Cup Of Coffee

Another bit of excellent Government spending. 6 Million quid for putting websites into search engines. The Department of Health spent £4.4m in “paid search” costs.

The full story is here on the BBC. Hey BBC, if you want this story in Google I’ll get it done for half a million. Cool? Done.

I saw this errmm.. people carrier thing outside a restaurant today. I think it was one of those American thingies. Either way, it was a bit worse for wear. I loved the repair attempt that the owner had tried out. It’s literally bits of metal with screws into it. Best of all, most of the bodywork he’d screwed into was plastic or fibre glass. Weird.

Link – Flickr.com

Every now and then I spit out a stack of links to sites and pages that make me click “forward to”.  If you follow me on Twitter then you’ll probably have already seen them, but here they are again for convenience..

The UK “Cafe Culture” has failed (contains swearing) – TheDailyMash

Sad gits with too much time on their hand write 7 complaint letters to the BBC. Hopefully the BBC will shred them – Metro.co.uk

Is it me or has the world gone insane today ? A 5 year-old boy walked into Lidl last year with his mom and was accused of stealing a bag of crisps by the cashier. He was held by the arm that, in a court case heard today..

“Amounted to false imprisonment and assault.”

He and his mother won a defamation case today as the child has suffered “injury to his reputation”.

Wah? He’s five. Thousands were spend on the court case and the family were awarded 7500 Euros (about £6,280) in damages. He’s five. FIVE YEARS OLD. He’s probably in the first year of primary school. In years gone by he would’ve just had a telling off or they would’ve found out if he had actually pinched the crisps first.

6 grand. This compensation culture has gone bonkers.

On the left here is a watch. It’s a watch .. it’s not what you think it is.

These are actually given out by the NHS, and they’re to show that you’re free from any STI’s. You even get some free pants to show that you’ve been tested.

Oh, the poor village of Shitterton. In recent years this sign has been pinched many times by people who find the name “amusing”. I can’t think why…

Local residents have grown tired of the thefts, so they’ve paid for a huge rock and then etched the name into it. I’m guessing that it’s not going to stop the rascals blocking out certain parts of the word…

Oh, and have a read of this BBC news story. The last paragraph is particularly funny..

Link – BBC News

I really don’t know where to start with this guy. He has a purple bucket on his head. For f***s sake. A purple bucket.

Then he’s gone and changed his name to “Buzz Lightyear”.

Just keep away from the local schools mate. You’re going to get some weird looks.

Oh, and somehow this guy has got a girlfriend. If he gets married and turns up to the church looking like this she needs her head examining.

Tskk.. yes yes, I know it’s probably some sort of stunt for the film by some bonkers PR company, but sheesshh..

Link – Birmingham Mail

We’ve had a standard Sky+ box for some time and have fed the picture through a DVD record which upscales the picture to HD. The results weren’t too bad, but recently I bit the bullet and upgraded to Sky HD with full 1080 output.


The results? Well, I’ve got to say, I’m a little disappointed. The picture from Sky 1, when upscaled, isn’t that far off the picture from Sky 1 HD. I’ve got to say, it’s not really as amazingly different as I thought. Sure, if you’re not upscaling you’re going to notice a big improvement, but for me the HD picture isn’t a massive difference.

It’s interesting to see once Windows Mobile-only sites branching out to cover Android now. Coolsmartphone did the same last year, and recently added iPhone news. Now it looks like PocketNow are doing the same with WMPoweruser (which I’ll not link to as it’ll hurt your brain) also thinking about jumping ship.

Interesting times indeed, but not good for Windows Mobile.

Check these numbers out. The Business Link website gets a million unique hits per month, but has cost £35 million a year, with “£4.7m on hosting and infrastructure”.

£4.7 MILLION for a million visits a month ? Are you having a LAUGH? One server could do that easily. At a rough guess I’d say that £10,000 a year would do it!

Link – http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/rorycellanjones/2010/07/the_105m_website.html