How to prioritise at work?

June 11, 2013 By Leave a Comment

Learn how to prioritise work from Bolly, the zen mistress

If you’re one of those people that works from home or you work for a corporation and find yourself taking the job and your career too seriously sometimes, then a kitten can be counted on to remind you of life’s true priorities. They have no judgment so don’t take sides or waste time gossiping. They have no ego so won’t be found trying to claw their way up a corporate hierarchy. And best of all, they have their boundaries hard-wired. When it’s time to sleep, it’s time to sleep and everything else has to wait. If we only learned that lesson from kittens the world would be a far healthier place.

Picture of cute kitten asleep on laptop

Filed Under: smile

Triang hand-cranked go kart from the 1970s

February 24, 2013 By 2 Comments

The internet is lacking any reference to my hand-cranked Triang go-kart from the 1970s…

…so it’s my duty to fill that information vacuum so that anyone else looking for reference to this innovative little go-kart won’t be disappointed.

My brother Steve and I each had one of these Triang go-karts in around 1973. I don’t know how we got them or whether they were new or second-hand (we were pretty poor in those days) but I remember us both racing down the bumpy, steep little alley behind our house on the them.

What made the Triang go-kart special was that you powered it with your hands and steered it with your feet – the opposite of every other go-kart I’ve ever seen. Two metal tubes topped with rubberised hand grips were connected to a crank that drove the rear wheels by long, bendy steel bars. I can remember these bending under power, but they never broke. You pushed and pulled on the hand-tubes which drove the go-kart forward. The front wheels were on a single axle and you steered by pushing your feet (tucked under a little bar) forward.

Triang-ish3

These fat rubber wheels with gold hubs are the same as on our go-karts

The Triang hand-cranked go-kart had a very comfortable seat and plush rubber tyres. I can’t remember ever putting air in them, so they must have been solid but they were soft and bouncy and gave a very smooth ride. The whole go-kart was painted red and the grips on the hand-cranks were shiny black and moulded to fit your fingers.

Triang-ish2

The seat on this conventional Triang go-kart is very similar to the ones on our hand-cranked machines

The images here show other conventional foot-pedalled Triang g0-karts but are useful to show parts from the hand-cranked go-karts. Our hand-cranked go-karts had the same seat as the one shown here with the green wheels. And the one with the yellow seat (above) has the same fat rubber wheels (in the same colour) as our Triang hand-cranked go-karts.

Filed Under: smile

Will we all end up using the same few images online?

December 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Finding a familiar image leads me to a surprising discovery

This image is from a post on someone’s Audioboo feed. I recognised the ‘little girl and laptop’ motif because some time ago, when writing a blog post about some aspect of protecting kids from pornography, I found it online and considered using it myself. In fact I’m not entirely sure that I didn’t use it.

I decided to do a Google ‘reverse’ image search on it. According to Google, this image currently appears on 769 web pages online. Most of these pages contain content about protecting children from pornography. A quick glance at the results shows – surprisingly – that the BBC is the worst offender.

That’s 769 people who have gone looking for something like ‘child and laptop’ and grabbed this rather iconic picture. One wonders how many of those people obtained the correct permissions to use the image (yes, yes, myself included). One also wonders if there will come a time when the whole of the web is reduced to a relatively small number of ‘archetypes’ being lazily grabbed, downloaded and re-used.

It’s a depressing thought but it has something of a ring of inevitability to it.

 

 

Filed Under: critical approach to online media, culture, smile

When Google confuses me

October 12, 2012 By 2 Comments

Stats show people arriving on my site having searched for ‘viagra dick’

WTF?

I regularly check my blog stats, particularly the list of phrases that have brought Google searchers to it. I was a little surprised to find this morning that someone had – apparently – arrived here after searching for ‘viagra dick’. “When did I write about that?” was the first question I asked myself (because it’s entirely possible that in some ranting blog post about spam I did).

So I put the phrase into Google and ran through the first 30 pages of results but, unsurprisingly, couldn’t find any entries from my site in there. As you’d expect, the first million pages are full of scammers trying to ‘sell’ viagra online.


So I’m left wondering how this happened at all. Let’s imagine I did use the phrase in one of my rants and that that post appears on page 544,839 of the Google search results. Since no human would search that long – not even one looking to scam people – I can only think that it’s some kind of automated thing going on.

Of course, by even writing this means that I’ve now moved up to page 544,727 of the search results for ‘viagra dick’. I think I’d better stop while there’s still time :-)

 

Filed Under: GRRRR!!!, smile

Frog strangles goldfish

March 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Do frogs strangle goldfish?

Yes, they do. This morning in my dad’s pond, I noticed this odd sight. A frog clinging tightly to a goldfish – a very dead-looking goldfish. It was riding it around the pond like a holiday inflatable toy and refused to let go of it even when I gently prodded it with a stick. The frog’s grip was obviously very tight and there were some ‘gizzards’ dangling out of the fish but generally, the fish looked as though it had been in good condition before its encounter with the frog.

So what happened? Well, it’s spring and the pond is currently full of frogspawn which leads me to think that the unfortunate fish was, in fact, loved to death by the over-amorous frog. A quick internet search revealed quite a few references to frogs killing goldfish by hugging them to death as well as larger bullfrogs actually eating them.

