I won’t be getting paid as soon as I thought, so all that lovely Yule spending is off. Botheration. No camera, no new whizzy-fast computer. And no prezzies for anyone. (Not that I could have afforded to match the iPhone that Grandchild no.2 received for her birthday last Tuesday – but sending her a gift voucher for a combined b’day/Xmas prezz would have been nice.)
Still, the money will arrive eventually, no? (Yes it will! Think positive!!)
Feeling quite pleased with myself – just spen a good hour submitting the newly-completed Windows Hotline website to the search engines.
I’m never sure if this is really necessary – good design, standards-compliant coding, keywords and linking should be enough, along with one-time submission to Google, Yahoo Search, Bing and DMOZ. However, companies pay quite large sums to SEO businesses to get their sites submitted to the dozens of search engines that are out their, so I offer the same service (for extra, of course). It’s a boring process and generates huge amounts of spam for me (so I use one of my “kindly send your spam here” throwaway webmail addresses). But it may just help.
Yes, it appears to have stopped raining. For now. And we’ve actually had some sunshine today. We’ll see how long it lasts.
Hm. I’ve started feeling optimistic and unwontedly happy lately, with a feeling that something nice is coming my way. I know I have a chunk of money due to me, but it’s more than that. I’m planning….
Anyway, for now, I’m looking at cameras and computer hardware. Tempting as it is to splurge the whole damm lot and more on a DSLR camera, I’m looking over the range of midprice 10-12 megapixel digitals, something equivalent to the Ricoh camera that got nicked last month. Hopefully, I’ll have it in time to take some Yule pics.
And I’ve decided to buy a whole new PC base unit – motherboard, memory, dual-core CPU and case, maybe a hard drive as well. My present setup is over five years old, which is ancient in tech terms. It’s slow, won’t play videos properly, watching TV programs and DVDs on it is well nigh impossible and it crashes with boring regularity. A new machine would make me far more productive – I will be able to get so much more done, be much more efficient…..
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(OK, OK, I admit it – I want new stuff!)
Almost finished the Windows Hotline site. I’d started out thinking it would be a very simple bit of work – a straightforward HTML site with some slideshow galleries for the products. A fortnight’s work at most. But of course, rapid complications developed. First, the client hated the template and logo I’d lovingly crafted, so I had to spend another week designing something he did like. And then more complications and difficulties, some technical, some not.
As I said, it’s almost finished; a lot of the delays have been caused by technical problems with the hosting company, and one of these problems still isn’t fully resolved. But I’m within a day or so of getting the client’s sign-off, which is when I can send out my invoice. I’ve already planned what to spend the money on.
Today, in the meantime, I’m catching up on some of the urgent maintenance and upgrading of some of my other sites – I’d promised an overhaul of the AA Diary design by Sunday, plus I want to get on with a total redesign of this blog.
So, hopefully, I can get back to blogging a bit more frequently. At home here, there’s nothing much to write about except the weather. In short: RAIN RAIN RAIN. Haven’t been out today to see what the roads are like, but there’s bound to be flooding and impassible roads on both sides of the Loch. We’ve plenty of supplies and, sat on a hillside, the houses here aren’t in any danger of flooding. So we can just sit it out.
“It is usual to have the polite convention that everyone thinks” Alan Turing
Homeopathy with Dr. Werner
Dr Werner is a homeopath and here she claims that the latest discoveries in science prove homeopathy. Unfortunately, all her video proves is how staggeringly ignorant she is about science.
She confuses mass with density; she gets Einstein’s equation wrong; she thinks that Stephen Hawkings (sic) thought up String Theory (wrong); she says that String Theory means that the universe is full of “energetic particles shaped like U-ies” (eh…?); that electrons, neutrons etc are pure energy (wrong); that disease is the “transformation of our energy state into something different” (AARRRGHHH…..) and so on. Her view is that homeopathy is all about vibrations; we are vibrations, the universe is all vibrations; energy is vibrations; therefore homeopathy is true! (She uses the word “vibrations” in practically every sentence; I wanted to tell her “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”)
Why do these New Age types think they can talk about a science subject when they so obviously haven’t even bothered to read a few Wikipedia articles on the topic? (more…)
Yesterday, we sent out for our big monthly shop and bill-paying day. As usual, I took along my camera, in case there was the chance of some decent pictures along the way; I popped it into my old green shopping bag.
Having done an errand in Kilmarnock, our almost-final stop was at Morrisons in Ayr where, as usual, I hung my green shopper on the trolley as we went around. It was an unseasonably chilly, windy day; getting back to the car, B told me to sit inside while he packed the shopping and put the trolley away. The place was heaving with cars and shoppers and it took us over ten minutes just to get out of the car park.
