Daily Archives: November 27, 2007

Below the Queen’s head

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A while back I noticed that the initials IRB appeared below the portrait of the Queen on recently-minted coins. It turns out that those are the initials of of Ian Rank-Broadley, the man who drew the portrait. I found that courtesy of the Wikipedia article on the British one penny coin.

So now you know the reason for those letters. I thought it might have had something to do with the series of the issue or something. But it was much simpler than that. It seems a bit odd that whoever is in charge of choosing the image allowed the initials on there. It seems weird for the artist to sign coins. But then, our notes used to have © Thomas De La Rue and Company on them (the paper notes).

The end of some of my sports picks applications

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During the Rugby World Cup, I stared an application on Facebook: France 2007 World Cup Picks. It had that stupid name for trade mark reasons. (Another app turned up a few weeks later called Rugby World Cup complete with the real logo, but it didn’t have anything to do with the IRB.) It now called Rugby Picks and is following the Heineken Cup.

At its peak, there were 35,000 users. The peak was about halfway through the competition, and it dropped off significantly by the end. At its peak I thought, wow, this is a good idea, why not do it for some other sporting competitions. So I did. And now there are apps for the Premier League, Champions League, NBA, College Football and NHL. And the A-League and cricket too. Except half of those have next to no users and updating the scores is taking a up a lot of time, for no gain.

I wrote Rugby World Cup app for two reasons: to learn about Facebook applications (pass) and to draw people to Zemobo (fail).

Because of the time involved, I’ve had to make a decision, and I am going to close down the applications that have less than 300 users. So that means goodbye to:

  • A-League Picks
  • College Pigskin Picks
  • Cricket Picks
  • Fútbol Picks
  • What The Puck?
  • Basketball Picks

I’m sorry for the inconvenience. If anyone who reads this is interested in purchasing and maintaining an application (VB.NET/SQL Server code base – you’d get a non-exclusive license to the source code), please send me a message on Facebook (the link’s on the application pages).

These ones are still around:

It’s interesting to note that it’s rugby and football (both big in the UK) that are getting the most users.

I am the world’s authority on Brazilian-European monetary relations

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It seems so, anyway. I wrote an article in March about finding a coin from Brazil that was similar to a 5 cent euro coin. If you search for “brazilian money euro” on Google, I come out number 1. I’ve had three hits from that.

I also got a hit from “entavos brasil”. But there’s no such thing as an entavos. It’s supposed to be centavos. But I couldn’t see the C on the coin. Presumably somebody else couldn’t either. Funny.

I’m also popular for “similar to euro” and, of course, “arun stephens” (with or without quotes). Perhaps one day I will be number one for “arun”. I’m the number 2 arun if you restrict the search to New Zealand. That’s cool.