This next move is probably going to result in one of two outcomes:

• Realisation that the Statcounter code in my blog is fibbing big time
• Any good will I have left from the postroom boys going out the window - before my christmas shopping from Amazon turns up

but I reckon those two are mutually exclusive, plus the end justifies the means, so here goes.

Yesterday I got an email from a colleague to say that they would:

"Much rather donate money to Charity this year ... so, please don't feel the need to send me a [christmas] card"

This got me thinking, as at home we've already got lots of christmas cards ready bought and just waiting to be written (I know this because I hauled the five christmas boxes down from the loft on Sunday evening), how can I make a charitable donation and still continue to send and receive cards? It hit me when I was pulling off the M3 on the way into the office at 06h25 Friday morning (not much goes on up there at that time of day!):

For every card I receive at my work address, rather than sending a card back in return, I'll make a donation these charities:

• Home Start - the charity supported by Sun here at Guillemont Park via our reception area gift-tree giving programme. They provide support for families with young children in over 337 communities across the UK and with Forces families in Germany and Cyprus.
• North Hampshire Hospital's Early Pregnancy Assessment Unit (NHH Charities (EPAU)) - which does what it says really, but like most parts of the NHS is woefully underfunded

To make life interesting (like it needs to be!) the donation will depend upon where the card arrives from:

• Hand delivered/internal mail: 10p
• Received from UK: 23p
• Received from EU: 44p
• Received from rest of world: 50p

So apart from a nominal amount for hand delivered cards, the donation matches the postal cost to return a card.

Just to be crystal clear, this is lieu of you getting a card back from me in return, I don't want you taking me off your own christmas card lists!

Now for the not so small print: I don't have deep pockets and short arms, but I'm going to place a maximum donation of £50 (UKP) to each charity, but whatever the final figure, it should (if it's > $25) be doubled with the help of the Sun Microsystems Foundation Trust.

So if you work at Sun in the UK, I'm sure you can dig out my mailstop details. Otherwise, whether you're a Sun employee, a reseller, an existing, current or previous customer, a former work-colleague, a friend or relative(!) or an unrelated blog reader who's maybe received this permalink in viral form, please send christmas cards to me at our UK Head Office Address, and mark them FAO "ColinJ" -- don't forget the "J".

I'll be sure to keep you updated on how the postroom relationship breaks down!

Seasons Greetings (as per your locale!)

Recently one of my old bosses blogged about a BBC report around how we only give (web)pageloads 4 seconds before clicking elsewhere. Well, seeing as today is Thanks Giving Day in the USA and tomorrow is Black Friday (the day when our American cousins historically start Christmas shopping in ernest), maybe I can show you something to do whilst you're waiting for the status line to change from Waiting to Read to Done when you're doing your on-line present shopping, particularly if you'll be shopping on Amazon.

Ever find that you're not quite spending sufficient to qualify for free shipping/delivery? Well if you try one of these sites:

• http://www.filleritem.com/uk.html
  
• http://www.hotukdeals.com/amazon.php
  

Depending on what you're buying and how much the delivery charges are, it can be cheaper to buy something extra than buy just your item and pay the postage fees. For instance buy a electric toothbrush for £14 and you'd have to pay £5.88 P&P, a total of £19.88. But a quick search on one of these websites reveals you could buy Old-Time Cats Stickers: 24 Pressure-Sensitive Designs for £1.28, taking you up to the £15 threshhold. Yet you'd only pay a total of £15.28 saving over £4.50 and getting an extra Christmas present for some distant cat-loving relative into the bargain!

I heard about this website on the weekly Money Saving Expert email sent out by Martin Lewis, the man behind the excellent Money Saving Expert website. This is a great source of money saving tips on anything and everything by finding the best deals and beating the system. The site's honours include a Parliamentary Motion commendation!

Take a look, there's shed loads of hints and tips (almost entirely UK-biased I'm afraid), subscribe to the weekly email (it's free) and listen out for Martin's regular appearance on the Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2 (yes it's true I listen to Radio 2, as well as Radio 1!).

For all of you States-side: Happy Thanks Giving, and try not to over do it!

