Tabloid Edition

Finding a web host

OK, so we all know that if we want to gear up our business for this 21 st century reality then we need to make sure that we've a presence upon this here intertubes thing. It might be that we go full flood and attempt to sell our products directly. It might be that we simply offer information about what we do. Or we might provide (in a step I thinl has been hugely successful for the likes of Nokia) all of our support, our manuals and instruction booklets online. But we do all know that without the online presence we're not going to last as a business.

However, which host we use can become a little complicated. Which is why you might want to have a look at this guide to web hosting. What is it that you actually want from a web host? The lowest cost? OK, fine, just click through that link there for a guide. Or perhaps there's something else more important? Up time? Or the tools that you get to build your site with? Or maybe you need blog hosting, or e-commerce hosting?

Whatever the mix you're looking for from your hosting company it's well worth clicking through to see what this guide can do for you.

Let her get fat

Let her get fat is the new cry from the women of Saudi Arabia. For there's a slight problem with the way that gyms for women are regulated has led to something of a problem. There's a Ministry that regulates men's gyms, and that's fine. But the problem is that women and men cannot join the same gym, for in Saudi the sexes are strictly separated.

So these women only gyms, they're accepted....but no Ministry will step up and agree to be the people that regulate them.

"Let her get fat!" is the slogan women in Saudi Arabia are using to challenge a clampdown on female-only gyms.

Unhappy at the growing number of unlicensed female gyms, the Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs recently closed two in the Red Sea city of Jeddah and one in the city of Dammam on the Gulf Arab coast for not having a license.

In response, newspaper columnists and bloggers are promoting the sarcastic line "let her get fat!" as a way of fighting back, though it is likely to be a losing battle.

In Saudi Arabia, where clerics have extensive influence in society, gyms are sexually segregated because of conservative tribal and religious values.

Welcome to what it's like to live in a fully regulated society. You can only do those things which regulations allow you to do.

Me, I prefer freedom and liberty, although I understand that your mileage might vary.

Saving money online

OK, so we all know how to save money in the old regular bricks and mortar stores. We simply cut the coupons out of the newspaper and take them around to the supermarket. Simple enough and we've all been doing it for years.

However, how do you cut out virtual coupons from the newspaper so that you can use them virtually online? Well, clearly, we can't, so what we need to do is go to this website where we can get the coupons we want and need to save money on our online purchases. For example, have a look here to see their HP Coupons. As you can see, there's a number of very decent offers there that can help you to save money.

And of course it's not just coupons for HP equipment. Try this easy coupon seach for example and see what other things they have available. And don't forget, you don't need to just go there when you know what it already is that you want to buy. It's worth having a look through the whole database to see if there's something there that you dodn't know you wanted but which is being offered as a very good deal.

You never know what it is that you might find!

Swine flu not kosher

This has to be one of the more absurd things that a politician has done this year. OK, I know, it's still early, there's another 8 months for better entires, but really:

"We will call it Mexico flu. We won't call it swine flu," Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman, a black-garbed Orthodox Jew, told a news conference Monday, assuring the Israeli public that authorities were prepared to handle any cases.

Under Jewish dietary laws, pigs are considered unclean and pork is forbidden food -- although the non-kosher meat is available in some stores in Israel.

Good grief, it's not called swine flu in order to piss off people who think pigs are unclean (whether Jew or Muslim) but because it is a mixture of two flu strains. One that affects humans and one that affects pigs.

Although I will admit to a certain sneaking admiration for The Daily Mash's coinage. Why not just all get over it and start calling it pork flu.

Those pesky mosquitos

Yes, now that summer is truly on the way I'm planning the garden activities from me and the family. I've got as far as selecting the recipes to try for the barbeque (as always, about three times as many as we can possibly use and all insanely more complicated than we will ever actually attempt. It will be back to basics, good meat lightly cooked.).

But the thing that always interrupts such epicurean delights is our old enemy the mosquito. Where we are we don't really have to worry about malaria but we do about the West Nile virus. But even more than that my wife is both deliciously attractive to mosquitos (as it has to be said she is to me) and also allergic to them (as, it has to be said, she usually isn't to me). So we've been looking for years for a decent way to make sure that we can both avoid the darn critters and yet still enjoy the outdoors.

