Digitalquill

I leaned something new this evening! When I got home there was a racing pigeon on the drive, it was clearly struggling, probably having been hit by something or it was suffering from exhaustion.

After trying to contact RSPCA and other without success we called a friend in the know who told us to try and spread the wings out as they would be stamped with the owner.

After calling several numbers (it was difficult to read) and probably scaring some poor people asking if they looked after pigeons I finally tracked down the grateful owner who came and picked up the Pigeon within half an hour.

Apparently it had been released over a week ago for its first outing and never returned. No idea if it will survive but better it being with the owner than with us as we really have no idea!

You will have noticed that I have started adding small images to each post, this is to add a little bit of interest to the site. The images themselves do not usually add a great deal to the post, but they do give a little eye candy.

Images are also very useful for search engines, Google indexes images and a great deal of traffic can be obtained from images search traffic, and also alt tags and images names are all used by the Google index.

Kiva.org is a microfinance website that lends to individuals that would otherwise find it difficult to raise capital. In their words ‘Kiva’s mission is to connect people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty.’

This is something that I have been trying to support over the last few months, where I have been lending on Kiva.org, and the first loans I made have started to be repaid, meaning that I have credit on my Kiva.org account that I can re-lend.

This is a very worthwhile project, with loans starting from $25, this is a very little sum, and due to the way Kiva.org works the risk of defaults and you loosing your money is shared between others in the Kiva community.

Kiva has started lending to individuals and businesses in America, however, I have tended to steer away from those as I see more value helping others who are in my view in greater need of help.

I have lent $175 so far, but my investment has not been that much as I have re-loaned money that has been paid back from the original loans I made. This is not much I know, but its a start!

This is a very interesting and important project so if you can help in anyway please do. I have not had any problems so far with the loans I have made and I can always withdraw the money from the site once loans a have been repaid rather than re-loaning them if i need to, thankfully thus far I have been in a position that allows me to re-loan rather than withdraw those funds.

Visit Kiva.org

We came back from holiday on Saturday after a great week in Northumbria near Alnwick. We stopped on the way up to see Mum and Dad, and then stayed in a lodge.

The complex where the lodge was had a health farm, gym and swimming pool and a huge play park for children which Eva loved.

On the first day (Sunday) we went to the seaside, the first time Eva has been to the beech, she could not wait to get there and get onto the sand, pulling mummies arm trying to get there quicker. Once on the sand she was off and there was no stopping her. Grabbing hand funds of sand and then eventually making her way down to the sea, she ran straight in and straight out giggling, and then decided it was alright after all and went back in, screaming and laughing as each wave splashed against her. We could not get her out she loved it that much, the problem was it was quite cold so after an hour or so she was too cold for any more so we huddled her up with towels and daddies fleece to warm her up and then off to a cafe.

The rest of the week was similar, we went to the beech several times, and round Alnwick castle and its gardens and had a meal in the tree house restaurant which Eva thought was brilliant! Indeed on Saturday morning when it was time to go home she wanted to go back to the tree house and was a little upset when we said it was time to go home, but she has plenty to talk about now!

We had to rush home on Saturday as we had a friend booked in to help with fitting a new central heating boiler, a bigger project than it sounds as we wanted to to move the boiler and some of the central heating pipework in preparation for the kitchen extension.

The work on the kitchen has now become critical as in order to achieve the fitting of the new boiler we had to take down the kitchen ceiling as the bathroom which is above the kitchen has a tiled floor so access to the pipes would be impossible. This is not a problem as we have put up a temporary ceiling until we get the kitchen extension done when it can all be re-plastered as one job.

It does however mean that I need to get the plans for the kitchen moving now. We took some time out on holiday to run through the various quotes that we have had from suppliers for both the building work and the kitchen its self. I need to run the resulting decisions through the budget and the project plan to see where it leaves us but then it is a planning and building regulations process, which is unfortunately rather out of our hands in terms of timescales, hopefully it will be no more than 12 weeks for that process which can mean that we can still get the extension done this year without us running into winter weather.

We need to start planning our next holiday now as I am shattered after the weekends work. I can no-longer manage to do this sort of work for one reason or another, I will post more about that when I feel ready!

I have just purchased another VPS at Ultrahosting to add to the many I have. I have been using them for about three years now with only one minor problem with a hard disk failure.

I have just bought a new VPS with them for a WordPress Hosting Service I am setting up and got 10% off.

10 % off VPS servers at Ultrahosting

Code: Spring10

Not sure when this code runs out but it worked this evening.

I recently had the pleasure of being invited to Jury service for two weeks. As there is nothing that one can really do to get out of it I had to go.

On the first day I was unsure of what to expect, and it is safe to say that I did not expect what actually happened.

I will not go into the details of the two weeks for obvious reasons, however, there are a few things that can be and need to be said.

The Judicial system is fully supported by the tax payer, and, as with many public sector organizations wastes a huge amount of money, our money.

The amount of wasted time within the system amazed me each day. Nothing seemed to happen on any trials until 11:30, lunch was taken at 1pm for an hour and then a session of a couple of hours was taken in the afternoon. This all means that the time actually spent doing cases must only be 4 hours a day.

I know what my boss would say to me if I told him I was only going to work 4 hours a day, believe me it would not be polite!

The extent of the wasted time and impact on peoples lives extends further than than just the Jury, witnesses and experts have to turn up, barristers, lawyers and court staff all hang about doing very little. This extent of waste just would not be allowed to happen in the private sector, any private sector business with that amount of waste would simply fail.