Don't know if you've had chance to catch the latest Bravia TV commercial from Sony yet; okay I'm a little behind the times on this one. The Ad has been running for a couple of weeks now, although there was a huge amount of viral advertising kicking around including bystander videos. It's the follow up to the classic Bouncy Balls commercial, except this time the bouncy balls are replaced by 70,000 litres of paint and North Beach/Russian Hill, SFO have been replaced by Glasgow's Toryglen estate!

There's a write-up on in the Magazine pages of the BBC News site which goes into detail how they found a 60's Tower Block in Glasgow which was awaiting demolition, covered surrounding houses in (very) very large polythene sheeting, paid off the locals and then proceeded to explode those 70,000 litres of paint off over the shop.

I don't reckon it's quite as cool as the original Bouncy Balls ad, it's a little bit too British to honest! Don't know if the decision to avoid an ubercool, downtempo, voal/lounge/dub soundtrack was premeditated (Balls was dubbed with José González's cover of Heartbeats. Something like that might not have sat so well this time around.

Would it encourage me to buy a Bravia? Well I'd probably be encouraged to start looking once I'd seen the advert on someone else's HDTV. Start looking after Christmas that would be, and probably not at the Bravia "Engine" range (1) because they don't seem to do a 37" screen (I've been told we can have a 37" screen!) and (2) cause I think an engine in the living room would probably be too noisy, especially when you're trying to watch something good on telly!

It did leave me thinking though, what might we be able to do for a Project Blackbox TV commercial? Maybe we could enlist the Top Gear's Jeremy Clarkson - he's renowned for having a bent for trying to destroy his most hated cars (and any caravan) by varying and increasingly more inventive means; he once resorted to targetting a Corvette with an helicopter-mounted gatling gun.

A few years ago Top Gear attempted to destroy a Toyota pick-up; they tried:

• drowning it in the Severn Estuary
  
• dropping a caravan onto it
  
• attacking it with a wrecking ball
  
• setting it alight
  
• dropping it into shot (must have been at least a 30 foot drop)
  
• driving it through the "production office"
  
• hoisting it 240 feet aloft another 60's tower block and having the tower block demolished from beneath the Toyota.

It survived all that and was still drivable (they allowed themselves to do roadside repairs where necessary, but no parts could be replaced and the only consumables they used were a few sprays of WD-40 and a gallon or so of diesel.

Hmmmm on second thoughts, maybe that's not sure that's quite the message we'll be going for with Project Blackbox.

I had been planning introducing my youngest to you all in more fun way (I was going to show you his entry on kittenwars.com -- yes, my youngest is a black'n'white cat by the name of Eric) but of course he had to spoil all of that this morning...

When I came down into the kitchen at around 6am this morning (enroute to the office to take over from the Solution Centre nightshift) I found the chicken my girlfriend had taken out of the freezer to defrost intime for tonights dinner, sat on the kitchen floor, ripped open and half scoffed.

There are two cat's in our household, the aforementioned and Lita (the big sister). Lita (so I'm assured) would never get up on the kitchen work surface -- in fact Eric's only been known to do it twice in his two years!

OK, make that threee times; so nobody saw him? Nevermind, I just use father's intuituion and came to a quick decision, given he was caught with a bird in his mouth at the weekend (and then propmtly made a run for it, with the bird, under the hole in the fence) Eric was clearly at fault! He was quickly and quitely shown the relevant evidence, and then quitely told not to touch anything like that again (I recall a little wigging of the index finger was involved) then he was put down and promptly tried to run out into the back-garden. Except the cat flap was still locked! Well it made me laugh anyway!

Eric, this is everyone. Everyone, this is Eric.

PS
Before you ask, Lita was named by my girlfriend after the WWE erm.. performer: Lita. Although she is often mistaken for being the namesake Reading FC's star forward Leroy Lita!

Eric, on the other hand, is named after Slowhand himself Eric Clapton.

Which ISP? Is that an age old geek question or what? Actually these days I'm not sure it can be limited to a geekquest anymore!

