Recent Blog Posts

Nylon

Gonna dress you up in Nylon.

All over your body. (From your head down to your toes.)

Well Madonna, keep away from me then, as that’s a sure fire way to give me textile dermatitis!

The 7-10 split club

Just a quick post announcing my entry this evening into the Ten Pin Bowling 7-10 Split Hall of Fame.

Bowling geeks will be interested to know it happened at MFA Bowl in Burnley (AMF lanes), and the shot was a straight ball from middle arrow to around 1/2″ left of centre on the 7 pin, which struck the back curtain head-on to rebound and take out the 10 pin.

Feeling so chuffed with myself I might just make myself a bowling trophy in the morning to celebrate.

Glass Engraving

Just a quick post to show off my new equipment. For the last year we’ve been planning, researching and buying sand-carving (sandblasting) equipment to enable us to personalise the glass and slate trophies we make and sell at the shop.

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Pocket Dialling

The last couple of nights I have been over at the allotment, strimming down weeds and tidying up.

Yesterday, after an hour and a half’s work I was interrupted by my phone ringing, and a panicked voice saying they were returning my call, and was everything OK as I had made lots of calls. Somewhat puzzled, I assured the caller I was fine. Upon ending the call, I noticed my phone’s wallpaper had changed, also that around 50 different apps were open.

Well, I’d never have guessed it, but it turns out that using a petrol powered strimmer with your phone in your pocket isn’t a good thing, as the vibrations have a wonderful knack of making your phone think someone is pressing buttons. Oh well, no harm done!

Until this morning…

I awoke to an unusual email from eBay containing an invoice for my purchase. What purchase? I was digging and weeding last night. Oh, poo! 💩 My phone had only gone and bought an item for £126.00 plus £10 delivery. The strangest phone call of my life was about to be made. I honestly don’t know whether the seller believed me, I would have found it hard to believe myself, but ultimately he was very understanding, and cancelled the sale.

So, my phone now has a weird and wonderful password on the lock screen and my fingers are crossed for no further surprises.

Updating the Travel Checklist

A couple of weeks ago now I made the decision to revisit my old Travel Checklist site.

Once upon a time it was a nice little earner, pulling in around £20 a week in banner ads.

Over the years my traffic levels and the click-through rates both dropped as I pretty much left the site to its own devices.

At one stage I foolishly made a structural change, for the express purpose of trying to attract more clicks on the adverts, to the detriment of the user experience.

Fast-forward to today, and the site is well and truly in the doldrums, receiving approximately 10% of it’s peak traffic level.

But no more.

I’ve woken up to the fact that for the site to be a success, people must find it easy to use. The checklist has now been relaunched back as a simple list, much like its original incarnation. It has however been rebuilt using Bootstrap, a front end HTML, CSS and JavaScript framework designed to assist in the creation of responsive design websites.

In time I still plan to create an interactive system whereby visitors can mark items as booked, packed, ordered, outstanding or not required, and for the system to retain the visitor’s state during the days leading up to their trip.

For now though, I’m just happy to have my site back in a form that doesn’t make me feel ashamed, and hopefully I can now start to work on it once again as a serious site that I can take pride in.

Travel Checklist