I hate it when the Yellow pages gets dropped off at my house.. it usually arrives as a bundle of 2 books (the phonebook / white pages) and the Yellow pages, and they sit around the house unused until the next edition arrives.

They are massive, ugly, and for me – completely useless.
I would never page through the Yellow Pages looking for a plumber/electrician/painter/doctor/whatever, and any directory-type searches I need are done through Google and have been for years.
I don’t have it in me to simply chuck the books in the trash, and even sending them straight into the recycling seems like a complete waste.

I was peeved when I arrived home a couple of days ago to find that a new set of books had been dropped off, and they have been sitting on my dining table irritating me ever since.

I heard voices outside the house this morning and was pleased to see a couple of guys wearing high-visibility vests with a van full of telephone book, and going door-to-door to hand them out.
I rushed outside, and the conversation went something like this:
“Oh good, you’re back – I don’t need a phone book and yellow pages, please take mine back”
“Sorry sir, I can’t do that, I only distribute them, I can’t take them back”
“Why not? Give them to someone else. I haven’t used them.”
“No sir, I get paid per book I drop off, so I can’t take them back, I must hand them out”.
“So give mine away again, get paid twice”.
“No, I get paid for distributing these ones. Rather take another set from me and I’ll get paid”
“I don’t want another set. I don’t want this set either. If you won’t take mine away, I’m just going to throw them away.”
“Fine throw it away, but take another one and throw it away too so I can be paid”
“WTF???”

At this point I closed the door and put my phone books back on the table and vowed to ignore them for another year.

UPDATE: I’m clearly not the only one who hates this unsolicited dumping –
Check out http://www.yellowpagesgoesgreen.org/ and http://www.paperlesspetition.org/

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Sometimes Cape Town really busts out the most incredible sunsets. I caught this one on my iPhone from the Sand Bar while having drinks and dinner with a couple of friends.

I’m impressed with the image an iPhone can capture with a pretty poor camera unit.

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I’ve never been a big fan of tag clouds as navigation devices, but Wordle is pretty awesome..

You can plug in a block of text or an RSS feed and generate beautiful word layouts with the most frequently mentioned terms appearing more prominently.

Looking at mine, it’s obvious that I’ve been blogging about Farmville too much.

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This is a refined version of a tip I saw somewhere….

If you are playing too much Farmville (like me) and get tired of waiting for your slow-poke farmer to walk around the screen to get things done, here’s a tip: immobilise him to speed up the whole game.

First, buy or scrounge 12 hay bales, and leave them somewhere on your farm. We’ll come back to them.

Now visit someone else’s farm, then return to your own.

Your farmer will be standing on a square in the center of your farm.

Click on the delete tool (red spade) and dig up the square he is standing on.

Grab the hay bales you collected earlier, and build a little hay-bale prison around him.

See image below showing how it’s done -

Now you can plow, plant, and collect much faster than if your farmer was allowed to walk around on the farm.

The game seems to understand that he is trapped and still allows you to play without him needing to be on the square you are working on.

And by choosing the center square, he will always land back in the trap after visiting other farms and returning.

Yes, spending time optimising my Farmville gameplay is a little sad, but you can’t say I don’t try optimise and improve everything I tackle

And I’m researching Social Gaming for my work with the 24.com Games team.

I’ll think up some more excuses later.

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