The Damned United

27 Mar 2009: The first of something like seven films scheduled for release in the next few weeks which I’ve been really looking forward to was The Damned United, which has been reviewed as that rarest of things, a good film about football. And it is: I really enjoyed it. What I find odd though is that several reviewers have said “it’s not about football, you don’t have to be a football fan to enjoy this film”, and I have to take that as being true, as the reviewers writing that really don’t seem to be football fans. But as far as I’m concerned, thie film is totally about football. All I could see were those league tables superimposed on the screen as [...]

Tweeting from Portman Road

21 Mar 2009: Well, four or five of us twittered from this afternoon’s riveting nil-nil thriller at Portman Road; the whole project is a little primitive at the moment, but I honestly believe that one day this sort of thing will be taken for granted. Over forty fans had signed up to follow the Twitter feed (presumably largely those not at the game!) and I’m sure that a few more kept an eye on the http://twitter.com/ITFC_live page. Anyway, if you followed the Tweets, how was it for you? Useful? Not really adding much to information you could get elsewhere, such as the Ipswich World commentary, the BBC text updates or the TWTD messageboard? Or a lifeline? Do let us know below, because it’ll [...]

4-20mA Aerospace Widgets news

10 Mar 2009: This post is a bit silly. Sorry. Apparently, the 4-20mA current loop standard is important in widgets for the aircraft market. At least, it is as far as this page about 4-20mA Aerospace Widgets is concerned. I made the page up just now, to show how companies can build an authority page on search engines for niche subjects they might be involved in. The page took me about 30 minutes to create, and even if it was a real subject, assuming I was knowledgeable about the subject, it shouldn’t have taken any longer. Anyway, let’s see how it does in Google, shall we? Here are links to the Wikipedia pages about 4-20mA, aerospace and widgets, just to help the whole [...]

VAT, the Flat Rate scheme, AdWords, AdSense and confusion

9 Mar 2009: I’ve just spent far too long (as is always the way) trying to find out what I should be doing when it comes to accounting for VAT with my AdWords, Amazon affiliate marketing and AdSense activity. The confusion stems from two things: firstly, these services are supplied from other EU countries (with different VAT rates) or from outside the EU; and secondly, Google usually charges most UK advertisers Irish-rate VAT on their AdWords and apparently, if you’re a business (which you almost certainly are, if you’re using AdWords), they shouldn’t be charging you that VAT. All this leads to everyone I’ve spoken to not understanding how much money they should (or shouldn’t) have been paid to or from Google and [...]

Champion Larch Ditherers

1 Mar 2009: 110% Larch Dithering! Champion! I’ve always loved anagrams, although my admiration for their possibilities reached its peak many years ago when my flatmate and I realised the best ever anagram of his name was “Bob Ganjashit”. In those days, you either did anagrams with Scrabble letters, a big piece of paper, or a program you could download for the BBC Micro which took ages and never came up with much. Now you can go online and get thousands of anagrams of anything in seconds. So after all these years, it’s time to generate a new list of anagrams of my own name, and choose a top 25, which are presented here in alphabetical order …although I so want to be [...]