freeg131: Philip Gamble

Birmingham

admin — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 11:09:08 +0000

A Computing, B Geography, C History

Olympics

admin — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 08:58:26 +0000

Being told of the “tremendous support” for the British canoers/kayakers before the start of each run they do.

Watching replays of action from just a few hours ago when it is obvious we didn’t win any medals - if we did it would be the headline story.

Watching Steve Redgrave and John Inverdale whisper as they present the rowing so as to avoid disturbing the Australian broadcaster Channel 7 and NBC who commentate in the pens either side of them.

Oh why? It’s the Olympics.

And the opening ceromony was faked, both the fireworks and the singing.

Universities Central Admissions Spammers

admin — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 10:14:08 +0000

When applying to University in the UK you have no choice but to use the UCAS system (unless you only apply to Oxford and Cambridge). They charge you £15 for the privilege of using an over-complicated website which requires you to use separate login details to apply and then track the progress of your application.

Not only that but in the past 3 days they have sent me three separate letters containing nothing but an advert (for Lloyds TSB, some student housing company and for the Teacher Development Agency) and three letters explaining that they send us this junk to keep the cost down. This far from the only junk mail they have sent me though, I have had adverts for O2, numerous for yougofurther, BBC Radio 1’s “surgery” program and some shop called One4Uni.

Why are they using our future as a business? Because they can. Because £15 x 550,000 applicants (£8.25M a year) is not enough.

Scalextric

admin — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 21:26:27 +0000

Built several large scalextric tracks with Jon and Simon this afternoon after playing basketball and aerobee in the park.

To make Jon happy, here is a bad video:

Bye bye GameMaker.tv

admin — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 17:43:10 +0000

A year an a month after I bought GameMaker.tv I have passed the domain onto Robin Monks for use with the audcast his GMKing organisation produces.

The $40/year godaddy renewal fee is something I will be glad to get rid of - especially as I was planning to let it expire after 1 year - forgetting I had set it to autorenew.

Lost out in the PR update

admin — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 12:18:59 +0000

GameMakerBlog appears to be a big looser in Google’s latest PageRank update going from PR2 on July 9th to 0 today. Whilst I am not concerned that my search rankings may slip, they vary week to week anyway, I am annoyed as this could have a big impact in reducing the number of sites willing to advertise on GMB. PageRank is seen as a measure of how noteworthy a page is, so I wouldn’t be too surprised to see income in August at around half that of July.

The pageranks of all the other sites I listed on 9th July have remained the same.

Great local press

admin — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 21:01:15 +0000

Not for the first time Watford FC has fallen out with the Watford Observer.

Back to the browser wars

admin — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 10:29:00 +0000

Found this page about a Microsoft prank backfiring after the release of IE 4.

Matched meltdown

admin — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:14:45 +0000

Over the past week or so Matched has cancelled all 4 of my active adverts which had been paying me £12 a month.

“Some of you have been asking us why your pages have recently been declined, even though you’ve had adverts displayed on them for several months

The reason for this is that several of our advertisers have recently been conducting reviews of the pages displaying thier ads and have asked for some to be removed. This could be for any number of reasons, including lack of relevant content and a poor quality of page.

We have attempted to re-assign new ads for all those pages that were initially declined, but unfortunately there are some that we’re unable to assign other adverts to.

If you’ve found that one of your pages has been declined, we apologise for the inconvenience, but remember that you can now submit other pages instead!

Thanks for using Matched.co.uk…”

Thank you. It was good while it lasted.

I am not all that surprised to be honest as the ads were never particually tagetted - I am more amazed that advertisers actually did, for several months, want to advertise Life Insurance and Corporate Events on a website about a park.

This means there are currently no adverts on CassioburyPark.info which had been getting £9/month through matched.

GMB audience looking for cracks

admin — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 09:28:10 +0000

(over the last month)