my uk life

toddler taming

my friend susan has started a blog on parenting of children ages 0-5, and in reading what she has posted so far, i think it's absolutely great. it's sound, practical advice and written in a way that helps people understand not only what needs to be done but why. i'm looking forward to reading more.

how to look great for cheer competitions

today i was searching on the web for some advice on baby constipation (poor madeline), and one of the results that was returned was for wikihow: the how-to manual that anyone can write or edit. it's a very good example of a wiki, which is in very simple terms a website that is editable online and to which it's very easy to add pages.

i browsed around wikihow a bit, because the concept is great and they have loads of categories. while there are plenty of serious topics covered, there are many funny articles. one i had to highight--for reasons embarrassing to admit--was "how to look great for cheer competitions," but browsing further i found "how to act like a gangster," "how to make slimy-gooey," and "how to do a round off in gymnastics." all very useful.

google searching

last week, i read an article in the newspaper about small businesses who were relying on google search hits for their business, only to face financial ruin when google changed its search algorithm. they featured a shoe store that specialized in large shoe sizes. apparently this store saw a huge percentage of its sales coming in from the internet and discovered it had, by sheer luck, gotten itself into a position where it came up as the first search result when people searched on "big feet."

the small biz owner got used to the additional business, until -- you got it -- google made a change right before christmas last year and the shoe store fell several hundred places. suddenly the internet business the owner relied on disappeared. i can sympathize with the owner, but i don't think you can blame google. really the owner should be thankful for the money he made when he was at the top.

a colleague of mine pointed out that my site shows up first on google at the moment when you search on "shannon banks." i have been wracking my brain ever since learning this but can't think of a single thing to sell that might allow me to take advantage of this stroke of luck. funnily enough, the site with my name as its domain, which appears to be a site for an insurance company and probably does want to make some money from their web presence, is a few hits lower.

you go agreement...

i went online to buy a baby pushchair this evening. after much deliberation, we chose an easywalker, mostly because it is extremely lightweight, so we can lift it into our car without breaking our backs, but has nice sturdy wheels so we can take it out on walks along the river. there is only one supplier for the uk, and it's a dutch company that sells online and exports to britain.

as i was filling out the online form, in english, i came across one line in dutch: "gaat u akkoord met de leveringsvoorwaarden," with only one response, "ja." it was a mandatory field. so before accidentally signing my life away to the devil or agreeing to distributing my contact details to all the world's telemarketers, i went to babblefish and did a free online translation. it came back: "you go agreement with the deliveries conditions."

so. that's okay then.

email weather forecasting

today started out to be a beautiful summer day, and as we're working from our home office, richard and i went outside and ate our lunch on a bench in the park. the sun was shining and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. that was 1pm.

i got back inside and received an email from a co-worker who was in our Reading office, about 30 miles from here, commenting that they were having a torrential rain and thunderstorm, and that everyone was standing at the windows watching, the weather was so severe. that was 1:30.

i wrote him back and told him the weather here was fabulous; he replied that the storm had passed through Reading and was heading east. that was 2pm.

five minutes later, the sky turned dark and thunder started rumbling in the distance. i can now see raindrops hitting the surface of the river outside.

if you have email, who needs the weather channel?

defragmentation

in the last few months, my laptop performance has slllloooooowwwweeeed down to a place where it is painful. booting up takes 15 minutes. getting outlook up and running takes another ten. so this morning, i finally decided to take the time to try to clean things up in the hopes that it will help. if it doesn't, i'll try a more drastic approach.

this sounds like a rational plan, but it's currently 10:35, and i started this process of disk cleanup and defragmentation at 10:00, after suffering with my crawling laptop for an hour. defrag is currently at 3% and moving files i've never heard of around on my system. cleanup is at 2% and is compressing old files.

and while this cleanup happens, nothing else is productive. opening this window to type this message took five minutes. outlook never successfully loaded.

so i'm viewing this as an investment for my future, and realizing that i can do little work until this machine is once again functional.