Monthly archives: May 2005


Six Figures

Another day, another blogging challenge. This time to earn over $100,000 from a blog in a year. Maybe being on a daily income that is equivalent to $100k at the end of the year would be a more realistic target.

My self imposed targets are much simpler. Adsense’s payout limit is $100. It took six months to reach that figure for the first time, and it looks like it’s going to take three months for the second time. If I can keep halving the time it takes to reach $100 at least to the end of the year I’ll have a nearly viable income.

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You can see for feet up here

I spent an hour and a bit in a cloud yesterday, constantly having those horrible moments where you think you’ve reached the top only for a gap to appear and more mountain to become obvious. Despite a lot of rain the day before and a few moments when we thought we’d have to turn back, we made it to the top of Sca Fell Pike. I took a lot of shots on my phone cam which I’m going to try and stitch together to create a time lapse film of the trek. The battery died before we reached the top and it doesn’t have the Doctor Who landscape we had to scramble across, but it’ll give an impression of the walk.

One third of one of my 100 Things completed.

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Rules of the road

A woman’s guide to cycling.

Local governments tell feeble lies

All local councils claim to want to encourage cycling. They read in a book somewhere that this is what you ought to say once you ascend into local office, like, “I’ve lived in this community all my life, and have a real commitment to the area.” To this end, they put out measly leaflets telling you pig-obvious things like, “Avoid getting trapped between two articulated lorries.” If you didn’t know that, you’d already be dead.

The truth is, they hate cyclists with a passion. That’s the only way you can possibly explain all the things they do to endanger us, like inventing giant buses that bend in the middle, and laughingly encouraging us on to cycle paths so badly maintained they look like a trap set by Wile E Coyote. When you hear anything from any official on this matter, never forget they lie. They lie, they lie, they lie. It’s even possible that Steven Norris is lying about the helmets.

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A social observation

The kind of person who routinely prefixes “cyclist” with “kamikaze” is exactly the kind of person who prefixes “asylum seeker” with “bogus”

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Do pay attention 007

To answer my own question, yes you can get ejector seats in 1/32nd scale. However I think I’ll pass and build something for myself.

I have received the Aston Martin and Packard Victoria. The Victoria’s going away until I get or make a gangster figure, so I’m looking at the Aston as my next project. I’m going to get the Secret Agent in the next few weeks but I’ll work out what his vehicle contains in the mean time.

It was an EBay purchase and only cost 74p (postage was over twice the final price) so there are a few problems. The rear axle is missing and the front pillars are bent, one broken, from some abuse in a past life. I might be able to find a new axle from the parts bin, but I’m considering enclosing the whole drivetrain as if it’s been protected against mines.

There’ll be no back seat passenger space in this DB5. I’m going to build my own ejector seats and the launch tubes etc. are going to take up a bit of space. There’ll probably be some rear firing weaponry as well. This is where I can get away without buying specific weapons. As a product of Q division the guns on this car will be unique. I have some etched parts for switches and extra gauges and I’ll drill out the glove box so it can be open with a handgun inside.

The first job, however, is probably going to be gluing the glazing in as a way to straighten the pillars and get the roof line fixed.

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The Transporter

With the exception of some very good fight scenes about three quarters of the way through this film is challenging Catwoman for a special place on the bottom of the pile.

Jason Statham is Frank, a retired soldier who now plies a trade as a getaway driver/ courier of illegal goods in the South of France. During the opening chase sequence his robotic insistence on sticking to his special set of rules, supposed to drive home his hard edge, actually makes him look like an anal retentive queen. And it only gets worse from there. Finally breaking one of his rules, “Never open the package”, he gets involved in a nonsensical confusion of double crosses, shoot outs and people smuggling culminating in a fight on a moving lorry reminiscent of Indiana Jones.

The car chases want to be Ronin, and fail miserably. The acting is terrible. And this little corner of the Riviera is populated by people who speak English, with only their stupid accents to hint where they’re from. Given that it was co-written and produced by Luc Besson, the man behind the excellent Leon, I was expecting so much more.

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Nappy ever after

Leo Hickman, who has practical experience of nappies having spent a year “elbow deep in excrement” picks apart yesterday’s report about disposable nappies.

The fact is that, to my eyes at least, this report is full of holes. Why are its findings based on an assumption that washable aficionados use 47 nappies, whereas we had easily got by on 20? Why did the Environment Agency survey 2,000 parents using disposable nappies compared with just 117 using washables, meaning that (taking into account the weighting towards those using older-style nappies which use more cloth), many of the assumptions are based on the habits of just 32 people? Why does the report include the energy used to iron nappies? Who on earth irons their nappies? Why was it assumed that people environmentally conscious enough to be using washable nappies would automatically want to tumble dry them?

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All Change

It’s been quite a productive day all told. Paperwork has been completed and handed in to the County Court. Bureaucracy has been bullied into submission and forced to promise payment. I’ve spent all the vouchers I got from the Bullshit To Work course on CDs and DVDs. And, entirely independent of BTW, I got a job.

True it’s only temp and it pays just �6 an hour, but it gets me off the New Deal train wreck and it involves commercial experience with Illustrator and DTP software. Plus, it’s at the MRI which is only a fifteen or so minute walk from the house.

How does this affect Spinneyhead? Well the whole treating the blog as a job scheme was knocked off course by BTW and I only really got back into the swing of it yesterday anyway. The short commute means if I get up early I can post one or two things in the morning to keep you occupied on your lunch break. I’ll also have an hour or so before everyone else gets home in the evening. I’ve been managing about a dozen posts a day across the family and I’ll try to maintain or improve on that level.

How to Save the World for Free, Digest, Dig and Scale are better moneyspinners for Adsense revenue than the main blog, but they just don’t get the traffic. So I’m going to work on ways to grow that. Expect to see a sidebar down the right with the most recent posts from the other blogs on it. To get new customers I may even consider buying a few cheap adwords myself.

Spinneyworld is still on the cards as well. I’m trying to get WordPress installed to use on SW. Hopefully that will be up and running by next week. An ethical investing blog I had been considering is going to have to go on hold, though.

Tomorrow I must get my hair cut.

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