But then again, my friends and readers are all early-adopter geeks such as myself.  So this figure is obviously skewed from real world usage.

Anyways, if you are one of those 29.82% of people with Internet Explorer, I highly suggest you switch it up to Google Chrome.

In the past two weeks I have been pleasantly surprised by a few companies and their efficiency or attitude in dealing with me.  So I wanted to give some shout-outs.

Thames Water

Yes, this one shocked me the most.

Every day on my way to work I drive past a fire hose that has been leaking.  This irks me to no end.  The waste of water must be enormous as it has been leaking for months now.  I finally decided to take action.  But whom to call?  My first thought was the Camden Fire Brigade.  I rang up and got a response befitting to any government agency.  Something similar to a “computer says no” and pointed in the direction of Thames Water to pawn off the responsibility.  I just about gave up at that juncture because I was pretty sure that I would get no further with Thames Water.  But I decided to push on with one more call…

Got through immediately to Thames Water leakage department and explained the situation to the agent on the phone.  He informed me that no one had previously reported this incident and that it would be looked at immediately.  He took my name and number and gave me a reference code.  Within 30 minutes, I had another call from a very nice lady at Thames informing me that they would be taking care of the issue, but needed time to arrange with the council because the leak is on a major road.  Then she thanked me very graciously for reporting it.

All handled expertly and very politely.  Yay Thames Water!

ASOS

I am a huge fan of ASOS and buy tons of clothes on the site.  I am also a huge fan of ASOS because yesterday I received an order and decided that I needed a larger size so put the clothes in the post in the afternoon for an exchange.  This morning I had already received an email from ASOS telling me that they had received the return and processed the exchange.  Literally within 18 hours.  Awesome!

Truffle Shuffle

This company also made me smile with their prompt service.  I ordered a t-shirt on Monday by regular post.  I received the t-shirt on Tuesday.  I returned the t-shirt on Wednesday.  Today my return was processed and shipped.  Whoop whoop!

Lucky Voice Karaoke

Yes, I know I keep going on and on about how much I love my Lucky Voice home karaoke box.  But I also really dig the fact that those lovely people at Lucky Voice were kind enough to reward me with a free month subscription for the service just for writing a review.  They have definitely won me over as a loyal customer.

The moral of this story is that it is a nice to thing to live up to your promises, be efficient and also delight your customers.

Thanks for all the memories.

In fact, I only learned this because lovely Bjorn was kind enough to sing to me during dinner on Midsummer eve.

God bless the Swedes for being so much fun.

In case you missed what he was singing, here is the translation:

Små grodorna, små grodorna är lustiga att se.
Små grodorna, små grodorna är lustiga att se.
Ej öron, ej öron, ej svansar hava de.
Ej öron, ej öron, ej svansar hava de.

Kou ack ack ack, kou ack ack ack,
kou ack ack ack ack kaa.
Kou ack ack ack, kou ack ack ack,
kou ack ack ack ack kaa.

In English:

The little frogs, the little frogs are funny to watch.
The little frogs, the little frogs are funny to watch.
No ears, no ears no tails do they have.
No ears, no ears no tails do they have.

Kou ack ack ack, kou ack ack ack,
kou ack ack ack ack kaa.
Kou ack ack ack, kou ack ack ack,
kou ack ack ack ack kaa.

This is the list of friends that are online at Facebook right now.

I think everyone needs to get back to work and stop playing on Facebook, or at least go offline so people can’t spy on you like I do.

Tip of the Day?

To go offline, simply click on Options and select Go offline.

It looks super cute, but is it worth it?

For me, that answer is NO.

The White Pearl is based on the ONE IQ routes Europe edition and is priced at £179 (£10 more than the ONE IQ).  This is not the TomTom edition that I would want.  It doesn’t include any of the uberly useful live traffic features or my favourite Google search.  And they can take their female friendly points of interest and shove them.  I don’t care where the nearest Primark is and I don’t need to be pigeonholed into liking to shop for home furnishings.

The White Pearl seems like a product that was thought up by guys who want to market for women, rather than something that is useful.

Thanks, but no thanks.  I’ll just change my background to pink on my 540 and drink a cosmo instead.