We got home some ninety minutes later, unpacked the car. And it was then I realised my green bag was missing. It had last been seen hanging on the Morrisons trolley, B had put the trolley away…… Luckily, I’d had my purse in one of my pockets; but my lovely new camera had been in the bag.
I shouted at B, hit the wall until my fist hurt, shouted some more at B, stood outside and sulked blackly in the rain for a good spell. Slowly cooled down. I rang the supermarket; no, nobody had handed my bag in. I rang the police and reported it; the nice police worker sympathised with me and said that my house insurance would probably cover it. I didn’t tell her that we’d never been able to afford house insurance.
I didn’t have a good night’s sleep. On getting to bed, I’d remembered that the bag had also carried my notebook, in which I jotted down personal thoughts, poems, notes, doodles and drawings. I bleakly imagined the thieving little scrote who had lifted my bag having a giggle over it.
This morning we had to go to Dumfries for more bits and pieces. It was a gorgeous morning, with the sun breaking through the autumn mist; trees looked ghostly and the hills receded into the fog. Damm – I wanted my camera! In Dumfries I had intended to get a couple of pairs of jeans in the TJ Hughes’ sale, B wanted a big pack of bacon from the butcher van. B got his bacon, but the jeans – well, the ones in my size – were all gone. I did try buying a jacket that was hanging in the sale rack – the one I usually wear is looking its age – and which appeared to be an affordable price. Only to have the salesgirl tell me it shouldn’t have been in there and was at full price – which was not affordable. Hell and damm.
Driving back, we went by the back road past the loch. The mist had melted away and the sky was a clear pale blue. The water surface as as smooth and mirror-like as I had ever seen it; the trees,just turning colour, studying their upside-down reflections. We passed a group of people on the bankside aiming their cameras everywhere.
B caught me looking. “Don’t say a word,” he pleaded. “Please, don’t say anything.”
I do a lot of online consumer and marketing surveys – it doesn’t pay much, but every little helps (most of the cost of the new mattress we bought last month came out of my survey money).
Having been doing them for years, I’ve come across far too many badly designed surveys that don’t ask the right questions and don’t give enough options. For instance, most consumer surveys assume that everybody does all of their food shopping in one of the big supermarkets, never cooks from scratch, never brew their own wine and beer, and never grow their own fruit and vegetables. So I find quite a lot of surveys about shopping and food quite hard to fill in accurately; lists of supermarkets only occasionally include the Co-op, corner shops rarely feature, and as for street markets and farmers markets….
One particularly clumsily-designed survey was asking questions about furniture-buying; the first question was “Have you bought an item of furniture in the last 6 months?”, to which I replied “A kitchen table”. Then I was asked which shop I had bought the item from and presented with a long list of furniture retailers. But I hadn’t got it from a shop – we had bought it from one of our neigbours, and there was no option to say so. There was only a box at the end of the list, marked “Other”. So I entered “Our neighbours” in that. As a result, I had to answer a further twenty or thirty questions on the “Our neighbours” furniture shop – was their shop well laid out, were the staff helpful, was I offered different payment options, did they have a catalogue, did I go to their website etc. etc. Not a complete waste of my time – I got 50p for it – but certainly a waste of the marketers’ time.
Another useless survey I remember was one on energy utility companies. (more…)
Just been looking through the listings on a freelance writing jobs website. One that caught my eye:
Horror torture tour scripts require someone with expieriance [sic]
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Experience of what, exactly…?
….or rather, the lack of it. Had one enquiry about web design this last week, on Monday, wanting to know my prices. So I told her and haven’t heard anything since. She’s undoubtedly gone off to find somebody cheaper.
It’s difficult knowing what prices to charge. An elderly astrologer whose judgement I respect once told me off for not pricing my astrology services professionally and drummed it into me that that I should never undervalue my skills. Web design or astrology, it makes no difference – I’ve spent years learning my crafts, so I should ask a proper price for them. However, there are always people out there undercutting you. A lot of them are rank amateurs who will deliver to the low standard that they’re paid for, but how is the enquiring customer supposed to know that? All she sees is the price being asked.
I’ve been actively looking for work. I’ve signed up to a couple of online freelancing agencies for web design, writing, design and proofreading work. But looking through the listings is a depressing experience. The jobs being offered are either morally repugnant – spamming blogs and forums with ads, writing fake dating ads – or woefully underpaid – €100 or less is being offered for producing complete websites. As for writing, $1/€1 per 500 words seem to be the norm for writing projects; one outrageous (to me) listing is asking for a ghostwriter to produce a series of 24,000-word childrens’ stories for just $150 each, with no credit or copyright. Would you be terribly surprised to learn that at least six people are currently bidding for this job, some for less than the asking price? That’s capitalism at work – whatever lousy wages you’re offering, you’re going to find somebody desperate enough to take the job. Especially these days.
Me – I’m trying to hold the line and do my bit to keep up pay standards. But it’s not that easy.