Now that summer is upon us it’s time to dig out the croquet set, mow the lawn and dust off the barbecue. The game of garden croquet has always been popular with the upper and middle classes in Britain and is often associated with garden parties of the landed gentry. These days however it’s appeal has grown and croquet has become a game played by many. Famously John Prescott, the socialist former deputy PM, played croquet one summer in front of the cameras instead of doing any work. This gave the game new exposure and showed that you didn’t need to possess any degree of sophistication to play. Since then Croquet has become hugely popular and many low priced sets made available to the masses.
It feels like driving in London has been made impossible, or at the very best, extremely painful and expensive. Today however things look set to get worse still with the trialing of brand new wifi speed cameras. The cameras will be deployed on the routes with twenty mile per hour speed limits and will work on the same principle as the specs camera that is now all too familiar on our motorways.
The new cameras will be placed at intervals on the road side and communicate with each other using wi fi. Cars will be monitored as they pass each camera and if they reach the second camera in a time that suggests their average speed was higher than the threshold they will be recorded for a fixed penalty notice, three points and a fine.
This represents another major offensive on the British Motorist who has suffered a great deal of pain over the last ten years through extreme and draconian speed enforcement.
Over the last ten years or so the way people search and buy creative talent has changed almost beyond recognition. The dawn of the internet has seen a new age develop which has changed the way creative’s, such as illustrators, promote their skills and earn a living. The globalisation that the World Wide Web has brought about has made things a lot more competitive that’s for sure. With the huge explosion in royalty free images and their ease of access one might be forgiven for thinking that the days of the lone freelance illustrator are over.
It would seem to be the case that those seeking to earn a living as a freelance artist have no option but to embrace the internet with both hands of they are to stand any chance of being commissioned. The web has become the first, and often the last, place people look when trying to buy an image. It’s important to make sure that your illustration services are going to be there for them to see when they look online.
There are numerous ways to gain a presence online, from setting up a web site, optimising your pages for search engines such as google and listing yourself within specialist websites and online communities. There are a whole host of ways to propagate your self through the endless web that is the internet, too many to list in this blog. The General focus should be on trying to maximise ones presence, in as many relevant places online as possible. You never know who will be looking where online, so cast the net wide.
As if things had not got bad enough for the motorist in North Wales, on the 31st of March the BBC reported that North Wales police are now resorting to hiding speed camers inside horse boxes on rural roads. The article makes reference to the chief constables well documented obsession with speeding motorists, apparantly his top priority over and above all other crimes! As is so often the case with online news articles about speed cameras the limited number of comment slots are rapidly filled up by the usual crew of ill informed anti car / speed group members who campaign endlessly for lower speeds and fewer cars.
It would seem North Wales police are continuing to hammer the law abiding citizens with speeding convictions for minor infringments of speed limits and ignore, once again, all other aspects of road safety. With such strong evidence to suggest that speeding is not the cause of most fatal road accidents surely it’s time to start enforcing the actual causes of accidents. Instead it seems they are intent on dreaming up new and inventive ways to hide speed cameras from a drivers view.
Today the Think JD blog was launched for the very first time with some help from web designer Darren Whiteman who very kindly installed all of the scripts and database onto the server. Watch this space!