Wicked Uncle sells children’s toys. It’s not aimed at kids, or even at parents, but at uncles and god parents who are terrible at remembering birthdays. It remembers the date for them, and even suggests a selection of gifts suitable for the child’s age.

I met Wicked Uncle’s owner, Mike O’Shea after a mutual friend put us together. We thought it would be nice to do something together and so I wrote a story about a Wicked Uncle which you can listen to here.

The uncle in question is more irresponsible than wicked, but all the same, you probably wouldn’t want him to look after your kids for the weekend. Mike’s previous business, Splendour.com, which sells lingerie, was probably just a touch more wicked.

I should install it here too….  I know that I neglect Blog Relations, but it’s benefiting indirectly as it’s on a shared server with Storynory. One day soon I’m going to start devoting time to BR here, but at the moment running Storynory and keeping up with my nanny duties for our small son is all that I can manage.

Parallels opens up a virtual terminal within your Mac desktop. If you have an XP disc and license, you can install Windows inside the terminal. It’s not hard to do. Well, if I can do it, then it’s not difficult at all.

Sound Forge runs smoothly inside Parallels, but it was hard dealing with a large sound file until I noticed that you can distribute the computer’s ram between the Mac OS and Windows as you wish. You can save files inside folders than can be accessed by either system. If you press fn alt return, the Windows screen revolves round in impressive 3D and becomes a full screen.

It’s a little odd running Windows on the Mac, especially as I don’t have a right mouse button to click. I get confused between using the ctrl button and the Apple button. Otherwise Parallels makes it a lot easier to ween yourself off Windows because you know that you can have the best of both worlds. iMovie on the Mac – a really simple and great video editor – and Sound Forge on the Windows terminal – the best sound editor.

So is Mac really better than Windows? It certainly looks nicer, and it’s easier to find your favourite applications in the bar along the bottom. I also think it’s easier to have several applications open at once, and to switch between them, partly because they tend to open at different sizes so you can see one behind the other. It’s nice the way you can dock applications at the bottom where you can easily find them again. All in all, these little advantages do add up. But it really is useful to have the option to run Windows in tandem for those hard-to-find applications.

Switching has been made even easier by the fact that these days, most of what I do isn’t on either the Mac or Windows. Many of my applications are online – Google Documents, Bloglines, GMail, WordPress, – even a quick-fix picture editor. I keep media files on a big external hard drive, which is just as well, as I will have to give this Mac back to Exbiblio one day. It’s convenient to work like this in the day of the disposable computer that lasts a couple of years at max – and besides, I like to drop down to the Internet cafe to get away from wife and baby sometimes.

The Trade Show Photo Trick

I meet many fellow webmasters during my party at the Consumer Electronics Show. During the party, I get a few hot babes to take pictures with the other webmasters. They love this because it’s the few occasions when they can get a picture taken with a real girl. The picture gets posted at The TechZone’s photo gallery. An email is fired off to the webmasters, and they’re instantly linking it on their sites to show all their readers what a stud they are.

Unfortunately, I’ve never had the opportunity to try that one out, so I don’t have a pic to go with this post.

Matthew may be right about the stock market valuation – it’s rated on the basis that it’s going to keep on growing exponentially – but as far as my own online life is concerned, I use Google more and more.

Google documents (which Matthew and I use all the time to collaborate) has replaced Word for me, and is starting to edge Excel out of my life. It means I can easily switch computers – for instance borrow a laptop – and still have all my work to hand.

I was probably the last blogger on the planet to start using Google Mail, but I can’t imagine how I got on without it. It has the best spam filter of any emailer that I’ve ever used, and organises correspondence brilliantly.

And now the latest version of Google Reader might well tempt me away from my beloved Bloglines. It has a temptingly clean interface. I won’t rave about it yet, as I’ve only just started using it – but it’s certainly worth a try.

I’m starting to blog more about kids stuff for our other site (sorry to bore you with Storynory but it gives my every day practical experience).  So I went to http://del.icio.us/popular/kids to see what people are book-marking with that tag.  But because it’s a pain to return to that page every day,  I have taken the RSS feed off that page and put it into my Bloglines feed reader.  I’ve done this with some other popular tags and it’s a great way to keep up to speed.  It throws up goodies all the time.  I recommend it.

I still think that Bluehost offers excellent value, though I’m still reeling from being told by customer service that they can’t sell me any more bandwidth because they lose $25 per month on their package as it is.

We’ve put our latest post to our Storynory podcast for children on Libsyn. I note from their blog that they all work at Libsyn without any salaries at all.

It seems to me that the publishing revolution that is blogging, video/picture hosting, and podcasting has made the hosting business very competitive indeed. People are actually using the bandwidth that they buy, instead of leaving it redundant. This is costing the host providers real money – even if they do live in Utah where you can buy 3000 sq ft home for around $200K.

You can see why Writely is attractive to Google. A free word processor is a brilliant way to undermine Microsoft. In fact, pissing-off Microsoft is fast becoming the main purpose of Google, especially now its income growth is starting to slow.

The good news for Writely users is that it’s going to stay free now it’s in the hands of Google. The bad news for those who’ve just heard about it, is that Writely is closing registrations of new users. They are worried that the publicity will overwhelm them.

Now the top priority for the Writely team. Clean up your HTML code. No line-breaks where there should be paragraphs. Then I for one will start using it to write blog posts.