Domain or not Domain?

I've had a number of different domains registered (notionally to run either blogs or little shops on) for quite some time - I've finally gotten around to consolidating the list of them over the last couple of days.

Now it's time to figure out whats happening with them. I suspect when each was acquired I had a "great idea", which I've since forgotten.

Does that happen to you?

You start something, put it down because you're busy - then when you finally get back to it you think... "What on earth was I doing with THIS??"

Adverts, Organisations and Blogs Ahoy!

Please don't be too shocked by the fact I've actually been updating my blog recently - I'm not sure how long that will last! :)

I've found a possible new outlet for 'food related' posts, which is great as thats something I really wanted to split out from here, which leaves most of the business stuff over at Mattched IT and really only personal notes on any fun/annoying/interesting things which happen to us, or which I notice.

You may also notice some adverts, because I'm running a few experiments at the moment - and whenever I want to try things out, this blog tends to be the guineapig! Some of them will probably stay, but others are quite likely to go.

PS. Rosa got me a copy of "FISH" - The River cottage book - by Hugh Fearnley eats-it-all and his friend Nick, for Xmas and if you're into fishing (or eating fish), it's really brilliant. :)

Happy New Year!

Well, it happened again - another break (as suspected, our holiday ensured I didn't get back into blogging). Anyway, happy new year everyone - I hope it's a good one for us all!

I've got a possibly new blogging venture on the go which means I need to re-assess what I post here - I think I may limit it to short personal notes of interest, but then again there is generally a shortage of those and they tend to get slapped on Facebook these days!

So we'll see.. but very much still alive!

Um.. what happened?

Wow. Last post in February! Oops.

That gives you an idea of just how busy things have been!

To be fair, inbetween maintaining the Mattched IT Blog and Handmade Crafts Blog, I don't get a lot of time to write posts for here, anymore, but I'm going to try and post occasionally at least.

Mind you, this might not be the best time to start since we're off on holiday in a few weeks..!

Using less electricity?

Had our next electric bill today, and being a bit sad - and in light of all the things we've changed to try to reduce our bills, I thought I'd track our success.

We have averaged 18.25 units a day over this quarter, compared to 18.55 for the same quarter last year. The two intervening quarters were 22.80 and 25.20 respectively.

The first 18.55 is a bit anomolous as we were still moving in, and neither this quarter nor last quarter did we have the heating on at all - therefore I'm going to say that we've managed to reduce from 25.2 to 18.25.

Thats a saving of 6.95 units a day. If we assume the electric is used 300 days a year (bit of a rough figure, but hey), and as per current bill is 13.11p a unit, well, heck, thats a possible saving of over £270.00 a year. Thats equivalent to roughly a quarter's usage!

Still here, never fear!

Oops. Bit of an unexpected break in the blogging schedule here.

Sorry folks - things have just been so crazy busy, both at work (this web development lark isn't as easy as you think!) and at home - lots of barbeques when we had a nice couple of weeks, and so on - that I've been totally neglecting my blog.

Needless to say, I've made some notes on things which have annoyed me over the last few weeks, and will try to post some of them up very soon!

Do-follow-tastic

I'm a big believer in giving credit where it is due - which is why it's always irritating to see that most blogs, sites, etc only give nofollow links.

For example, the crafts directory site I am involved with gives a do-follow link if you sign the handmade pledge. So. Finally, I've gotten around to editing my blog template, so that I can incorporate follow links in my posts.

And if you leave a comment with your name and url, you'll get a link back against that too. But please use your name, or at least something more sensible than a load of keyword spam, or you won't get anything at all.

The fridge of death

OK.

So.

Yesterday, our new cooker (to replace the oven which I may or may not have told you had died) arrived. A nice bloke called Tim brought it round, as he is moving to Belgium. It cost us £100 and is well worth the money for a double-oven cooker with a good hob, which is approx 18 months old (well used, but thats not a problem).

So.

I had to remove our old integrated hob and fridge, open up the worktop a bit, then wire in and put into place the new cooker. This sounds quite easy.

This would be quite easy.

