Failure is the Key to Success

Today is Shrove Tuesday, known as Pancake Day in the UK. It is the day before Lent begins and so the rich ingredients such as eggs, milk sugar and flour are used up prior to this.

The traditional pancake is a thin one, like a French crepe, which is served immediately with a sweet topping. Jo and the kids had ice cream with their ones, but I had my usual, caster sugar and lemon juice.

About 2 weeks ago, I followed John Chow to MyBlogLog and set up a profile and community for my blog. Since then my community has slowly but steadily grown as people find my blog and add themselves to my community.

I have also added myself to several communities that I have found here. I have tried to be sensible about adding communities as I don’t want to just add to every community that I find. I do try to check all of them for new posts at least once a day. I figured if I wasn’t interested enough in what the author had to say on a regular basis, then there was no point in joining. There may be some blogs that I will subscribe to the RSS feeds if they are interesting, but post irregularly, like I do.

It does annoy me a bit when some people just post links to their blog in everyones comments. I figure that if someone is interested enough to check my details out then they will look at my blog and make there own decision, but I suppose this doesn’t provide lots of links for the search engines to index.

Anyway, welcome to anyone who has found me from MyBlogLog. Please read any of my posts that may be of interest and leave me comments.

Tags:mybloglog

The online petition against the proposed introduction of vehicle tracking and road pricing has currently reached 1,559,649 signatures and finishes on 20th February 2007.

This is a protest against the rapidly increasing cost of motoring in the UK and invasion of privacy.

I am against the introduction of additional forms of tax and the bureaucracy needed to gather it. I does seem unfair to introduce charging for roads which we already pay for. A litre of petrol costs about 85 pence, 48 pence of this is fuel tax and 12 pence Value Added Tax (VAT). Add to this the annual Vehicle Excise Duty ‘tax disc’ at £175 for cars over 1600cc and we are paying quite a bit to run a car these days.

Some of the proposed road pricing schemes are talking of compulsory GPS fitted to cars. This is just wrong. We in the UK are probably one of the most monitored societies in the world, with about 1 CCTV camera per 14 people. Combined with data gathered from use of mobile phones and loyalty cards, we are rapidly bringing George Orwell’s vision of 1984 to life. The privacy issues aside, who will have to fund this compulsory technology, the motorist I expect.

I do agree that the car does causes massive damage to the environment and agree that something needs to be done. Much as I am against ‘stealth’ taxes, I believe if the cost of motoring needs to be increased to force cars off the road then it is best to add the tax to fuel, this way additional complex schemes the identify and collect the funds don’t have to be created. It’s simple if you used fuel, you pay the cost.

The problem with forcing the car off the road is that the public transport system isn’t up to being its replacement. This will lead to people having to reassess where they work and spend their leisure time, which could have long term impact on many industries in the UK. If a company really wants to retain it’s staff it will end up paying the charges, which will force to costs of goods up and so impact inflation. If they don’t pay the charges then they will loose experienced staff and so impact their effectiveness.

I have just read on the BBC website that Tony Blair will be sending an email in the next few days to the people who have signed the petition, so I shall wait to see what it says.

I do know that this is a complicated issue that will take some time to resolve. What do you think?

Tags:road pricing,vehicle tracking

I think it is a combination of reasons. I use this blog to record my successes and findings in my family tree research. I also use it to vent my frustration over things, usually it seems related to cars. I record technical information and details of software I use or have found. Sometimes it is just used to record my thoughts and intentions.

I’m not sure who my audience is. Me, my family, distant relatives, complete strangers, I’m not sure. If any of my postings help someone with something, all the better, I have found solutions to many problems because other people were prepared to share information via the internet.

Until last year when I claimed my blog on Technorati, I hadn’t even considered actively trying to promote it. Even then I didn’t really do anything about it, just carried on making posts on a semi regular basis.

It was only earlier this year when John Chow started his competitions to win some goodies, that I started to get interested in doing something with the visability of the blog. I added John to my Technorati Favourites and then last weekend joined mybloglog.com. This is when I discovered just how many other varied blogs there are out there. I have joined several communities and now check on many different blogs.

Why do you blog or read blogs?

Tags:blog reason

I’m not quite sure what happened in our garden this lunchtime as I missed it myself. Jo looked out into the garden, just in time to see a pigeon that was sitting in our Christmas tree disappear in a cloud of feathers. She thought it flew off across the garden, but it happened so quickly she isn’t sure. Looking in the garden, I have to say it must be a very cold bird as it has left a huge quantity of feathers in a trail over both ours and next door’s gardens.

I’m not sure if this is related to the post I made about the kestrel in the garden last weekend. Having looked online a bit more, I’m now starting to question whether it was a kestrel I saw. I only saw the bird from behind, it was brown with a long tail with a couple of broad bands on the tail. The more I look at pictures, the more I wonder if it was a female sparrowhawk rather than a kestrel.

Katharine Blake the musical director and one of the founder members of the
Mediaeval Baebes, gave birth to a daughter Ava Sophie yesterday. Both mother and baby are well.

We will be seeing the Mediaeval Baebes later in the year at Joust 2007. The Joust is is on the last 2 weekends of July at Berkeley Castle. I ordered our tickets last Saturday.

Tags:joust,Katharine Blake,mediaeval baebes