The Blog Based Small Business
This blog is absolutely standard WordPress. all I pay for is a small amount of extra storage and the use of VideoPress to put my videos in the blog. I think I pay about thirty dollars a year.
This blog is in effect a complete web site, with a contact form, searching and all the things you’d expect from a professional website. It also doesn’t have adverts or other things that will annoy my readers.
It differs in one way to a professional website, in that updating it just needs a small amount of form filling in a web browser. The difficulty is about the same as sending an e-mail.
So could you run a small business on a blog such as this?
I’ll use the example of a lady who does small repairs and alterations to clothes and household furnishings. There used to be and probably still is, someone like that in Cambridge market a couple of days a week and C got her to shorten and alter clothes for her. I was taught to do all this by my mother, but don’t think I could manage it now, with my hands.
Such a business could work well off the back of a blog. Say she repaired an expensive evening dress for someone in Dulwich, she might post a picture of the repair, with a brief description in the blog.
As Google knows everything immediately from WordPress, someone searching for evening dress mending, Dulwich, may well find the blog.
Gradually, as the blog expands you’ll get more hits and from the statistics, you can find out how your visitors got there.
So the blog does your market research in addition to getting your customers.
Confessions on the iPope
Well not quite, but there is now an iPhone app to help with confession.
Described as “the perfect aid for every penitent”, it offers users tips and guidelines to help them with the sacrament.
Now senior church officials in both the UK and US have given it their seal of approval, in what is thought to be a first.
The app takes users through the sacrament – in which Catholics admit their wrongdoings – and allows them to keep track of their sins.
It also allows them to examine their conscience based on personalised factors such as age, sex and marital status – but it is not intended to replace traditional confession entirely.
Instead, it encourages users to understand their actions and then visit their priest for absolution.
I have a few questions.
- Does the app search your e-mail to see whether you’ve been hinting of doing things that of which the Catholic Church would not approve? This would probably need a Bayesian filter and the Reverend Bayes wasn’t a Catholic.
- Does it look at all of the pictures you’ve downloaded to your phone and react accordingly?
- Does it check that the app associated with your football club is the right colour?
- Could the app be connected to add-on hardware that gives you a prick or an electric shock if you think naughty thoughts?
The possibilities are endless. And obviously the more serious the religion, the more serious the app!
It would also have added a whole new dimension to Clochemerle.
How Do You Banish Virgins?
Virgin Media is an frustrating company in that it designs so many things almost to annoy.
I’m using my Samsung Network at a friend’s house and some of the connection software for my home broadband keeps opening Virgin Broadband windows in Internet Explorer. Delete them and they reappear and often seem to replace something I want.
I do wish I’d installed Sky and used BT for my phone lines.
This is not to forget their rather inferior TV system, which is not up to the standard of Sky Plus and the fact that they still haven’t transferred my number from Suffolk.
I’ve just solved the Virgin windows by deleting the Virgin Media hub from this computer. So don’t install it, is my advice. I haven’t installed it on my laptop and that works fine, so I think it’s one of those unnecessary pieces of software companies like you to install, so they can track what you are doing or lead you to spend more money with them.
Facebook Involved in Divorces
It had to happen, that what you write on Facebook, would start to drop you in the mire over your marriage. One of the reasons, I blog rather than use Facebook seriously, as I have total control over what goes up. Also if someone uses bad spelling or grammar, I can remove the worst of the horrors. C also did some of her training in libel chambers, so I know enough to hopefully make sure, I stay the right side of that line. I also choose my targets with care.
This article in the Telegraph explains the problem of divorce and Facebook.
One lawyer is quoted as saying.
Many of divorces came after partners found “flirty messages” on the Facebook wall of their partner – and also “inappropriate suggestive chats” which spouses can see.
Note that I’ve corrected the punctuation in this extract. Times must be bad when you can’t rely on the Tory Party at Gossip.