And I think we might have found the very thing, one of these mosquito traps looks just the ticket. The general concept is that they attract eh mozzies and then kill them once they've been attracted. You know, a little like the Roach Motel concept, they check in but they can't check out.

As they really do work it sounds like the no brainer purchase of the summer.

Swine flu death in Texas

Yes, it's happened, a swine flu death in Texas. We were always worried about whether the disease would stay virulent as it expanded. And perhaps it is as this swine flu death in Texas is the first death from it in the US.

A 23-month-old Texas toddler became the first confirmed swine flu death outside of Mexico as authorities around the world struggled to contain a growing global health menace that has also swept Germany onto the roster of afflicted nations. Officials say the death was in Houston.

Kathy Barton, a spokeswoman for the Houston Health and Human Services Department, said Wednesday that the child had traveled with family from Mexico to Brownsville in South Texas. The child became ill in Brownsville and was taken to a Houston hospital and died Monday night, she said.

It is of course desperately sad that a child so young is taken from this life. But then that's what tendes to happen in epidemics, that it's the young and the old who suffer the most.

A government official confirmed the death from the new H1N1 swine flu on Wednesday.

It is the first death from the flu outside of Mexico, which has been the country hardest-hit by the influenza outbreak.U.S. officials have confirmed 65 cases of swine flu, most of them mild.No confirmed cases have been reported in Massachusetts.The acting head of the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention says the confirmed death of a toddler in Texas is a tragic development, but that it's too soon to say just how fast the swine flu virus is spreading.

How fast it spreads and how virulent it is when caught are the two factors which will decide whether we've got just another variant of flu on our hands or a true pandemic.

President Barack Obama said this morning that Americans should know the government is doing all it can to control virus. Obama also says schools should consider closing if the spread of the swine flu virus worsens.

Canada, Austria, New Zealand, Israel, Spain, Britain and Germany also have reported cases of swine flu sickness. Deaths reported so far have been limited to Mexico, and now the U.S.

This isn't just the first swine flu death in Texas, or in the US, it's the first swine flu death outside of Mexico.

As the swine flu epidemic continues to spread, the United States now reports its first causality, a 23 month old child in Texas. The toddler is reported to have recently been in Mexico and is thought to have been exposed to the swine flu while there. This child's case in Texas is the first confirmed swine flu death outside of Mexico.

The number of states reporting confirmed cases of swine flu remains steady at five (California, Kansas, New York, Ohio, and Texas). Britain, Germany, Israel, Austria, and New Zealand have been added to the countries with confirmed cases. Texas swine flu death has pitched up the anxiety in USA because of the worries that the virus is spreading.

The worst part is that this swine flu death in Texas isn't going to be the last one, either in Texas or elsewhere. Of course, flu kills tens of thousands of people each and every year, but this new strain could be much worse than that. Could be, might be, but probably won't be, at least from what we know so far.

Remodelling contractors

As regular readers will know we've been working on this house of ours down here. We've been working with any number of builders and contractors over the past couple of years and it has to be said that it would have been a great deal easier (and less stressful!) if we'd been able to find, where we were, a simple contractor to do all of these things for us. For example, have a look at this Baltimore Remodeling expert. They're taking upon their shoulders all of the stress and the strain of it all.

For example, they don't just sit around waiting for the architect to provide the design: they actually prepare the floor plan so that the architect (unless you want one) is unnecessary. And they don't do this just for small rehab projects, they'll do it for teardowns and full rehabs as well. Now that's the sort of service that we could have used!

But perhaps the most important thing (over and above the fact that they're efficient, hard working, on time and all those good things) is that they're properly economically aware. They know what it is that will add value in Balrimore. Which remodelling will add more to the value of your house than the cost of doing it. And that, in a contractor, is a skill worth more than rubies. Well worth checking out.

