Asian Tiger

For most of us, we sure can do with more legroom when we board a plane. I’ve been aboard a number of planes and airlines but I simply forget to record down the seatings with bigger legs space compared to the normal seatings. Note that this is applicable to Economy Class only as all Business Class and First Class seats have obscene legroom.

Here, in this post, I will start recording and post legroom seatings as and when I have opportunity to do so. I seek your help too if you can do the same. Together, we shall build some good resource and help those of us who need that leg space.

Recently, I flew on Malaysia Airlines‘ Boeing 737-400 from Jakarta to Kuala Lumpur. The seatings with extra leg space are:

1. Row 5. Seating ABCDEF
2. Row 11. Seating BCDE (Next to Emergency Door)
3. Row 12. Seating BCDE (Next to Emergency Door)
4. Row 14. Seating ABCDEF (Next to Emergency Door)

Having the same background images on my O2 Xphone IIm is pretty boring. I wanted to change some other background images but all I see on my mobile phone is a XphoneIIbg.gif image. I searched around the Internet and found some software that takes care of the themes and background images. Unfortunately, these software are either paid or given out free but I do not wish to further clutter my O2 Xphone IIm with software that may potentially cause instability to my phone.

I found the easiest method of adding background images to the phone. First, I got some images off the Internet and cropped the images to be 176 pixels wide by 200 pixels tall. After editing the images and saving them as GIF format, I will then connect my Xphone IIm mobile phone to my laptop via the USB cable. Naturally, ActiveSync kicks in and synchronizes my phone with Outlook. To upload the newly edited background images:

1. Double click My Computer
2. Double click Mobile Device
3. Double click My Windows Mobile-Based Device (this will access into your mobile phone)
   
4. Double click Storage
5. Double click Application Data
6. Double click Home
7. Copy and paste your background images into this folder

To change your Xphone’s background images:

1. Click Start on your left softkey
2. Select Settings or ‘8‘
3. Select Home Screen or ‘4‘
4. Scroll down until the Background image setting
5. With your navigation pad, push left or right to select the desired background images including the ones you have just uploaded.
6. Finally, click Done, Done and Home using your left softkey. You will now notice that your background image has changed.

Simple enough? Yes it is. This way, I don’t have to rely on installing 3rd party software to manage my background images. Below are some of the images that I have uploaded to my phone. You can save a copy of these to yours if you like them. If you want other backgrounds, just drop me a comment and I will try my best to get it for you.

Here’s a green background entitled “Gnome”

Here’s a blue background entitled “Smoky”

Here’s a cropped image of Van Gogh’s famous “Sunflower”

In the past, each time I start a new website, I will use keyword suggestion tools to give me a rough idea of the keyword popularity on the Internet. Results from these tools typically tells you how many times that keyword was searched in Yahoo and the corresponding keyword varieties. This is a great start as you would want to ensure that there are ready visitors to your new site (provided search engines have mercy on you and refers visitors to your site).

For this example, I will pick “travel” as the keyword.

Based on that information derived from the above activity, I will then build my site and target the keyword “travel”. 6 months to a year down the road, I see some improvements in Google SERPs ranking but never in the top ten (nor in MSN or Yahoo for that matter). Competition must be tough. Many hours of hard work need to be focused on that site to bring the visitors from SERPs. I have chosen a terribly competitive keyword for my site. I had to target a different and less competitive keyword (another few months wasted).

Fast forward 15 months. Now, before I develop a site, I will perform 2 activities:

1. Check keyword popularity
2. Check keyword difficulty

Again, keyword popularity tools provide you with a feel of how many searches were done on the Internet. I use DigitalPoint’s Keyword Suggestion tool. This tool provides you with results from Overture and WordTracker. You can also select which country market you are targeting (applies to Overture’s data only).

As for keyword difficulty tool, I prefer SEOLog’s Keyword Difficulty Check tool. Not only does the tool provide a rank from 0 (very easy) to 100 (very difficult), it lists the top 10 URLs from Google Search (great to see who your competitors are).

With both these tools, I now enjoy greater success through SERPs. I am sure that there are many more tools available on the Internet; please do share some of them here.

Note: These tools are best seen as estimates only and used as a guide.