You may have seen the (rather well produced) advert showing loads of engine’s driving around Central London that encourages you to “search online for Act on CO2” rather than actually giving a URL…

I’m glad I did.. Why? Not so I learnt how to reduce CO2 emissions sufficiently to make any impact on climate change but rather I also found Act on CO2 from the ABD, cleverly taking advantage of the government’s campaign, which details why changing the way we drive wont make any noticeable impact.

Rather it is just a way for the government to impose taxes claiming that they are trying to improve the environment.

Cars are often identified by public surveys as being responsible for climate change, but even if this was true (it isn’t) the numbers don’t add up. Cars are responsible for 16% of UK carbon dioxide emissions, which are 2% of total international emissions, and overall mankind is responsible for 3.4% of total annually cycled carbon dioxide (according to the IPCC). So cars are responsible for only 0.01% of emissions.

This is why environmental campaigning these days involves telling other people not to fly while flying to a different continent to sign copies of a book on the (myth of) man-made climate change, and why the tax on heating fuel (oil) is 5% while the tax on mobility fuel (petrol) is 300% yet buildings emit twice as much carbon dioxide as transport. It all makes perfect econonsense.

Those of you who know me will know that I’m not the tidiest person in the world, however even this is ridiculous by my standards.

This is what happens when someone else decides to start emptying the IT cupboard in the corner of my office, which has contained a multitude of junk for serveral years before I got here I think…

By Friday this will no longer by my office (actually, at the rate I’m going by 4pm today this will no longer be my office… i’ll be moving to the nice repainted one on the top floor for no good reason whatsoever)

It’s strange to be leaving… I do like it here

Sorry for the egg-… pun but this egg has a chance as it’s now being incubated by the wonderful people at Neon Gecko in Paisley (we don’t have the equipment to do it ourselves, and besides, it’d be difficult to move house with an incubated egg!!)

I couldn’t quite believe this… (but it made a good rant for today!)

I was reading a manual (see, told you it was unbelievable) when I found the following statement;

When operating the diopter adjustment control with your eye to the viewfinder, be careful not to put your fingers or fingernails in your eye.

Do they really feel the need to put thing like that in a manual… “When using your finger near your eye, be careful not to poke it!” goes without saying really, everyone knows not to poke their eyes surely?!

This seems worse than the current madness of printing “Contents may be hot” on a cup of coffee!

I love the new guidelines for phone in competitions…

QuizCall ran this competition tonight, I watched it for only 5 minues;

• In the first minute around 300 calls
• In the second 470 calls
• In the third 500 calls
• In the fourth 550 calls
• In the fifth 925 calls

That’s a total of 3,245 calls at 75p each… Of that 75p lets say 15p is taken by the service provider, leaving 60p for QuizCall’s operator, Ostrich Media Limited, per entry. That’s a total of £1,947 in 5 minutes.

This equates to £23,364 per hour or £93,456 through the show.

Curry, Wine, Apple, Bread, Leek, Water, Iced Bun, Tea and even Mead were all given as answers, and they were incorrect although are clearly present in the wordsearch they are not “one of their 8 answers”

After 10 minutes of this nonsense (during which I’ve been typing this message) they’ve just announced the £10,000 Jackpot… calls are now up over 1,120 per minute..

15 mins in… they’ve just given away £1000 for the answer Ham, with a promise of another £10,000 if they can guess a date that’s on their calendar!? (so that’s a 1 in 366 chance then…)

How is this legal?

QuizCall claim to have given away £ 6 million…. at a conservative estimate of £150,000 per show that prize fund can be amassed in just 40 nights… how many years have they been running this?

There’s an increasing trend of web “designers” putting links (or worse, large images) proudly proclaiming that their website is “Valid XHTML 1.0″ or “Valid CSS” but how many of them actually are… clicking the link on the home page of a company that should know better resulted in no less than 72 Validation Errors!!

Ironically, for a company which specialises (or at least used to) in Apple hardware and software, the site is ran on Microsoft IIS servers, is written in ASP .net and those validation errors? Mostly caused by proprietary MS tags interspersed throught otherwise relatively valid XHTML and CSS.

Admittedly I am actually wondering what software (even by Microsoft!) generated “HTML” code as hideous as this;


<p class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0cm 0cm 0pt; TEXT-ALIGN: justify; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none"><span lang="EN-US" style="COLOR: black; FONT-FAMILY: " mso-ansi-language:="" mso-bidi-font-family:="" 16.0pt;="" mso-bidi-font-size:="" arial?,?sans-serif?;="" ?times="" new="" roman?;="" en-us?="">


p.s. for those that recognise the site it wasnt picked for any personal reason, there are a lot of sites guilty of this, just so happened I was relatively impressed this company had recently redesigned their site… and wondered if they’d actually gone to the trouble of doing it properly… guess not.