Duxford’s Flying Legends
by matt @ 10:59 pm. Blogged under Nostalgia, Travel / Holidays
Popped up to Duxford’s Imperial War Museum (Cambridgeshire) on Saturday for the ‘Flying Legends’ air display. Admission prices have skyrocketed since I was a lad - it cost £150 for my carload of people to get in. The last time I went (in the mid 1990s) it was about £30 per car to drive in and watch the air display… a decade later it’s £30 PER PERSON with additional costs for ‘walking past the planes on the air strip’ or getting on board for a ‘look around’. Now call me Victor Meldrew but with people collecting to ‘get Concorde flying again’, shouting “Got any spare change?” I thought they’d have to be pretty lucky to find anybody at the show with that luxury.
It’s very hard to reminisce about things you did as a teenager when few people that you know years later can share the memories. Last night over a beer at The Lincoln Arms (Kings Cross), I was recounting tales of CB radio glory from the mid 1990s, which lead me to talk about the Friday night foxhunts I took part in. No, they DIDN’T involve real foxes - more like hide and seek ‘
On the tube this morning I was lucky enough to find a copy of today’s Sun newspaper. I’m not normally treated to such a delightfully informative resource, but today was different. I came across an article that detailed how the University of Newcastle has discovered that carrot juice reduces tumour growth by as much as 30% - this due to the Beta Carotene contained within the said carrot juice (apparently). “Why does the Sun have this information and nobody else?” I asked myself - so I checked out some real research papers.
When I was in uptown New York last month meeting with the folks at Doubleclick my attention was drawn to the ‘talking avatars’ gaining in popularity over in the US. It’s always difficult to create that ‘personal’ feel on a website consisting of just words and pictures, now with the assistance of the folks at ‘Oddcast’, you can feature your very own animated character to put your visitors at ease and audibly deliver your message.
It’s always interesting Googling your surname to see what you can find, ‘Peskett’ isn’t the most common of names, although there are enough of us for there to be another ‘Matt Peskett’ down in the Eastbourne area somewhere. Apparently he’s in ‘Decontamination’…HBO’s Mafia boss Tony Soprano is technically in ‘Waste Management’ so I’m not sure whether I should be scared of my double. Tonight, whilst checking for Google’s progress with spidering this new website, I came across a children’s entertainer up north(ish) called ‘Chris Peskett’. He is the co-writer of the award winning Catherine Tate Show. 
I received a mailshot recently which carried an advert for an air conditioning company called ‘Munters’. Now I must confess that this had me somewhat amused since, as many of us younger folks know, the word has become something of a popular insult. I thought it was time to look up the accepted meaning of the word since I’ve never really taken the time to investigate.
It could only happen in California I guess but a company called ‘Kinderstart’ (no, they’re not a German fertility clinic) have decided to launch a class action against Google over the PageRank zero score allocated to their website. Allegedly they’ve lost 70% of their traffic since this happened and they’re claiming Google have penalised them deliberately because they’re scared of the competition (they have a search box)… what does this mean for search engines? 
The web can be a bit like Marmite sometimes, with seemingly infinite techno jargon making its way into our dialogue with every passing day, you either have to ‘love it or hate it’. Todays word of interest is Swicki which I guess sounded good to the creator because its a bit like WIKI and search but not whats it all about? 
Reading the Metro on the tube this morning I saw an interesting article about a ‘life straw’ invented by ‘Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen’ to enable the inhabitants of developing countries to drink clean water, even if it’s dirty at source. Basically it’s a big tube with various filters inside it to remove micro organisms which spread diarrhoea, dysentery, typhoid etc.as the user sucks up the water. 
One of my UK clients recently received a link to a company that offers ‘multilingual SEO services’ - they build ‘optimised’ (and I use the term loosely!) landing pages in multiple languages.This led my client to ask me if I thought it was worth them shelling out some cash. My answer seemed like it should be posted on here for wider reference in case this ever comes up for you too, in SEO or PPC promotions…
Loading ...