Carla Bruni Sex Tape

There's a Carla Bruni Sex Tape....at least, that's the rumour doing the rounds today. I discussed this possible Carla Bruni sex tape with a colleague in hte film industry and he pretty much pooh poohed it, stating that in any film that includes nudity (as several Carla Bruni projects have done) there will always be tapes that someone or other keeps just in case the actress (and it usually is the actress) becomes famous later.

All of which is true but has little relevance for this story about the Carla Bruni sex tape, for it's not out takes from films being talked about but the theft of pictures from the apartment of a former lover:

"HIGHLY intimate" video and pictures of France's First Lady Carla Bruni have been stolen during a burglary in Paris. Cops fear the pics of the former model and her ex lover could now be made public, overshadowing an official presidential visit to Spain. The private collection was made during 41-year-old Miss Bruni’s affair with philosopher Raphael Enthoven — the father of her child.

The rather amusing thing about this particular lover is that she was originally living with his father: before the son sired a child upon her.

Carla Bruni is in the mist of a scandal as news of thieves stealing intimate pictures and video of the First lady comes to light. Hundreds of “highly intimate” photos, videos and computer files were stolen, and it seems as thought the thieves were only after those items, as nothing else was missing. This would lead one to think that the thieves have a plan for those items, either selling them to a tabloid, or leaking them on the net in an effort to embarrass Carla Bruni and Mr. Sarkozy. One would also think that a sex tape of some sort might be apart of the stolen collection of items, as we have all seen Carla Bruni naked. In fact, our friends over at Yeeah! have a nice collection of Carla Bruni nude photos, be sure to check those out here.

Although, it has to be said, the existence of a Carla Bruni sex tape isn't going to be all that much of a revelation:

Police now fear that thieves could take advantage of Miss Bruni’s status as an international sex symbol by selling the pictures for hundreds of thousands of pounds.

They could be posted on the web so as to cause maximum embarrassment to Mr Sarkozy, who is only too well aware of his third wife’s colourful past.

The only problem with that plan is everybody has already seen Carla Bruni naked (NSFW). Granted, maybe no one’s seen her on all fours with a ball gag in her mouth begging for cheese and crackers, something which could potentially be on the tapes, but really, aren’t there more important celebrities you’d rather fantasize about? Like Jessica Alba, Angelina Jolie and me. Come on, ladies. I’m available.

Me? I think the talk is all rather overblown. A few erotic photos might exist, for sure. Good Grief, those are all over the place already. But a Carla Bruni sex tape? No, not unless Nicholas Sarkozy thinks he's going to lose an election.

Death and.....

Well, as we know, the completion of that phrase is that death and taxes will always  be with us, will always happen to us. But while death is both personal and inevitable, taxes can at least be ameliorated.

The method of amelioration is quite obviously to find oneself a decent firm of tax accountants. Now in the old days this could in fact be rather difficult. You were dependent upon whoever it was that was running the accountancy services in your town. They may or may not have been experts in taxes....they could have been more simply book keepers for example.

This here internet thing has changed that, for now one can look for accounting firms online. No longer are we constrained by physical geography, something which all of us still constrained by the taxman are grateful for.

Just as an example, looking for accountancy firms in Chatswood, I find people who can handle my affairs. I'm not in Chatswood, no where near, but I have a greater choice of experts and that has to be a good thing, right?

Swine flu not kosher

I'm sorry, but I have to snigger just a little bit at this.

Pigs are, to both Jews and Muslims, unclean and the eating of the meat (bacon, ham, pork) is forbidden to followers of either religion.

OK, what the Sky Pilot tells you to do, that's fine. But it can be taken to extremes.

"We will call it Mexico flu. We won't call it swine flu," Deputy Health Minister Yakov Litzman, a black-garbed Orthodox Jew, told a news conference Monday, assuring the Israeli public that authorities were prepared to handle any cases.

Under Jewish dietary laws, pigs are considered unclean and pork is forbidden food -- although the non-kosher meat is available in some stores in Israel.

Yup, despite the fact that the danger of the disease is exactly that it has crossed the species barrier, the word "swine" ain't to be used.

I was at college with a man who is now a Rabbi.....and I have to say that he would not be such a damn fool.