A little back story… Recently I had the pleasure of visiting a Japanese hostess bar right here in London.  It isn’t as dodgy as one might think.  It was actually a bar where nice Japanese girls served me drinks while myself and some male friends sang really, really bad karaoke.  This whole experience woke up the inner Japanese in me and made me realise that despite having a voice that croons like a dog in heat, I actually like karaoke.

Yesterday, I was perusing one of my favourite geek sites, Firebox.com, looking at all the geeky toys I could potentially waste my money on own when I came across the Lucky Voice Home Karaoke Box.

Immediately I was curious.  Not only did it say karaoke, but it also had a pink mic.  Hm.  So, how does it work was my next question… I decided to order it for a mere £49.95 to find out.

Firebox is so totally awesome, that although I ordered regular post which was supposed to take 2-3 days, my package arrived after 1 day, just in time for the weekend.

For those of you not familiar with London, Lucky Voice is actually a chain of karaoke bars (currently 2) in central London.  They are set up Japanese styley with booths and are pretty much packed every night of the week with drunken revelers.  As it turns out, Lucky Voice was founded by Martha Lane Fox, one of the founders of Lastminute.com.  This might play a factor in the fun web element that I will get to in a minute.

The packaging for the kit was nice and simply branded in the style of Lucky Voice.  Inside was an easy to follow diagram for how to plug in the mixer and a voucher for a free month of premium songs on the site.

So, what is all the magic?

The beauty of this kit is it gives you the hardware to have a fun karaoke party, but the song bit is all hosted online at www.luckyvoice.com.  Super clever idea!

The site is cute and easy to use and has some surprisingly good functionality such as the ability to create playlists.  You can also create parties where you invite your friends, chat, share photos and even see the list of songs you sang!  How cool is that?!?

And once you have created your playlist / invited friends to your par-tay?

You click and off you go, full screen lyrics with the music playing.

Lucky Voice do a good job of upselling you to their Premium Sing by tempting you with a few freebie tracks (1,000 to be exact).  They have a decent pricing strategy with different packages that include:

• 24 hours of premium – £3.99
• 1 month of premium – £7.99

All payable by Paypal.  Easy peasy.  This makes it reasonably priced if you were going to host a karaoke evening and didn’t want to be locked into a month.  Good thinking.

Enough of me loving this thing in a blog post, I must go back to my Abba songs.  Get one of these boxes and have a great time!!!

Hopefully you have been lucky enough to try out Spotify, the Skype of music.  Spotify is a new music service that offers unlimited streaming of virtually any track or artist you can think of (especially Abba being that they are Sweden based).  If you haven’t heard of them, then you must live under a rock or something because you are really missing out on some fun.

Upon first glances Spotify is an obvious iTunes copy.  So then what is the big deal?  Another download of yet another music client. Blah blah.

The real fun of Spotify – apart from the fact that it is FREE (ok, you have to listen to a few ads on occasion) and the quality of the stream is amazing due to that lovely P2P backbone – is the ability to create playlists and share them with friends.  And not just create them, but collaborate on them with the world.  How cool is that?

Here is an example of collaborative playlists in the real world:

I tweeted for people to help me with a playlist about “sunshine” and included a link to my playlist.  If you have Spotify installed, then the link will pop up your player with my playlist.  You can then simply drag and drop new tracks into my playlist – or just listen to what is already there.  So simple, so easy – yet so powerful.

Try out my Dreaming of Sun playlist here – if you have Spotify installed.

To create or share your own playlist in Spotify:

Go to your playlist & right-click > select either Copy HTTP Link or Copy Spotify URI. Then share that with other Spotify users.

Now, this feature is pretty bare boned right now as Spotify currently doesn’t have the ability to truely “friend” someone.  But the possibilities are pretty limitless.  A few people have taken advantage of this feature by creating websites where you can share and discover new playlists.  I have found some true GEMS this way.

Check out these websites for playlists:

• http://www.spotifylist.com/
• http://spotifyplaylists.co.uk/
• http://www.spotifyfriends.com/

Please feel free to leave links to your own playlists in the comments of this post!