If when you lift the hob, you don't see this:


Suffice to say, once I finally managed to extract the fridge, I didn't plug it back in. Back to the classifieds to look for a fridge/freezer, methinks!

It's "Follow Friday" - not "List of names Friday"!

OK. So, I've blogged about #followfriday (Follow Friday) before. I'm just going to follow that up (ha ha), in light of a recent trend.

It seems to have become 'vogue' over the last 2-3 weeks, to simply tweet a big list of names. Or lots of big lists of names.

Frankly, that just annoys people. I'm not going to follow @rod @jane @freddy @tom @dick and @harry just because you spewed out 40 names and they were in there!

Why not tweet 2-3 names, one at a time, and give a good reason?

Here were mine for today (copied from twhirl):

First.. @GoodAndBadPR - because some of the examples they point out are just brilliant (brought to us by @10Yetis) #followfriday

Second.. @Oolamoola because of their great posts about the things you can achieve on a budget (plus they're up for a challenge) #followf ...

And finally @mestiere, because his tweets are a great way to find new crafts! (see also @ukcrafts) #followfriday

So there we go - food for thought, and a whinge off my chest. You may all return to your breakfast/lunch/dinner now! ;)

PS: You can follow me here: @mattchedit

Standby Saver - get rid of the red lights!

OK. So. Electricity prices went up 25% here, at the start of this year. Thats quite painful. Add to that that one of my pet hates is wastefulness in general, and you've got a bit of a challenge.

How much can I reduce our electricity bill over the course of the year, and how much will it cost me to do it? We already mostly use energy saving bulbs (will post separately on that), so the first obvious port of call was devices which sit on standby.

First, a quick bit of maths. The telly is target #1, as it gets quite warm, and in the lounge, the Wii, TV and DVD player are all on standby (so is the Sky+ box, but that doesn't work properly if you keep turning it off - because it doesn't store Anytime programs - very irritating).

A quick bit of guesstimated maths. An "energy saving recommended" LCD TV must use no more than 1.5 Watts of power in standby mode, so lets take a midline figure - 1W. Lets round that off, and call it 9kWh a year for arguments sake. Thats about £1.20. Oh. Thats pretty crap for a saving in a year. I carried on in the same vein, looking at the Wii (expensive if the little yellow light is on, which ours was), which we'll call approx £12, plus the DVD player - another £1.80ish.

So far, thats £15 a year. Not good.

We got a standby saver (as seen on Dragons Den) - http://www.standby-saver.com/ - which claims on the box that we could save upto £43 a year. Not right in our case, however, if we had a few more devices plugged in, you can see how it could easily add up - we have no hi-fi in there, for a start. But we only paid £21.95 for the gadget at Lakeland, so we should be quids in within 18 months. Not to mention the environmental benefits. Imagine if everyone did this!

In pure product terms, it was very easy to set up, has a little infrared detector which allows it to operate off the TV remote, and frankly you don't notice that its there. Two sockets with independant switches are provided, excluded from the saving functionality (i.e. for Sky+).

Fab. Highly recommended. If you have another console, VCR (??), Hi-Fi, etc also plugged in, you could save all the cash well within the first year.

Blogtastic, but for how long?

You may have noticed, that I'm trying really hard to be active on my blog again - my aim is to blog at least once a day, when I am at the PC (so that mostly excludes weekends, bank holidays, etc).

I'm also hoping that this will lend a bit of balance to my blog - as I won't ONLY be writing when something winds me up!

Of course, the risk of it turning into a spool of inane drivel (if it hasn't already), is also increased.

How long do you think I'll keep it up for??

I am become Geek!

Or at least, I've been accepted as an editor for a DMOZ (open directory project) category.

http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/Europe/Jersey/Business_and_Economy/Shopping/

Yay. :)

..and we're back!

For some reason, getting home from holiday is really, really nice.

Although I wonder if thats 'cos we were staying with the "inlaws"?

Oh well. Back. Buried in email and paperwork! Will blog soon..

Almost time for a holiday..

Saturday, we head out for two weeks in Spain (staying with the other halves family).

