It’s the final few days of 2008 and we’ve all hopefully enjoyed our Christmas and are now looking forward to the new year perhaps with a little less joy than we did in 2007. Things are a little less certain financially for many people, however there are still opportunities out there if we’re willing to keep looking out for them. For me 2008 has been a really great year. It’s not that I earn lots and lots of money in 2008, or that I bought a new house, I just think this year brougt with it a myriad of opportunities…
UK housing market in meltdown? The number of house reposessions jumped 71% in the three months to June 2008. It’s not easy out there right now and many people are finding it ever more difficult to keep up with their mortgage payments. Given the current state of the stock markets with banks getting bail outs from the taxpayer in return for tightening their practices, it is also perceived that they are more likely to seek house repossession rather than try to work out a plan with the mortgagee. I read a report in the Guardian last week in which the…
Google as settled it’s legal battle in the USA with authors and publishers. The deal could see the publishing world enter the digital era in a significant way and the changes are compared with the deal Apple did with the music industry to allow customers of it’s iTunes store to purchase music on a track by track basis. The same could happen in publishing world which will allow customers to purchase chapters of a book or the whole book in digital format. Although the deal has only currently been worked out in the US, and has yet to be finalised,…
Damn blast those merchant bankers who called in about 1 percent of their outstanding loan and flushed the holiday company XL down the toilet and messed up thousands of people’s holidayls two weeks ago. Thank’s to those buggers, I’m not going on holiday today to the seemingly wonderful island of Grenada! The writing was on the wall couple of weeks earlier when rumours started to circulate that XL had cancelled their Caribbean long haul flights as of November 2008. Despite the disappointment of not travelling to spend a week in the sun, doing some diving, some drinking and some travel…
Like many people, when I first started blogging, I discovered WordPress and it’s many features that made it easy to set up and get going within a couple of hours. One thing I loved about WordPress was the thousands of templates that were available and I soon fell in love with some very good ones from WordPress template designer Brian Gardner, (this new one is one of his too). In between using some of Brian’s WordPress templates and because I’ve set up WordPress blogs for other people, I have used templates by other designers who whilst making great looking templates,…
Not too long from now, I’ll be heading off again on another wander to somewhere where I’ve never been before, and as per usual, there’s lots of preparation to do and thinking about what I want to take with me. So far (again as per usual) I’ve done nothing, but one thing that I am thinking about quite a lot is getting some soft contact lens, (Acuvue dailies you know the type). I thought I would just this once ignore what my optometrist says about wearing rigid gas permeable rgp contact lenses due to my severe astigmatism, just because when…
Classic photographs done over using lego by photographer/artist Mike Stimpson. He has recreated some of the most iconic pictures from photography masters such as Cartier-Bresson and Rober Capa. The pictures can be seen on the BBC website. I was quite amused at the images and the photographers take on re-creating such classic images using a child’s toy. It just goes to show that with a little imagination one can create using any material or medium. Fluidity in ideas lead to the creation of great pieces of art. Now not saying that these photographs are going to be clasped to the…
