Coming Home
Posted: Sun 8 June, 2008 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Animals, D4D™, Domestic, Own Business, Travel | 1 Comment »So after a week away we’ve come back to:
- 1,000+ emails (for me)
- 100+ emails (for Herself)
- Shitloads of post
- Still no fucking mains water thanks to Anglian Water being utter, utter cunts
- Happy chickens
- Unhappy cat (he’s displeased that we’ve brought the dog back with us)
- A total jungle on the veg patch, except for the bits we’d cleared before
- The heavens opened for two solid weeks before we went away
- We went on holiday
- A complete jungle of a front lawn, where I’d forgotten to mow the fucker before we went away
Was the holiday worth it? Yes.
Does it make it any easier to deal with the deluge of crap from while we were away? Kind of.
Is it good to be home? Mostly, yes.
And now back to normality. Work tomorrow, back in Yarmouth for the day. Lucky me.
Spreading the Word
Posted: Fri 6 June, 2008 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Own Business, Work-related | Leave a comment »Over the last month or so, I’ve started spreading my company name around a bit – I’ve joined a couple of new business-oriented forums, using the company name as a login, and been making inputs into that.
There haven’t been any real results from it yet – I didn’t really expect there to be after only a few weeks – but this is part of a long-term strategy to help build up Google results for the company name, and start doing some keyword linking from the forums and organisations through to the company site.
It’s not the only part of the plan of course – there’s a lot more to it that I’m not going to go into just yet – but it’s certainly starting to work. My rank in Google is coming up – again, there’s a long way to go, but it’s getting there. I’m also likely to have a minor site redesign while I’m away this week, in order to punch up some of the key words and phrases for the company, and see where that takes me.
All told, it’s just a continual process of improvement and one that’ll take time to perfect. But it’s sure fun to keep on doing it.
Gettind rid of an Umbrella
Posted: Tue 3 June, 2008 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Work-related | Leave a comment »Now that everything’s been put in place, I’m pleased to say that I’ve finally left Parasol, so all the finances etc. are now coming through my own limited company again.
It’s been a long slog – the company was actually first formed back in January, and it’s just taken me time to find the right accountant, bank account and so on- but it’s good to finally be in the right place, and to start sorting these things for myself again.
Anti-Spam
Posted: Mon 2 June, 2008 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Geeky, Own Business, Work-related | Leave a comment »Over the last couple of weeks, I’d started receiving a significant (well, more than previously) amount of spam through the contact form on one of my sites. (the photography one, not that anyone cares)
As a result, I added in a small dollop of anti-spam input on the form – I’ve done this on several forms over the years, and it’s never caused me any problems. It’s probably now only about ten to twenty minutes work (including testing the entire thing) so it’s no hassle – and every time I wonder why I didn’t just put the damn thing in place when I created the original, rather than slamming it in as an afterthought.
In short, I just never remember. And in some cases that’s fine – some forms just never seem to get hit in the first place, whereas others pop up fairly quickly and get hit by spammers. It’s all very odd.
I know I should just put it in with anti-spam by default. It’s just I never remember.
Then again, on one particular form I did for a client, I added in a whole bundle of anti-spam features including the ability to ‘blacklist’ the IP and poster-name/email automatically by clicking on a link in the forwarded message – and that client never makes use of the features. I know for a fact that they get a whole bundle of spam through it – and I do on occasion run through and block a whole load of the IPs for them myself – but it seems equally bizarre for people to not even make use of the tools they’ve been given.
Coming to a Close
Posted: Thu 29 May, 2008 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Domestic, Own Business, Travel, Work-related | Leave a comment »At the moment, today is my last day in the current contract. It’s been pretty good – I started back at the beginning of April, for a two-week contract – so to have ended up doing two months here has worked out quite nicely.
The job/work has been OK – but the commute has been bloody horrid. For some reason, the A11 and A47 seem to be some kind of magnet for crap drivers, and there hasn’t been a day yet where I haven’t been cut up, or forced to slow down because of people (to use one example from today) travelling at 50 mph in the outside lane and staying parallel with the cars on the inside lane rather than overtaking them.
I don’t mind commuting to work, and the drive is far easier than it would be to take the train – in fact, taking the train is nigh-on impossible, as the first train from home wouldn’t get me in ’til 9.15. (at which point I’d still have to get from station to office) So I’ve been doing 400 miles a week just for work – not cheap, but them’s the breaks when you live in the arse end of nowhere.
I’ve currently got no idea where I’ll be working next. There’s a few options already, but I’m not sorting out anything confirmed until we’re back from Ireland. Then we’ll see.
Faster Payments
Posted: Tue 27 May, 2008 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: Customer Services, Own Business, Work-related | 3 Comments »At long last, the banks are introducing a faster payment system for phone and internet banking. I’ve often wondered how they can continue to get away with claiming it takes three days for money to transfer between banks/accounts – and the truth is, they really couldn’t continue to get away with it.
So they’re now gradually phasing in this new Faster Payments Service – which will (eventually) mean that you can do transfers on the same day, rather than waiting three days. Money leaves your account immediately, and is in the recipient bank account later that day.
Initially it’s just being trialled on smaller amounts – I think the average ceiling is about £20 at first – before it ends up going up to the maximum transaction value of £10,000 in a few months time. If you want to check whether your payment recipient can handle faster payments, you can check the sort-code on this site.
I wonder how this will affect the entire BACS and CHAPS system over time? It’ll be nice to be able to have same-day transfers without paying the extra £30+ for a CHAPS payment, that’s for sure.
Gah
Posted: Fri 23 May, 2008 | Author: Lyle | Filed under: D4D™, Geeky, Work-related | 1 Comment »Why is it always the simple stuff that never bastard well works?
All I want to do is have a drop-down box that submits itself to a form when it changes. I’ve been trying to use all variants of
document.forms.submit()
(And document.form.submit() and document.form[‘form_name’].submit() , and document.forms[‘form_name’].submit and so on and so on)
And does it work? Does it shit. Ah well, I’ll figure it out next week.
Probably.