Christmas is coming and you are wondering what you are going to buy for everyone this year. While the credit crunch bites you will no doubt be thinking of ways to economise while still getting a decent present. A chess set is an ideal gift, especially if you are buying for a young person. It is inexpensive, ever lasting (if you buy them a good one) and will help their mental development hugely. A nice chess set will look great, feel well made and feel nice in the hands.
Have you ever tried to buy a wooden toy bow and arrow set? If your experience of buying one of these was some 40 years ago you would have had no trouble at all. These days however it’s a very different story. The health and safety brigade have well and truly arrived. Forget the Sheriff of Nottingham, these guys mean business!
With many toy shops banning the sets because they fall into their anti weapons category, and others who are unable to find a reliable source of them. Yet children the world over are still desperate to get their hands on a set. They don’t care how dangerous it is, they just want to play Robin Hood!
Of course, the guys that import bows and arrows these days have to be a bit more sensible and make sure they pass the very strict European toy safety guidelines. Don’t give up searching for the ultimate wooden toy though will you, there are still some sets out there. You just need to find the bravest of shop keepers who will dare to stock them. Good luck!
The Think Jim tech blog is a new blog I discovered recently. I found it when looking up some information on delivery reports for my brothers new iphone. Thanks to the info on the blog he will always know when I received his texts… Damn it! It seems this guy Jim is obsessed with technology, from iphones, mac computers, to high end fridges and cable TV boxes. Offering a real consumers account of genuine issues facing the use of certain items of technology this blog is great for those that own the same gadgets as the apple iphone touting jim. Should you be thinking jim?
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!
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