As a widow, some would be surprised at some of the messages, I’ve exchanged with other widows. Flirting and the odd suggestion are very much part of life and help everybody to keep a balance in the darkest of times.
So that adds another layer of complexity to the problem and puts more icing on the legal bill.
Was This a Badly Placed Internet Advert?
I usually get notification of newspaper polls on the death penalty from a list I belong to on the Internet. This was the latest request I got.
Please help turn this poll around. Thanks! http://www.ydr.com/local It’s down on the left.
I voted appropriately. The paper incidentally is the York Daily Record.
But imagine my surprise that the placed adverts on the site were for theTrainLine.com, who I’ve recently used to buy a ticket on East Coast to York. And they were trying to sell me a ticket to York! Obviously, there’s an Atlantic Tunnel I don’t know about.
Seriously though, the advertising system was probably looking at my cookies and made an appropriate decision.
I’m not particularly bothered, but I can see that some people will be!
I hope everybody who reads this votes using the link.
–abe
Building Scientific Models with Computers
This was the title of a lecture at University College London, that I attended yesterday lunchtime.
It was an excellent lecture and in some ways it was like going back forty years to when I worked at ICI Plastics in Welwyn Garden City. In fact two topics, that were discussed by Professor Catlow, were similar to problems I tackled all of those years ago.
The first was the problems of turbulent and other flows. We had been interested in what happened inside an extruder as you used it to force plastics, such as polyethylene, polypropylene and PVC into moulds to produce the products needed. It was an intractable problem then and I suspect it might be almost as bad today. Although computers are now bigger and can handle many more nodes than the hundred or so, we could handle on our PACE 231R or with IBM 360/CSMP.
I also found his discussion of the various forms of molecules and how they could be predicted fascinating and if we’d had someone with his knowledge, we’d have got a lot farther with another problem.
When you create polymers, you create long chains of molecules like ethylene and propylene etc. which lock together like a series of odd-shaped Lego bricks. These chains then bind together to form the items we need.
At the time, ICI were trying to create an engineering plastic, which would be stronger and have a greater temperature range. I won’t name it here, as I don’t want to break any confidentiality, but suffice to say that the monomer or polymer building block, needed to be created as a straight molecule for the integrity of the plastic. It was known that several forms of monomer could be created and that there was a rather complicated separation process to extract the straight ones. Just as in Professor Catlow’s example yesterday, water in the reaction, was one of the factors, that affected the proportion of desired monomer.
Now I’m not a chemist but I was asked to look at the physics and dynamics of the reaction, with respect to removing the errant water from the reaction vessel as soon as possible after its creation, to reduce the damage it could do. In the end, I made myself very unpopular, as I often did, by finding a method that removed the water. I can remember searching Chemical Abstracts and finally found the data I wanted in a paper published by a Chinese researcher working in Canada in 1909. We don’t know how lucky we are with Google and the Internet.
I left ICI soon after I completed this work, so I don’t know the final outcome!
But to me, the exercise proved the value of using dynamic computer models based on differential equations, to understand difficult systems.
In some ways, I was able to do this work, because I was properly taught calculus and how to form differential equations at school. Would such an important subject now be taught to sixteen-year-olds as was regularly done in the 1960s at schools similar to the one I attended?
A Media Survey for Virgin
I always fill in surveys honestly, so when Virgin asked me how my broadband, TV and phones were going I told them in that way. I gave their service a score of 3 out of ten and said I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone else. They did allow me to give reasons and this is what I said.
1. I am still waiting for my previous BT number to be transferred. If I have to change it, then it’ll be an expense of several hundred pounds to change web sites and stationery.
2. The Virgin Media box has a poor interface, which I find irritating compared to my previous Sky+ box and Freeview recorder. Despite my stroke, I have a fearsome memory and if say I want a channel, I just type in the three-digit number. But with your box you must click OK as well. As I only watch and listen to about six channels anyway, that extra button is a real irritant. I have not used the record function yet, as it seems way to complicated. Remember, I made my money as a software designer, so I know about interfaces and your box interface rates about 1 out of ten.
