Reading Blogs

Sunny
I subscribe to several RSS feeds for information and news, the list also includes a couple of blogs.

The Dilbert Blog by Scott Adams. Scott has a interesting outlook on many things. Some of his posts make you sit there nodding in agreement, some leave you wondering what planet he’s on. Well worth a look.

The other blog that I read is John Chow‘s. I found John’s blog in November when I followed a link from Digg about someone who had been banned for providing a link to John’s blog, supposedly because he is a spammer. What I found was a popular blog with a lot of useful information. I subscribed at the time and have read every post since. John has some very good advice regarding advertising and blogging in general. Todays’ post was about getting RSS readers to visit the blog. John has on average 1261 readers who only read by the RSS feed, and I am one of them. Because the full post is in the feed, I do not need to click on the read more link to get all of the story.

However, John’s tactics have finally worked; he has been at 2007 CES in Las Vegas and collected a selection of freebies from companies and is planning to give most of his haul away to blog readers over the next few weeks. So for the simple task of adding John’s blog to my Technorati Favourites (UK spelling!), I have entered his first competition. It might only be a pen and USB flash drive, but it’s the chance of winning something and the link back that finally brought me to the site and reading the comments.

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Washing Machine 2

Light Rain Went back to Curry’s this morning to buy the machine we chose last night. I don’t normally buy extended warranties on things, but it’s such a pain if the washing machine fails, so I got a 5 year one as well.

It will be delivered next Saturday and the old one taken away. Hopefully it will be a straight forward swap. I will need to cap off the hot water feed as the old one has both hot and cold, but the new one only has cold.

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Washing Machine

Clear Night When I got home last night, I found that our washing machine had stopped working. I was able to persude it to start by shutting the door very firmly, but it looks like the interlock is probably not working properly.

So we went out looking for a replacement machine. We ended up desciding on a discounted Bosch one in Curry’s, but by the time we got back there they were just shutting. I put my name against the machine to get back there tomorrow to buy it.

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Late Christmas

Clear Night We had a late Christmas this afternoon. We normally finish work at 13:00 on a Friday and work had arranged to take us all 10 pin bowling at Xscape in Milton Keynes and then for a meal afterwards.

The first game didn’t go too bad. I am not a bowler; I bowl at most a couple of times a year, but its the taking part that counts. (That’s what you say when you’re not very good at something) This first game was ok, with 3 strikes and a couple of spares to total 129, but the second game was a disaster, with strike followed by double blank for a total of 74.

Afterwards we had a Christmas dinner, complete with crackers and Christmas music.

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Census E-Petition

Cloudy Night
I was sent a link today to an online petition to reduce the classified period for census data from 100 years to 70 years. http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/CensusInfoFreed/

This is actually on the E-Petitions section of the 10 Downing Street website. Petitions can be signed by British citizens or residents

I have signed the petition, which now has over 1500 signatures. I am not sure if it will have any impact, but it has to be worth trying. Another 3 censuses worth of information now would be well worth having.

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Not according to plan

Rainy
Today was a day that could be summed up as ‘not according to plan’.

It started raining early this morning and hasn’t stopped all day. That put pay to my plan to get out and take some photos.

So I decided to make a start moving my video recordings over to DVD. We got a DVD recorder at Christmas, so the thought was to connect the video recorder that we had borrowed from Mum and move some of our aikido and other tapes onto DVD. Well, I plugged the video in and turned it on and nothing happened, no display, nothing. Oh well, maybe it’s the fuse I thought, but no. This is the same video that was working fine until I unplugged it last Saturday to install the DVD recorder in its place.

At least the next plan worked. I set up my film scanner and have made good progress scanning in my 35mm negatives. When I have scanned a film, I am now storing the negatives in ClearFile Archive storage pages. My plan is to scan the film and then make 2 DVD copies of the the images including parity files so that it gives me the best redundancy. The 2 copies will be on different brand media as well.

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