So if it happens to you and you find yourself reading this, rest assured that while it will be the oddest (and possibly the most disturbing) thing you’re likely to see today, it is in fact quite common.

Filed Under: smile Tagged With: , , , , ,

What’s happened to bbc.co.uk?

November 9, 2011 By Leave a Comment

When you can’t get bbc.co.uk your first though is “has the world ended?”

Very occasionally something goes wrong and you can’t get the BBC website. Oh my God, you think, has the world ended? What could possibly take the BBC offline? It’s funny how we think that the BBC’s website should be more robust and resistant to code screw-ups or inexplicable breakdowns than other websites.

Usually, the BBC website shows back up within minutes and all is well. You can relax in the knowledge that a battleship-sized asteroid hasn’t knocked the earth of its magnetic axis and messed up all communications across the planet. Nor has a NASA-covered up brown dwarf star (masquerading as an icy comet) initiated an Extinction Level Event.

Joking aside, it is telling to notice just how destabilising it feels when a website like BBC doesn’t work. Worse yet those times when you can’t connect to the internet at all. I don’t know about you, but I will admit to a sort of nameless panic at being suddenly cut off from…well, you know, the real world. 

Filed Under: smile Tagged With: , , , , ,

Barclays flexible bonds

November 7, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Will Google think that my friend Barclay and his flexible bonds is in any way interesting?

I was watching the TV tonight and I saw Barclay’s ad for Flexible Bonds which ended with the voiceover exhorting people to “Google ‘Barclays Flexible Bonds’. I enjoy watching businesses use Google in this way. Barclays are, of course, supremely confident that their results will come high up in Google. And so they do, I am sure.

Of course, I’m also interested to test just how well Barclays has sown this particular meadow for the keywords ‘Barclays flexible bonds’. You’d hope it was done well. You’d expect it to be done well. And if it IS done well, then you won’t see my post anywhere – which is how it should be. If you DO see this post, then I’d argue that something’s gone wrong somewhere in the Barclays’ online strategy.

You know me. Nothing malicious in my intent, just insatiably curious to see what happens.

Filed Under: business insight, marketing, smile

Tin Eye reverse image search engine

June 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Tin Eye is a great tool for finding out who uses your images online…

I went to a school reunion last weekend. One of my old school friends is now a bit of a ‘business guru’ and, inspired by the 30 year interval between seeing people, blogged about change – including a picture of a yellow road sign reading ‘change ahead’.

‘I wonder how many times that sign’s been used?’ I thought to myself – and went to consult Tin Eye, an amazing image reverse search engine. You upload the image you’re interested in (a screen grab of the yellow sign picture in my case), hit a button and in seconds it will find a whole list of instances where that image has been used. Since the file names of all these occurrences are different, this operation can only be by analysis of the bitmap itself – quite some mind-boggling feat.

Tin Eye found 17 instances of this image (but I’m sure there are a lot more out there). In each case, the wording had been changed but Tin Eye found it anyway based on the overall composition of the picture. I decided to add mine to the list but be a bit more… honest about it :-)

Filed Under: business insight, smile

LG condenser dryer not heating?

January 15, 2011 By 1 Comment

Has your LG condenser dryer stopped heating?? Read this before you spend another £500

** Online reputation boost due to howtomendit.com and the internet generally!! **

Same happened to us this morning. Can’t live without one. Can’t (frankly) be arsed to start thinking about ‘repair man’ (if such a reliable person can even be found any more?). So started immediately thinking about just buying another. Hell, we’ve had this one running continuously for 4 years – it’s not as if it hasn’t seen good service.

But before spending another £500 I went to our friend Google.

And discovered that if your LG condenser dryer stops heating, you might want to take off the back metal panel (after switching off from the mains, of course) – whereapon you’ll find a little red reset switch.

If you press that little red reset switch, the dryer will start heating again. At least mine has.

I’m not sure it’s a permanent fix (there’s something about the filter sensors increasingly coming on – but no idea of how to get to those sensors to clean them…) – but I’ve just done it and it worked for now.

Thank you Internet. :-) I’m suddenly £500 better off than I was about to be. Nice.

Two other things:

1) LG – why don’t you paste a little note on the machine itself saying “If your heater element should stop working…”

2) LG – why don’t you print your little instruction stickers that you DO have on the machine upside down in future? That way I’ll actually be able to read them when I’m on my hands and knees trying to fix the unit (instead of putting the ‘right’ way up at floor level?)

Filed Under: mukau reputation boost, smile, WOW! Tagged With: , , , ,

Earliest recorded use of the world ‘Pixelated’

April 6, 2010 By 2 Comments

Has got to be Mr Deeds Goes To Town (1936), surely?

First of all it was the earliest screen appearance of the flat-screen TV in the 1960 ‘The Time Machine’ directed by George Pal. Now, we bring you arguably the first recorded use of the word ‘pixelated’ – the two little old ladies in the courtroom scene in the 1936 Gary Cooper classic ‘Mr Deeds Goes To Town’.

I say ‘arguably’ because of course, the lil’ ol’ dears aren’t really talking about the basic unit of the digital picture.  Nope, they’re saying ‘pixie-lated’ and they mean someone who’s ‘away with the fairies’.

But it would be a pity to let the truth spoil such a good soundbite, eh?

Filed Under: smile Tagged With: , , , ,
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