Tabloid Edition

Winter breaks time!

Yes, it's just been half term so now of course it's time for us adults to get away and be off to see something different. Get away from the kinds, kick back and relax a little. Which brings us to hte question of where should you go for a little winter break?

Well, of course, we could go skiing but that's way too energetic. And in the middle of winter there's not much point in going anywhere else outside. Which leads us to thinking about the great cities as places to go. And thus Edinburgh.

First things first though, before thinking about what to do while there, what about Edinburgh accommodation? What should we be looking for as a place to stay? Well, as a first pass, probably not a hotel: they are, in the UK, famously expensive for not all that good a service. B&B's, weel having been in a Scottish one of those I wouldn't recomment it. Which leaves us with what is in fact the best option, renting one of the Edinburgh apartments that are available on short term lets.

Excellent, well, we've got the city and the place to lay our weary heads: what should we actually do or see in the city while there? This is where Edinburgh adds so much value. But the time you're in the city you are able to walk pretty much everywhere you might want to go. No public transport issues, no hassles with cars. And as to what to do, well, the place is stuffed with galleries and museums and, of course, very decent pubs. Which is what I would recommend you do: culture and booze. Just the way to recover from the children's half term.

Getting the house right

Long term readers will know that we've been working hard here to try and get these two houses rebuilt and finished off. One is almost finally done: just the finishing touches to go. And that brings us to the subject of mailboxes. In the country I grew up in this simply wasn't a problem: mail was put through your front door. However, other places, other ways, and this is one of them.

Given that we've turned one house into two houses this means that I need plural mail boxes. So where should I go? Out here in the boonies where we are there's not a shop locally that sells such things. Nor do any of the large stores in the local center sell them. so of course I do online.

And guess what I find? A site with an almost endless number of different designs and sizes of residential mailboxes. Remind me again. Just what was it we used to do before the invention of the internet and the Web. Did we just go without?

Webhosting news

We've all managed to understand that we need to be online these days: but I'm not sure that everyone has quite understood how important it can be to get your web hosting correct. Who you use depends a great deal on what it is that you're trying to achieve. Running an email capture and mailing site will require different skills from the host than running an e-commerce one.

Fortunately, there's a site out there with a good series of pieces on these sorts of subjects. What you should be looking out for, how you can leverage and enhance what a site offers you and so on. For example, here's a good piece on the e-commerce concept. How to go from that very first concept you've got all the way through to the implementation of the finished idea: and success, of course.

Here's another one, on how to leverage social media for SEO. How you can use Facebook, Twitter and all the rest to increase the search engine position of your site and services.

Well worth reading through the site. There's some wisdom in there.

Where to get your tickets

OK, so at least we know that the days of having to stand in line outside the stadium to get your tickets are long gone: I won't have to do what I did on the Stones tour of the early 80s ever again. We know that all of this activity has now moved online.

However, where exactly online should you go to get such tickets? The Stones aren't touring right now, but perhaps Los Angeles Lakers tickets appeal? Or Genessee Theatre tickets? If so, you'll probably want to check out those links to see the great deals that are available only at that site.

Hey, they've Boston Opera House tickets too, as well as a huge range of other shows and locations. You'll probably have to wait another 360 days or more for the next Superbowl but there's plenty to see and do between now and then. And by using that site you not only get the convenience of their easy ordering system, you get their low prices so you can see and do more.

Brooke Hundley

Now this is most unkind to Brooke Hundley. She is/was the ESPN production assistant that Steve Phillips had an affair with back in the summer.

You may recall that Hundley though that Steve was going to leave his wife for her....yeah, right. She turned up at the marital home and was sending texts to the wife and getting all bunny boiler.

Well, OK, so far, but it's this next part that Steve Phillips is doing wihch definitely marks him down as no gentleman. Both he and Hundley lost their jobs over the affair. He then declared that he had "sex addiction" and took himself off to the same place Tiger has just come out of.

You see, this way he's not just an ageing and famous man who can get his end away with a young woman. This way he's ill, d'ye see? And people are not responsible for their illnesses.

Why is this unkind to Brooke Hundley? Well, look at it this way. You're a young woman, you've been sweet talked into bed by an older man, possibly led on a little.

And when he's caught he says that he was only attracted to you because he was ill.

Woo yeah, way to build confidence in people, eh?

Getting the business online

OK, well, most of us have managed to absorb the point that if we're going to have a successful business in this day and age then we need to get the business online in some manner. It might be just as advertising, giving potential customers details of how they can find us. Or it could be after sales service....I've always found sites which have the full sets of manuals on them to be terribly useful.

We might also want to go the whole hog and have a full marketing business online: looking for customers, interacting with them, selling to them and also servicing them afterwards. This particular model can be more difficult and it depends crucially on who you use to host the whole business. It's almost certainly true that you should do this with a company that is expert in email hosting.They'll have there all of the tools you need to make such a site successful and more than that will be able to guide you through what you need to do. Things like mailing list aquisition, management of those lists, sending out emails and respoinding to them.

It isn't easy to make sure that you've got your site properly set up and properly connected: but using the right host does make it a great deal easier.

How old is Roger Daltrey?

Well, yes, Roger Daltrey is indeed no spring chicken, but how old is he?

The answer is of course 65 years old.

Yes, the man who sings "hope I die before I get old" is indeed an old age pensioner now and he's even, in his native England, got a free bus pass given to those who are too old or decrepit to be able to walk everywhere.

No, now, stop, don't snigger. When they wrote that song (and others with similar lyrics) they were of course only just out of their teens and didn't even think about what it would be like to get to this sort of age.

As two of their confreres did not of course: Keith Moon and John Entwhistle. Both dying of the varied effects of a rock and roll lifestyle before they did manage it.

Here's a question for you: es, of course, it would be lovely to have all that money and fame but, umm, would you really happy when 65 to be repeating whatever it was you were doing when you were 25?

Cochlear Implants

From the annals of ain't capitalism great comes the story of cochlear implants. Hearing loss isn't exactly a new occurence: we can marvel at old hearing tumpets in museums (or if you're very lucky, junk shops). But those were not for those actually deaf: rather, for those losing their hearing usually as a result of age.

And of course there have also always been those who lose their hearing as a result of accident or disease: and those who are born profoundly deaf. This is why a cochlear implant is such an advance: for those profoundly deaf are not really helped by hearing aids....or amplification and the like of which ear trumpets are a pre-modern example. For here it's not just that the ability to hear is diminished, it's that some part of the structure that makes hearing possible at all has been destroyed.

So what cochlear implant surgery does is rebuild, mechanically (and increasingly electronically) the physical structures which are necessary for hearing to be possible. It's one of these huge advances that makes living in the 21 st century such a joy: sure not everything's perfect by goodness, aren't things getting better?