I would give you 1 out of ten, but the support staff have been trying hard to get my number transferred and I think they are getting as frustrated with the non-transfer as I am.
I do hate surveys which just take scores as these can’t give meaningful results, when customers have had problems. They seem to work on the we know best principle and if you don’t like it tough!
They also had another box for comments at the end of the survey. I said this.
Because I’ve had a stroke and can’t read small print or use the telephone too well, I’d like to be able to e-mail problems in. What is the e-mail please? I also need that number transferred. BT say you haven’t asked them to do it and you say that BT sy the number isn’t active and other things. Something is seriously wrong. Or is it me, I once tried to transfer a number from Vodafone to O2 and it ended up with Orange. Only when Orange phoned me, did I realise why my late wife’s new mobile phone didn’t work!
James – Blogging as the Anonymous Widower
It will be interesting to see if I get anything more than the standard response.
Claiming Winter Fuel Payment Without a Birth Certificate.
I’m 63 and have never claimed the Winter Fuel Payment. In 2007, when I was first eligible, I had many other things to do with C’s illness an eventual death. I should have claimed in 2008, but I was after the cut-off date. Last year my son was dying with pancreatic cancer, so again it was the last thing in my mind.
So this year I decided that I’d better do it. I phoned the help line number, 08459-151515, who said they’d sent me a form in 2007. As I was claiming Widow’s Benefit at the time, I suppose I ignored it. They said they’d send another, but it never arrived. Or at least I never saw it.
So yesterday, whilst the weather was so cold, I decided to have a go. At least I was in front of the cut-off day in March, so I should get it this year.
I updated the form on the Internet and printed it off. But it needed birth certificate for proof of age! My birth certificate was unique in that it had the wrong date on it, which had been officially changed a few weeks after I was born. But I have not seen it since we last moved in 1991. I paniced a bit and ordered a copy on-line, but that won’t be here until mid-January.
So again I phoned the help line ans told I could take two of my passport, driving licence and medical card to the nearest JobCentre Plus to get them verified. I searched the JobCentre Plus website and there is no office finder as you get on any chain of shops website. After perhaps twenty minutes of searching, I found that the nearest one was at the other end of the road on which I live. Within ten minutes my passport and medical card had been copied and certified.
Everything was in the post by lunchtime.
So it was fairly easy in the end, but why can’t it be like how you purchase a Senior Railcard. That is totally on-line and must be a much cheaper system than the one they have for the Winter Fuel Payment.
I know not everybody has a passport or a driving licence, but these people could just take everything they have got straight to the JobCentrePlus? And why is there no list of JobCentrePlus offices on the Internet?
Perhaps, the whole system is designed to employ more bureaucrats and reduce the take-up of the benefit? Or am I being too cynical?
Computer Networking
I have had some very bad experiences trying to network computers. Today though I used a pair of Netgear Powerline AV200 adapters to connect my laptop computer upstairs to one of my printers downstairs. They seem to allow me to print without any changes to the settings on my laptop at all.
This is very much a first for me, as normally linking a printer to a computer remotely takes me a couple of days. Either networking is getting better or I’m learning how to do it better. I’d put it down to the networking.
All I need to do now is get my main computer attached to the Internet. Here’s hoping!
Cooking is Easy
I finally cooked something properly last night. It was one of my version of a Jamie Oliver fish pie.
It was actually easier than in my previous house, but mainly because the work surfaces were laid out better with respect to the sink and the cooker.
The only problem I had was getting the oven to work, as I have no instruction manual and I couldn’t find the type of Baumatic cooker, I have on their web site. There is no indication on the front of the cooker what model it is either. Incidentally, I have the same problem with an old television. It should be law that the model number is easily found and that manuals are on the Internet. It perhaps in one thing with a television, but cookers can be dangerous things, so perhaps they are a totally different matter.
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The Anonymous Widower 