It does have to be noted that some of the waste can not be helped. Keeping people waiting due to legal arguments or the need to clarify evidence or matters outside the control of the court such as illness or witnesses being late can not be helped, however, I do believe that there is a huge saving to be had if correct and efficient management was brought into the system to properly manage the day to day activity in court. Those managers must have the authority to say what goes without the miss-guided policy that everything revolves around the judges and what they say.

There is also the matter of defendants changing their plea at the last minute which again causes a huge amount of wasted time any money. I would estimate that in the two weeks I was on Jury service, the percentage of cases that did not actually go to trial would be 75% and of those 25% that did go to trial a further 15% change their plea soon after the jury is sworn in. This means again wasted time for the court, for the witnesses who have had to turn up regardless and for the Jury who have at times sat around all day.

The main area where time and money is wasted is in the lack of forward planning for each day. An example during my two weeks was when we are sat around all day in the jury assembly room, we had been told at 10:30 that a trial was about to start, we were the only 15 jurors left, so we would be called for the jury panel.

As we had been told that the trial was about to start, we were held on tenterhooks, we could not leave, could not start any work (I took my laptop in) all we could do was sit and wait.

We were eventually called down at 3:45pm, the 12 Jury members were chosen an the trial as adjourned.  To be fair on the Judge he did apologize that we had, had a wasted day, but when he told us why, in truth my blood boiled. He held up a list of all the cases that he had sorted out that day, none of which involved a jury. Surly the sensible thing to do would have been to deal with the one with a Jury trial first thing, swear int he Jury and then adjourn the trial and let everyone go for the day. We could then have returned to work rather than sitting around in a room watching the clock tick by.

That way the court would have saved the £30 per head for the second part of the day, witnesses and indeed defendants would not have had to be there and everyone could have got on with their lives for that day.

What can be done about this?

I am not sure, but in my opinion there needs to be a wholesale review of the system. As I mentioned before, experienced managers should be brought into manage the day-t-day activities and planning of the court.

In my opinion defendants should be given the chance to change their plea prior to the trial starting, this should be a final chance, it should be made clear that it is the final opportunity they will get and once the trial starts to is followed through to its conclusion. The ability to plea bargain at that time would be past.

Please do not get me wrong, I believe in the process, it is what this country is built on, but the waste, especially in these hard times when the countries deficit is spiraling out of control simply can not be justified.

Eva loves cooking, we made some chocolate rice crispy cakes with her yesterday, she loved it, we made way too many so we will have to give some away. All Eva could say was exciting! She had one for her tea and loved it!

Serves: 2

Cooking Time: 20 minutes

Ingredients

1x400g tin of Chickpeas
1x400g tin of Tinned tomatoes (chopped)
2-3 bacon rashers thinly chopped
Red Onion finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic finely chopped
Chopped Coriander
Balsamic vinegar
Olive oil
1 teaspoon of Sugar
Salt and Pepper to taste

Instructions:

1. Chop the onion and garlic and fry in a small amount of olive oil until soft
2. Add the chopped tomatoes and chick peas straining off any water with the chick peas
3. Add a splash of balsamic vinegar and salt and pepper to taste
4. Add a good helping of chopped coriander
5. Leave to simmer for 10 minutes, add some water if it starts to get too stiff
6. Fry the thinly chopped bacon in another pan until crispy
7. Add the bacon to the beans and simmer for a further 5 minutes
8. Fry or grill some ciabatta bread in olive oil (or drizzle some olive oil over the bread if grilling)
9. Serve the beans over the bread

Well it has been some time since I last posted, during that time allot of water has gone under the bridge. It was back at the end of February last year that I wrote my last blog post on this site. Shameful I know, but I have been battling against Google and others for the length of that time.

This and my other blog Earning From Affiliates was hacked and links to spyware added to the bottom of some of my sites, I assume this was some form of SQL injection attack on a vulnerability in WordPress.

As soon as I found this problem (hours after it happened) the site was cleaned, repaired and wordpress upgraded to fix the vulnerability, however by that time Google has showing a warning about the sites. No problem, all I should need to do is use the Google Webmaster tools to contact Google and ask them to re-check the site and remove the warnings. No… not that easy at all, emails and messages to Google went without a response. Weeks turned into months and I got fed up with the mess and was about to simply bin the sites when I thoughts I would have one more try and what do you know the warnings were removed and all is now back to normal running.
It has meant that the sites have been without updates for so long that their readers have probably long gone, any ranking in Google or other search engines has been damaged if not set back to zero so I am effectively starting afresh, although I do have the advantage that both sites still have their content, which is all self written unique content.

I have been busy over the last year, I was married in August to the wonderful and beautify Cheryl, her and our Daughter Eva are my life.

I have also been working on other projects, mainly software projects relating to Affiliate marketing, which have been much more successful that I could ever have hoped.

I will post more details about those projects in the coming days, but for now I just wanted to add a note to say I was back and I will be trying to find the time to post regularly and put some effort into these sites.

I am laid in nice deep bath, soaking my aching muscles after a hard morning clearing gardens and garages at a rental property. Hopefully Monday will see it going onto the market and we will again have a tenant in the property very soon.

I wonder where other people blog from. I usually blog in my office at home, sometimes sat in front of the TV, but I don’t see why with today’s technology why one needs to be limited. I do have an Orange Mobile broadband dongle which I use quite often when I am out and about.

I was recently searching for domain names,  someone suggested ontheblog.com a play on words… unfortunately it i taken, although there is no site there.

I wonder where the stranges place anyone has blogged from is. Post a comment if you have any strange blogging habbits!