In the UK, the Broadband market has recently started to see a glut of free offerings, from the likes of Carphone Warehouse (mobile phone retailer), Orange (mobile phone network provider), and now Sky (satelitte TV provider and part of the Murdoch chain). As you'd expect all of these have at least as many strings as your standard apron, but as a Sky subscriber (I bought into Sky+ (PVR) when the UK PVR market wasn't quite mature enough) I can now choose from:

• 2Mb (upto) (capped @ 2GB) FOC (but with a £40 activation fee)
  
• 8Mb (capped @ 40GB) £5/month (activation fee dropped to £20)
  
• 16Mb (uncapped) £10/month (with no activation fee)
  
• 8Mb (capped @ 70GB) £17/month (but with activation fee back up to £40 eh?)
  

at this point I should probably add that I belive the area I live has a 1MB limit -- the fact we can even get ADSL is something the whole neighbourhood is ever so grateful. When we were shopping for houses ADSL availability was high on my shopping list, and just as we found our ideal property (which we bought!) BT kindly acknowledged they were due to drop their 5km-from-exchange restriction, which was timely.

I've been a happy Pipex customer since around 2002 (I moved back to the UK from Silicon Valley where I'd had a fine broadband connection until the ISP went bust). In my time with Pipex, I've had to phone them only a couple of times and I've never had a problem with the connection. I only moved away from them once, when I moved to a rented property that was already connected to NTL for phone and cable, so I opted for them for my broadband (cable modem) and that too was more or less troublefree, and obviously wonderfully, for the day, fast at 700Mbps).

Currently I pay way too much for my uncapped 1Mbps service from Pipex (something like £23.99/Month!).

I'm sure looking at this in black and white you might think it was obvious to follow price, but as a customer of both Sky and Pipex, I know I've had no problems contacting or dealing with Pipex, whereas Sky, being significantly larger, are sometimes frustrating to deal with (like many large teclos); I've had many heated discussions over various issues with Sky -- do I really want to risk my broadband connection simply on the basis of price?

Doubtlessly overseas readers will be oh so eager to let me know just how little their local ADSL costs!

Thinking this through, I think I'd rather check out the ISP's taking part in the BBC's Multicast Trials and get a little more for my money;a static IP address might help too ;-) It's probably appropriate to invest some time looking through the excellent ADSLGuide.org.uk. And when I'm through with that, I'll start shopping around for new gas and electricity suppliers!

Back in May The Stroke Assocation  held their annual Thames Bridges Bike Ride crossing  14 bridges covering a gentle 32 mile route from   London's City Hall, through Old London Town, and then along the  towpaths of the River Thames, through Richmond Park and onto Hampton Court.

For the third year running my girlfriend and I took part, this time we were again joined by her brother who I'm pleased to say  managed to finish this time (last year he cried off after riding 20 miles with chronic back pain, not a common sight to see a 6 feet something tree surgeon unable to carry his own bike up steps!).

I was also pleased to make it home without any punctures, Adrian picked one up at a break-stop, which resulted in an hour off the road and Nicola picked one up between platforms 2 and 11 of Waterloo Station

As usual it was a great day out for a brilliant cause – raising money to help the 250,000 people who are currently living with stroke in the UK.

And for the third year running colleagues throughout Sun, friends, family and this year even resellers helped in the riasing money element of the day. Along with Gift Aid and help from The Sun Microsystems Foundation we managed to raise £770.80.

Thanks very much to all of you!

Are you wondering who the dodgy looking chap in the picture is? It's me. I'm probably not as high profile as Jonathan so here's a little background:

I joined Sun nearly 9 years ago, having previously worked at MSSL , part of University College London a software developer/sysadmin in the Climate Physics Group (actually that was a worryingly long time ago!).

I'm a support engineer working in Sun's Systems Technology Service Centre organisation, which means when there's an issue on a high-end Sun box (older or newer) as well as lots of other products, there's a chance that you'll end up speaking to me (online or on the phone).

I first wrote this entry on 23rd November 2004, but it only appeared on my internal blog, and I really don't think anyone actually read it!

It's all change for me again at Sun; today I start on my 12th manager in just under 9 years. I don't really think this is a bad thing, working in Sun you'd be hard pushed to find anyone who'd never had a change of boss, like in Scotland where they're say "If you don't like the weather just wait a little while and it'll soon change!".

So it's Richard's turn to take on the role of sitting above me in namefinder following in the footsteps of (most recent first) Richard, Andy, Ray, John, Gary, Alison, Sean, Thierry, Rob, Kimberley and Ray (the same).

Today I start under Richard for a second time (basically we've changed teams however Richard is still on my case!).

Good Luck, Richard! -- Loving your work!