jonathanchong.com

I can’t wait for this movie.

I’m still a bit unclear as to what Megatron is going to transform into. Rumours are that it’s going to be a tank but isn’t Brawl already a tank?

This is a building opposite the Gherkin in the City in London. It’s right outside my palce at work. As you can see, they’re demolishing the building from the GROUND UP!

There’s actually an explanation from the construction crew as to why they’re doing it this way, but I couldn’t find it to take a photo. If anyone had an explanation, please feel free to let me know!

We all love Firefox. I certainly do, and I use it everyday. However, I am finding myself leaning towards Safari / Webkit when I am using my Mac, simply because Firefox on the Mac is so sluggish. Not only that, the browser is now moving towards version 3, and a fix for the infamous Firefox memory leak is nowhere in sight (certainly not in version 2).

On the Mac, when I start-up Firefox and Safari / Webkit, both apps take up about 100MB of RAM. But after the CPU usage for Firefox always hovers around 20% even when idle, whilst Safari is using virtually no CPU. On a website with 3 standard rich-media ads, CPU usage on Firefox jumps up to 90% whilst on Safari it’s still not high, under the 10% mark.

That is a massive, significant difference and is one of the reasons why I’m finding Safari / Webkit to be slicker and faster although not as extensible as Firefox, which has thousands of add-ons for it.

After about half an hour of usage, Firefox starts to consume about 400MB of RAM, whilst Webkit at the moment is still just under 200MB of RAM.

Is the reason why Firefox is so sluggish is because it re-writes the broken HTML on a page? For some reason, it rewrites all the XHTML-correct < br /> to < br >, rewrites all the < img /> tags, and adds < tbody > tags to tables. Why? It’s going down the route of Internet Explorer where the browser is correcting incorrect HTML and not breaking the page visually, which will actually force the designers to correct the flaws in their markup.

Mozilla, please sort these issues out. I love your browser, but the issues I’ve highlighted above are making me feeling more and more disillusioned about my Firefox experience each day.

The Techies at work decided to rally for the business to lavish some luxuries on us hard workers, and we opted for the following:

1. Sony PS3
2. Extra wireless controller
3. Logitech 5.1 surround sound speakers
4. Games: Tony Hawk’s Project 8, Ridge Racer, Virtua Fighter
5. Movies: Open Season, Kingdom of Heaven

The above cost about £700, which we reported was the best £700 the business ever spent, and loaded the equipment up in the boardroom for a night of gaming extravaganza.

Photos:

Off to submit in my Weekly Report that we should be getting more games to satisfy the masses.

Whoever thought hunting for a property to buy could be so difficult? I visited 4 properties this weekend, and loved 2 of them, thought I had wasted my time with the other 2.

But for the 2 that I was interested in, paying upwards of £250,000 for a two bedroom apartment set alarm bells ringing in my head. I’m already having trouble trying to secure a £200,000 mortgage, where am I going to get the other £50,000 from?

Maybe it’s all tied down to me wanting to pay off the mortgage in 15 years, and not 25.

Anyway, I took some photos, which I’ve uploaded to my Flickr album for everyone to see.

It’s hard to imagine London not being the most expensive city in the world, and yet, according to a recent survey, it’s fourth behind Oslo, Paris and then Copenhagen are listed as being more expensive to live in.

Something must have gone wrong somewhere, because, this is how much it costs to get around on public transport in London:

• £4 for a single journey within Zone 1 on the London Underground
• A weekly bus pass is £14
• A one day bus pass is £3.50
• £2 for a single bus journey

A list of the most expensive cities in the world is below:

1. Oslo, Norway
2. Paris, France
3. Copenhagen, Denmark
4. London, England
5. Tokyo, Japan
6. Osaka, Japan
7. Reyjkavic, Iceland
8. Zurich, Switzerland
9. Frankfurt, Germany
10. Helsinki, Finland

Tokyo and Osaka are still in the top 10, whilst Hong Kong is 14, and Singapore 12.

New York is still America’s most expensive city, but the falling value of the dollar meant that it was cheaper to live in Atalanta than in Shenzen, China. Shanghai is still China’s most expensive city. It’s even more expensive to live in Moscow, than it is to live in New York.

The cheapest city to live in is Manila in the Philippines, tied with Mumbai in India.

Good grief, it can’t be that difficult to choose a holiday, can it?

I’ve had to go through so many different package combinations, from so many different holiday providers, that I’m on the verge of just giving up. Plus, surely all this aggro is not worth approximately £250, which is the price of the holiday?

That includes staying in a 3-star hotel in the centre of Paris, for 3 nights, and the return flight to actually get to Charles de Gaulle airport from London Heathrow.

I haven’t actually booked this holiday yet either. There are so many to choose from and I’m worried that I’ll be making a mistake … is £250 too expensive for a long weekend in Paris?

Maybe I’m just being tight.

Hello and welcome everyone. I’ll try and write as often as I can, even if it is just inane ramblings and short posts about what’s going on with my life.

At the moment I’m just sitting at my desk, listening to last.fm and trying to get a few things sorted, like a nice short holiday to Paris for some time in April.

And it’s also dawned on me that I will need a decent camera to take photos with. See, I currently have a Sony Ericsson K800i as a phone and the camera on that is pretty decent for the photos I take. But I realised that if I want to take some decent photos in the City of Romance, I’ll need a better camera and plus, it’s long overdue that I get a dedicated digital cam anyway.

So, one of the things I’m looking for in a camera is for it to have Wi-Fi capabilities, so that I can transfer stuff from the camera to the Mac over Wi-Fi. I’ve grown out of wires and I’m even looking at wireless speakers to replace my current setup.

The Nikon S7C fits the bill, and it’s nice and sleek as well, but I haven’t been impressed by the sample photos posted all over the Internet and at £225, it’s kinda steep for me. It’s a nice-looking camera and all but it’s kinda important that it takes decent photos and I’m a bit surprised at the lack of “Wow” picture quality from a Nikon camera.

So if anyone has any camera recommendations, let me know!

Right, I’m off to play with this a bit more. See you all later.