Bleurgh

(via Gordon)

I have to say that Marmite Guinness (or Guinness Marmite, whichever) manages to combine two of my least favourite things into one convenient jar.

Blech³.

Dock Green

As a matter of course, I try to avoid buying anything from Dixons, Currys, PC World and the like – mainly because of their insistence on getting your postcode for every purchase, and sending out shite product insurance and warranty extensions etc. all the time.

There’s a couple of other reasons as well, to do with preferring to use stores where the staff actually know what they’re talking about, and don’t charge top whack for their products. (Yeah, yeah, price guarantees etc., but still, I find them in general to be damn expensive)

During the week, I ordered a new ‘carry all the time’ camera via Amazon from Pixmania – a wee Panasonic Lumix TZ1, which should fulfil all my requirements. Anyway, it normally retails for about £270, but Pixmania had it listed for £155. All well and good. I know the TZ1 is being phased out and replaced with the TZ-2 and -3, but this one will be more than sufficient, so I figure I might as well take the discount.

Anyway – what I didn’t know is that Pixmania is actually owned by – you guessed it – Dixons Stores Group. *sob*

Brithday

Oh, and Happy Birthday to Mr Dragon.

It’s obviously not a good day to be him – he’s feeling Old. Heh.

Self-Promotion – revisited

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about starting to do more work to promote my own stuff, and I’m pleased to say that it’s all going quite well at the moment.

I’ve been accepted in to the Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS) and my UK Webdesigners Association (UKWDA) profile has been updated, my Linked In network is slowly growing, and the portfolio website is beginning to look pretty good (in my own humble opinion, of course) although I’m not going to link to it just yet, as there’s some basic stuff that needs to be reconsidered/redone before it goes live. I’ve also hoyed out some letters to various places in order to see whether I can get permission to do photos’n’stuff at them

I do, however, still find that this is the thing I hate the most. Hard as it may sometimes be to believe, I’m really not good at just standing up and saying “Me? I’m bloody great, I am”. It’s still extremely rare to hear (see, read, whatever) me saying something like that, although I’m kind of getting better at it. Gradually.

Backing Up

Way back before Christmas, I bought myself a 320Gb Western Digital ‘MyBook’ external hard drive, mainly as a backup dumping ground for data, but also to hold backups of the important stuff that I have and do.

And I did do a manual back-up every so often. But then I read the Lifehacker feature about automatically backing up your hard-drive, and figured that an automated back-up is far better than just ‘when I remember’.

So last night I went through and did it all – downloaded the SyncBack software – a whole £15 all told! – and now all the important stuff on the PC gets backed up regularly, and automatically. Oh yes, and then I do FTP it off to an off-site place as well, just in case. All very useful.