingly though, gone are the days of surfing. People don't take what's offered, they take what the search for. However, with wikiHow I'm eager to pop back in, throw a few articles on my Instapaper and then read them later on my Kindle.

Now I'm going to read about How to Be a Slacker Mom. Very relevant.

Having lived under a rock for a while I've managed to miss this great new feature in Gmail: Muting or ignoring conversions

From their help text:

"you've no doubt been subjected to the 'thread that just won't die!' If you're part of a long message conversation that isn't relevant, you can mute the conversation to keep all future additions out of your inbox."

That is such a smart feature. Interestingly I didn't even think there was a solution to that problem. I sure I have many times needed something like this. Now, let's hope I can remember to actually use this feature.

Ever since we started building SnapExpense we ask people we meet how they do their business/travel expenses at their company. Almost always they say their software is annoyingly bad and it's a right pain in the ass to process their expenses. Today I heard another such horror story from a friend about: GlobalExpense (www.globalexpense.com). Apparently it's dreadfully slow to use and it never remembers or adapts to what you have entered previously.

So my friend went to the website on my computer to show me how crap it was but that didn't work because GlobalExpense doesn't work in Firefox! What?! On SnapExpense, about 30% of our visitors use Firefox (with 31% using Internet Explorer).

I'm glad to see that the competition is lagging behind. Gives me heart. Especially as I have recently added Google OpenID log in to SnapExpense so you can log in or register with your Google (or Yahoo! or any OpenID provider) account straight away.

This is going to be useful to keep handy when I move to America.

According to my analytics the most popular Google search for getting to Crosstips.org is exactly crosstips.org which clearly proves that a lot of people type in the domain name in the search field these days. I do it too.

The second most popular search is "word whomp" which Crosstips has a dedicated page for. What's cute about that is that it was just a little side project I threw in yet it has grown to become one of the most popular features. You can never predict these kinds of things. I think the next thing I'm going to add is a Hangman solver which shouldn't be too hard.

So fellow Word Whomp cheaters, go for it!

Came across these amazingly beautiful photos from the Katrina hurricane. I can't believe I missed these before! In a sense I wish I could have been there, but in a safe place.

We might be able to pool together and poison the earth with our pollutions but every now and then mother earth reminds us we're just ping pong balls in her game of tennis.

It's of course a simplification but is it not true? Come on, admit it, isn't there something to it?

What do you think? As a man I must admit that it does feel like that. I don't know about the girls perspective so I'd love to hear what you think (keeping it mind that it's an exaggeration)

Spotted this website called Healing Food Reference which is what the name says; a reference of food and their healing "power". From the home page:

"This site is part of a public education project created by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, and hosted by Truth Publishing. Its purpose is to educate and empower consumers with information they can use to prevent and even help reverse degenerative disease. There are no commercial sponsors of this site, and neither Mike Adams nor Truth Publishing was paid anything to create this site."

Basically click on a type of food, for example tofu and you get a list of things it can help with such as fever and then from the fever page you can more foods that help.

At first I was a bit taken aback by the home page and huge amounts of text on it but once you're in it is so easy to use. Perhaps the reason the home page is jam packed with content is for his search engine optimization.

If you want to just remember one single password and you want to use different passwords for different site then Oplop might be right for you.

For those who use last.fm and like to visualize stuff with pretty graphs. For the really curious, here's mine of the last year (15 Mb)