To be honest, I could do with a bit of a break, although it has ended up landing while we are really busy in terms of work, etc - so very much looking foward to it.

Will attempt to write at least 1-2 blog posts while we are out there (most likely whinging about how rubbish the journey has been, or how pants something at Gatwick is). Will also endeavour to smuggle back some sunshine in the luggage.

Blog posts and work?

Just noticed how my number of blog posts has tailed off this year.

Wonder if this reflects that things have been getting steadily busier?

January - 25, Feburary - 9, March - 7, April - 4 including this one!

Barclays Bank - They suck, incase you didn't know

Yeah. Barclays.

I was going to write a furious rant about this, but I have been busy, and the fury has now fled.

On Wednesday, the day BEFORE my trip to London, I wanted to change some Jersey money into English notes - not a complicated exercise, but makes it easier when you are on the mainland.

So I popped into Barclays, and asked at the Bureau de Change - this seemed logical to me.

"Oh." Said the surly woman at the counter. "Uh. We don't really do that here. This is the Bureau de Change.".

OK. My french is rusty. However, I'm pretty sure that 'bureau de change' means "somewhere you can exchange money". So I had a bit of a moan.

"Well.", she tried again. "Do you have a Barclays account?". She had clearly had enough of me by now - I was in town doing the shopping, so not wearing my sunday best - and if care is not taken I can lean towards the scruffy. And I have a baby face. This causes all sorts of issues.

"Well yeah." I said. "But it's only a business one - and frankly after the last couple of years, the service from Barclays has been so abysmal - something which is typified by the fact that you're refusing to change 30 quid for English notes - it's not one which I plan to keep open for much longer."

She was a bit taken aback by this. Perhaps because I was waving my business delta card about a bit. I didn't feel it was out of order though - their Business service is pretty damn crap - and unfortunately she had hit on a sore point.

"Oh. Well. I suppose you could go up to the other counter and they might do it for you."

The other counter. In the same bank. Ah. Through that queue of approximately twenty other pissed off 'customers'? Um.. Uh..

"Oh, no thank you..", I said, probably far louder than I should. I added my parting shot: "I've got to go to the Market anyway, I'm sure the guy in the greengrocers will swap it for me - he actually gives a damn about his customers.." and walked off, feeling slightly less angry. At least one of the women in the queue was sniggering by now.

I am a bit ambivalent on this point though. Either:

1. It's unfair to have a go at the people 'on the front line' of large companies with crap service, because it's not their fault.

OR

2. It's absolutely fair, because they could choose to work elsewhere, or they could try to improve the service - rather than being jobsworths.

Given that I run my own business, and try damn hard to look after our customers - even if it's a bit inconvenient - I tend to err on the side of #2.

Rantette over.

I'm not ignoring you all..

I know - I've been really slack with my blogging this month! Even Rob Wray has said so!

It's a shame, because I've got some really good bits and pieces to blog - some stuff from our trip to London, a few work related things and a couple of good .NET tips to add to the mix (and possibly a recipe or two, even).

I'll get to it soon - as quickly as I can - just have a lot of work to get out of the way first!

Please bear with me.. normal service (Um. Am I normal?) will be resumed as soon as possible..

So far.. not so good

At airport. Good. In plenty of time, with no queue to check in - also good. Sadly the fire alarm has gone off twice, involving a full evacuation of the building. Currently waiting for the massive queue for security to die down so I can get through to airside - and hopefully onto a plane!

To London, and beyond!

Off to London shortly (well, this afternoon).

Will report back on situation re: snow, et al! Hasn't been terribly snowy here in Jersey, to be fair.

Expect occasional blogs on how things go over there - will be back on the 11th!

Smoke Free for over three weeks!

Hurrah. Today is the 22nd day of my latest attempt to become a non-smoker (hopefully my final attempt).

Really good now. Had a horrible smokers cough for most of week 3, plus sinusitis for a fortnight (weeks 2+3) - according to mum this is what happened to her, just milder (mind you, she smoked for a lot longer).

Getting hungry more. Turning to chewing gum and Jelly Beans. All good.