Nailing Your Colours to the Mast
January 21, 2011 | 
Author I read this on the BBC web site, momentarily I felt a sickness welling up inside me… it's all about Ed Balls; here we have a young inexperienced politico, with less business acumen than a nat! being heralded by the BBC for his economic prowess. What, where are we at, this Keynesian megalomaniac would have us spend more of other peoples money to avoid the inevitable readjustment of our economy to a more sustainable balanced state.
Ed Balls: Even opponents concede Mr Balls has a formidable grasp of how the economy works. He was effectively Mr Brown's second-in-command at the Treasury with a hand in some of the biggest economic decisions of Labour's time in power – including making the Bank of England independent and staying out of the European single currency. Also known as the author of the phrase "neo-classical endogenous growth theory", used in a speech by Gordon Brown in 1995 and mocked by the Conservatives.
Making the Bank of England independent! Excuse me but how does that work. Oh yes they have to ensure we have a stable economy by keeping inflation below a pre-agreed target. Seems this has slipped their collective memory as we have been above the declared limit for some many many months!
Staying out of the European single currency, was really not anything special, we were never suitably aligned to go in. A fact rarely mentioned in the debate. The single currency is a political construct and as such will struggle on as long as there are people in the EU stupid enough to support it. You don't need to be an economist to know it can't work. Common sense is quite enough. We now have the Irish predicament as a great example of why it was doomed.
Then, "neo-classical endogenous growth theory", few people will of heard of this, Googling it may help a bit, Wikipedia can also help. The fact is reading the explanation of this theory tends to sleepiness, brought on by the sheer dullness of the exponents of the principle. For example:
Often endogenous growth theory assumes constant marginal product of capital at the aggregate level, or at least that the limit of the marginal product of capital does not tend towards zero.
I rest my case, the lunatics have taken over the asylum!! Remember Sir John Harvey-Jones, one time sub-mariner, late great manger of ICI, sadly departed. How would he have viewed Mr ED BALLS economic strategy… Balls… quite so!!
Posted in Politics | 
Tags: Bank of England, Ed Balls, Inflation Target, insanity prevails, Sir John Harvey-Jones | 
No Comments »
Blog Moved to a New URL
The blog site has been running for some months now on the main url for Quadriform Dataserve, the purpose was to see what kind of traffic we could generate through the blog, and see how it affected the level of enquiries. The experiment has shown a number of things, the level of enquiries remained about the same, perhaps up a bit. The amount of spam users was raised dramatically to the tune of hundreds per day, particularly when the blog topic was contentious!
In future blog posts will be restricted to the .biz domain, as this sees less traffic than the .com
Another Scam! A UK based Fraud!
To ALL Visitors
This scam, as I was told, or in my view, a really serious fraud, needs nailing before too many people see their hard earned cash vaporise!! I was sent this by a good friend, so I have every reason to believe it true.
You may want to watch out for this;
Can you circulate this around especially as Xmas is fast approaching – it has been confirmed by Royal Mail. The Trading Standards Office are making people aware of the following scam:
A card is posted through your door from a company called PDS (Parcel Delivery Service) suggesting that they were unable to deliver a parcel and that you need to contact them on 0906 6611911 (a Premium rate number).
*DO NOT call this number, as this is a mail scam originating from Belize*.
If you call the number and you start to hear a recorded message you will already have been billed *£315* for the phone call.
If you do receive a card with these details, then please contact Royal Mail Fraud on 020 7239 6655.
Posted in General, Scams | Tags: Fraud via the post, Parcel Delivery Service, Premium phone lines, Royal Mail, Trading Standards Office | No Comments »
Home Website Center Review – Legit or Scam?
The Internet is awash with people blogging and twittering ad infinitum, there are also many sites around ready to take your hard earned cash, offering promises of a healthy revenue stream for simply doing a few things on the web. One such site is called, "Home Website Center". Their proposition is the familiar taster "Mom makes £379/day Working fronm Home", they also create an air of confidence by showing some Google affiliate type views. See the advert screen shot below.
OK, for interest I decided to sign up and see what they actually offer you, my readers can then make a judgement, as to whether they believe it to be a legitimate proposal or not! I look forward to hearing from anyone who has taken the plunge and made anything from it. Of course I realise that I have wasted £23.46 to demonstrate my point, but if it saves anyone else wasting their hard earned money then I think it was a service worth doing. I also believe in the Internet being a place where self monitoring is preferable to big government intervention, so we should stamp on these so called business opportunities, and expose them for what they are, a means to make the snake oil salesman who developed the scheme into a very rich snake oil salesman!
