Firetop

About two months ago I began researching environmentally friendly cars, looking at the CO2 outputs of hybrids and low emission diesel engines for something cost effective and ‘green’. Hybrids like the Toyota Prius are still quite pricey and some environmentalists actually believe their enormous batteries are in themselves a contradiction to the word ‘green’ - so I was interested in the VW Polo Blue Motion (low emission diesel). I went to the VW website, I read other independent reviews and was impressed with the reported fuel consumption, emissions and road tax free status… but then I tried to test drive one and guess what? I couldn’t. (more…)

It’s that time of year again where Grand National fever grips the UK population and everybody goes flutter crazy. With a four year winning streak behind me I’ll be looking to make this my 5th year of success with my spread betting technique. Last year I won £145, putting me up £115 after taking off the £30 outlay, a shame that I only ‘bet to win’ using my strategy and not ‘each way’ because I also managed to bet on McKelvey which came in second. I’ve spent a fair amount of time on the analysis again this year as usual and thanks to a Wikipedia Grand National winners chart decided to lower my maximum handicap threshold from 11-5 to 11-1. I may live to regret that as it rules out the yet to fall over ‘Vodka Bleu’ but fingers crossed it’ll be a wise move. (more…)

In 2002 email marketing was seeing the march of lovely, ‘exciting’, colourful, image-filled HTML beauties. These new emails were enabling us to A/B test all manner of factors due to their pixel tracking capability – informing us of open rates, click through rates and pass-alongs. However, after seeing years of continually falling open rates, default image blocking as high as 50%, preview windows and consequential problems with graphic ad serving I am going back to the old skool with .txt as a default preference for all future campaigns and e-newsletter templates. (more…)

On Saturday afternoon we took Maria to see some real farm animals, taking full advantage of the lovely blue skies we’ve been having of late . It seemed only fair that we let her experience the sights and smells of a farm - having subjected her to numerous children’s books full of pigs, goats, cows and sheep… and our own attempts at animal noises are nowhere near as good as the real thing. Bocketts farm, on the outskirts of Leatherhead was heaving with children and buggies, indeed we had to park in the overflow field and couldn’t even find a seat in their tea rooms, forced instead to feed Maria outside. Once over that hurdle we ventured into the barn to get up close with the livestock. (more…)

It’s been quite hard to get away from the US election in the British media, hardly surprising in my opinion as this is about electing arguably the most powerful person in the world. With Super Tuesday occurring tomorrow (and you thought it was just Pancake Day) the main candidates for the Democrats and Republicans will be decided. Poor Suzie_Q has been forced to watch ‘The / A Daily Show‘ with John Stewart on More4 for the past two weeks - worth a watch even if we do get it with a 24 hour delay. Tonight after watching the global edition I thought I’d see which of the two Democrat candidates (Clinton and Obama) were leading the Google search race in the US - and it’s Barack Obama. (more…)

I was very sad to learn tonight that Jeremy Beadle MBE had passed away after suffering from pneumonia - that after a number of years of battling against cancer and leukaemia. As a child of the eighties I believe Beadle WAS Saturday night entertainment (well… there were only four TV channels back then so that may have helped!). Whether it was in ‘Game for a Laugh’ with Sarah Kennedy, Matthew & Henry Kelly, or later his own show ‘Beadle’s About’ in which he would play practical jokes on people by setting up fake scenarios, Saturday just wasn’t Saturday without him (or the A-Team). (more…)

After many years of musical mixing enjoyment at Brighton’s Honey Club (Guy Ornadel, Benny Benassi etc.) the curtain has finally closed for Suzie_Q and I - refused entry on the grounds that we are from Dorking. On Saturday evening we had planned to visit to hear what used to be the best house/trance in the South East, the occasion - our wedding anniversary, and after a year away from clubbing (having a baby) we really needed it! We even went to the trouble of booking an expensive room at The Grand Hotel so we could be within walking distance. After bracing the gale and rain, a bouncer resembling Eastenders’ Phil Mitchell told us ‘Sorry, you can’t come in because you’re from Dorking… and I’ve got seven in already’. To say we were taken aback would be an understatement, at first we thought he just had a Jack Dee style of humour – but no, he was serious, The Honey Club now discriminates based on where you live. (more…)

I’m just starting to recover having logged out of the ’social networking’ site Yuwie. I thought I’d take a look at how viable the site’s business model is - stickiness of content etc. so I created a new profile. In the process of doing so I had to click ’skip’ to fifteen concurrent pages offering me debt advice, mortgage advice and all manor of other rather suspicious looking offers before I could even edit my profile… many were repeated over and over again. Once on my profile page I managed to load up a photo of myself before the strobbing ‘PC error’ style leaderboard adverts made me feel positively sick (I kid you not). So stickiness this site definitely doesn’t have, it’s main attractor is the ‘revenue share’ deal offered to all members. (more…)

It seems that Christmas comes twice a year with Google Adsense - for this blog at least; it’s been almost 4 months since the last $100 payout and now another little $100 of ad revenue coming my way. What a shame that the dollar gets weaker with each passing day, and that the income of $200 only just about covers the portion of server hosting fees. Thank goodness I didn’t start this website to get rich… I did at least manage to double the click through rates towards the end of the year, should make at least $300 in 2008, woohoo!

This time last year I was advocating that Flash 7.0 be the most up-to-date version that should be quoted for online advertising creatives in 2007, with Flash 8.0 penetration only at 70/80%. This year, having looked at the latest statistics from Millward Brown’s research (available on Adobe) and read the blog of the Product Manager for Adobe Flash Player (Emmy Huang), Flash 9.0 is already at 93.3% in mature markets. Clearly this is a marked improvement on the situation one year ago, and I think it means we can say Flash 9.0 exports will be quite acceptable for ad servers in 2008 without impacting too much on campaign delivery / forecasts. (more…)