Every once in a while, you look at something and at first glance surrender it do absurdity. Then on closer inspection, you realize that in fact, a jewel indeed lay beneath the murky mud of silliness. Well, I have such as a one for you all and it has to do with our favorite search engine, Google.

Everyone knows that Google is a simple all white page. That white seems to be burning more fuel than black backgrounded screens. In other words, the white Google uses about 74 watts of energy on your display versus the 59 for the black version Google. Now, Mark Ontkush has gone and figured out that with all of us hitting the Google site as much as we do, that if we were to have a black version, we’d save — ready? — 3000 Megawatt-hours a year. Don’t mean much to you? Didn’t to me, either. In terms of greenbacks, we’re talking $75,000 in energy conservation. Wow!

No Fletch, this doesn’t mean I want all black web pages. 75k is small price to pay for a good looking web site.

Everyone gets meatloaf (spam from friends and family) that consists of jokes embedded in a hundred e-mail enclosures because AOL still doesn’t get how to forward a message. Sometimes, though, some meatloaf has some worth and today I got one that really made me chuckle (CIMS: Chuckle In My Seat.) There was another one that read “Forgive Your Enemies - It Messes with Their Heads” that got an LOL.

Anyway, thought this was somewhat on topic and it cracked me up so I thought I’d share the love.

Astraware is pleased to announce a new way to buy games and applications from their online store due to customers’ requests for alternative payment methods. Many customers either didn’t have the particular types of card Astraware accepts or they didn’t have a credit card at all, and so requested that Astraware accept PayPal® as an alternative to cards. After a bit of nifty integration work from David Oakley, Astraware’s CTO, PayPal® is now live on the Astraware website.

“We get almost as many requests for different ways of paying and changes to our site as we do for developing different games - the number of PayPal requests has been steadily increasing over the last year until it was our most frequent request,” said Howard Tomlinson, CEO of Astraware.

“PayPal’s Express Checkout system was easy to integrate into our store’s checkout and also easy for our customers to use,” said David Oakley, CTO of Astraware. “For people who already use PayPal it significantly reduces the amount of information they need to provide to buy our games.”

Customers who choose to pay with PayPal® instead of the usual checkout system will be redirected to the PayPal® site to put in their login details and confirm the transaction. Once completed the site will instantly redirect the customer back to the Astraware website to complete the transaction and the customer will receive their registration code on screen there and then so they can start playing the game immediately. Their code will also be emailed to them as usual so they can keep a record of their transaction. Customers who are familiar with using PayPal® should hopefully find this will be just like their experiences at other sites!

The initial roll-out of this enhancement is for purchases of Astraware developed and published products, so the option to use PayPal® won’t be available at the checkout if customers have added one of the titles (from the Astraware Lifestyle catalog, for instance) that Astraware resells for other companies. All being well, Astraware hopes to extend this service across all products on its site in the near future.

For more information on Astraware accepting PayPal®, please visit the Astraware website at http://www.astraware.com.

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