Quadriform + PixelPutty = 1
At the risk of sounding partisan, pixelputty, which features the above 3-D graphic, is my eldest daughter's site, whereas I am the more staid Quadriform [don't ask how the name came about, it goes back to the nineteen eighties!]. However we try to help each other out where we can, so Pip does the designs and I write the code, we scrutinise each contribution and usually get to a good positive result. Below is a design + logic site we produced recently for restaurants to create their own web sites.
We have been very successful as a combined team, and look forward to more joint efforts, which usually produces our best work, get in touch if you would like something similar, or something creative that we can do for you!
Posted in Web Technology, Web site development | Tags: Pixelputty Quadriform as one, web design, web technology, Wetherby | No Comments »
iPhone (and other smart phones) Friendly
Well in case you are into mobile devices, you might like to hear that the site is now iPhone, and other mobile types, friendly. When you access the site from a mobile device the content is displayed in a form suitable for the restrictions of small “viewports”, not wishing to be smug, but that is what the screen is called from a web point of view! Phew, too much “techiness” here I feel!
Not all the site will work in this friendly manner, the earlier bespoke sections, may look a bit cr*p, but, Hey! We can't look back can we! Lest we may become a pillar of cyber space salt!
Posted in Browsers, Web Technology | Tags: iPhone, mobile devices, pillar of salt, viewport | No Comments »
Arty Triumphal Arch
Since it is nearing the festive season I put an A3 Giclée print using expensive 300g/m² archival quality paper on eBay, the picture is above. Just to see if it would sell, bit of an experiment really the page is http://tinyurl.com/25tz9mk [Using tinyurl to reduce the long url]
If you like it, why not make a bid, you could get a bargain. Don't forget it is a great piece of history, commemorating as it does the Colonialists victory in the American War of independence 1783. Up yours King George and Lord North [Prime Minister] A Sun [Newspaper Observation from the Falklands War] Galtieri moment if ever there was one.
Teupen hyLift
During a recent visit to Sudeley Castle, near Cheltenham I came across a Teupen hyLIFT Leo series access platform, this type of equipment is every serious photographers dream, a little large for general everyday use but for those special occasions, you can't beat being at a height with the camera in your hand, all forms of towers with remote heads on them generally do not live up to being on the spot!
The access platform was being used to inspect the walls and eaves on parts of Sudeley Castle, a great way to do difficult inspections, but had there been an event on it would have provided a great platform from which to photograph or video the action!
The rest of the photos are on my Fickr pages here. If you would like to get the benefit of an elevated photo-shoot, prices start at £600.00 per day, including operator, me! Transport to the location would be extra. The machine pictured here will reach to around 23 metres [75 feet] in height.
Photographing a subject from a high level can really add drama!
Posted in Business Visits, Photography | Tags: Access Equipment, Event photography, Hire, Photo-Shoot, Photography, Teupen hyLIFT | No Comments »
Update on Photo Sale at Wetherby
Well it went better than I expected, a steady flow of people passed through during the day, and I had numerous discussions with interested people about my style of digital photography. I have to say I am not fixed in my ideas about what is right or wrong, presenting pictures at the Leeds Photographic Society has taught me to be open in my choice about what photography has to offer. I am not in the silver halide camp, nor fixated on grunge using Photoshop, there is much that can be achieved which produces an exhilarating result, so don't be put off by the doom-sters, just do what you like and if its digital, be thankful for the reduction in dangerous chemicals! Here are a few more pictures that were available on the day.
Also thanks to David at ameliagreenheart who was another of the exhibitors for the inspirational tips provided, especially http://www.enterprisenation.com which seems to be a good networking site.
Posted in Digital Imagery, Photography | Tags: Craft Fairs, Hard on the feet, HDR Photography, selling, Wetherby | No Comments »
The “Bollocks” that People Write
When you have a blog site it is amusing to see the utter garbage people are prepared to submit as comments to any particular article. Most of course are hoping that by adding links back to their own site, that this will increase the traffic they receive and assist in their search engine ranking.
Naturally anyone with a blog who allows such posts to be freely displayed, could in no time be swamped by the spammers. So you have to approve or reject the posts, but in truth I have had so many over the last six months that I bulk delete them direct from the database. So far I have had 2,800+ comments since January of 2011, 98% of which are complete junk, some even quite offensive linking to the most obnoxious sites you can imagine.
The image above is a screen shot from the comments table, before deletion, not much of any merit, and the email domains are usually hotmail or gmail, which says a lot!
Why are people so stupid? Spam, Spam, Spam, I preferred the Monty Python Original!