Adrian Garside

OK, so you are thinking Gallium can’t be any more fun than Mercury, but I reckon I can convince you.

Mercury is already molten at room temperature, it melts at -38C which for most of us is a bit inconvenient (with a nod to my Canadian readers). Gallium, by contrast melts at a balmy +29C -  just below body temperature.

That means that if we hold a solid bit of Gallium it will melt in our hands – can you imagine that?

Which leads me onto how I know about Gallium – I was just reading a review on a book called “Fun and Intrigue with the Periodic Table”. I know, that sounds improbable, but from the review it sounds excellent – Ican’t wait to read it. Anyway it mentioned a trick involving a disappearing teaspoon – the teaspoon is made from Gallium. (It also explains how a USA senator campaigned for office with blue skin…like one of the Intel men!)

Gallium has the additional benefit of being non toxic, so it is OK to play with it.

Gallium is also readily available on ebay…

I want some. But more likely my boys will get some for Christmas – educational & fun, you see.

I found this website – Record Breakers and Trivia on UK Album sales.

I have 13 of the top 20 Albums, including both Queen Greatest Hits – the second was good becuase Under Pressure was on it, but it had a big problem – you know that thing, where you know the track order in your mind, so when one track stops, you know the intro to the following track? Well, that messed up the second version, I hardly ever listened to it!

Maybe this isn’t an issue with the ipod generation.

Out of the remaining 43 on the list I had another 14 – so 27 in all. Not sure if I had Now 44, so I didn’t count it!

Curious the albums that are in in, and the ones you’d think were in it, but missing – Led Zep 4, Appetite for Destruction, Nevermind all not there…

How do you fare? Be interesting to hear – put your score in the comments box please

Back when I was a lad we’d go camping, or we’d go for a swim in a river. Camping was called camping and swimming was called swimming, or a ‘dip’ or ‘skinny dipping’ if our attire was skanty.

But now, to draw attention to draw attention to the fact that you are not under the juristiction of the Health and Safty executive, if you camp in a place that isn’t a campsite, it is called “wild camping”. And, since Saturday was the hottest day of the year, I found myself looking for a place to go ‘wild swimming’.

If I still lived where I did as a child, I would know where to go, but I don’t. Fortunately, there is a website called ‘WildSwimming‘ and this told me to head up to Twyford and swim in the River Itchen, or rather, the River Itchen Navigation – which is the man made bit of the River Itchen that was made for boats to use I guess.

The boys and I had a whale of a time, and this place is well known – there were a few dozen people there!

Di took some photo’s of me and Zak jumping in – sorry about the quality, they were done with a mobile phone. Finn did jump in but his photo just showed a splash!

I was kind of neutral for the final – both were teams that I had hoped would do well – both teams have a track record of playing beautiful passing football. So my hope was for a great game of football.

I was disappointed in the game – it was poor. For a showcase event this won’t have made any non football fan think ‘Oh, I see why everyone likes this sport’. The Germany v Paraguay game for 3rd was much better, possibly owing the the freedom you get from there being no big prize.

On the day I am glad Spain won,  Holland seemed to have decided to use pretty ugly ‘non dutch’ tactics to defeat Spain and in this game, as in life, whenever you behave unnaturally you get found out. I think, when Holland reflect on this match they will think ‘Why didn’t we play normally?’ and if they’d lost, they’d have at least lost honourably. As it is, they are focusing on all the ‘shakey’ refereeing decisions that went against them, while ignoring the deliberate ‘benefit of the doubt’ decisions that they benefited from.

In the lead up to the World Cup I was really excited – it seems to me that world cups of yesteryear were exhibitions of the finest football. This time round it hasn’t been like that and over the weeks I had moved from watching almost every game to watching hardly any of them.

I daresay I will be excited again in 4 years time…I hope that it’s better, but I suspect it won’t be – players and managers are human and the hype is overwhelming – even in New Zealand,  the football hype was all consuming during the group stage and they knew the chances of progress were slim.

Ah well, moving on, it’s the Tour de France now – I wonder if Armstrong will recover from yesterday’s events!

If you build a website, you want it to be found by google and yahoo so that if someone searches for the widget that you make or the service you do, you stand a chance of being found.

If you are a small business owner, you will probably have a website, and you will probably be pestered daily from people who ‘work with google’ or can get ‘you on page 1′ or something along those lines.

Di can build websites – she did the large part of this one and showed me how to do the bits I did. It works well, and gets a fair number of hits. She has been impressed by the platform – wordpress – which I particularly wanted to use as I used it with my last blog.

Today she has rebuilt her own series of websites, including an online shop using the same platform – wordpress. She is already getting a good number of hits – over 100 on her first day.

Cool huh – check out her website building prowess here

I use Firefox, I find it faster than Internet Explorer and it has more useful gadgets.

My laptop has a wide screen and most websites aren’t wide screen so most of the time I have space down the sides.

I have recently downloaded a widget that occupies the left hand 1.5 inches of my screen and shows all the ebay items on which I have bids or I am selling – it’s not essential, but it is handy – someone has just bid on one of my kites that I don’t use anymore.

If you are a Firefox user there are loads of widgets – called “addons” – here – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/

Greasemonkey is another favourite of mine – It doesn’t do anything itself, but it’s job is to allow small programs to adjust websites you view – these small programs are called ‘scripts’. So, download Greasemonkey, then choose some ‘greasemonkey scripts’ to download – I just found this page – 25 Great Greasemonkey Scripts for Improving Your Facebook Experience

Another addon I use is adblocker – now, when I visit websites I hardly ever see adverts – and so my internet works faster.

Ah yes, regular readers will have noticed the weight tracker on the right hand side.

A couple of weeks ago I was in Cornwall with friends and Tim took some pretty high quality snaps only marred by this huge chap in some of them, he seemed to be lurking with my boys…ah, that’ll be me then!

Although clothes shopping gives the game away sometimes, I still think of myself as I was when I was, say 25 – not thin, I did too much weight training in the 1980′s ever to be thin again, but I still looked good on the beach.

Anyway, encouraged by the snaps I put some battery’s in my scales, discovered that I had reached a new world record weight and started considering my eating and exercise habits.

Fingers crossed you will be able to track my progress, I’m hoping ‘public tracking’ will aid my discipline. I’m aiming for 14 stone for now – that will take me out of the clothes I wear now, into the clothes I used to wear say 10 years ago…there may be fashion crimes. If I go below 14 stone, I need a new wardrobe, I think I was last below that weight in the early 1990′s…

Di, the boys and I had a fabulous weekend with our friends Tim and Harriet and their children. Tim and Harriet live in Cornwall, so, it being the hottest weekend of the year, we went to ‘a beach that they know’.

T & H were amazed at how busy it was, the car park was full and we had to use a field which also became full. I expected Cornwall to be heaving on a weekend like this, so I wasn’t surprised.

If you double click on the photo’s, twice, they get much larger… you’ll be able to make out the crowds… The beach was perfect, but clearly well off the tourist trail and I’m not going to say where it is, for exactly that reason.

Hedge End Allotment

Yesterday I had a problem with my allotment – I had a notice letter, you may have spotted some indignation on my part.

Today I had a page and a half letter from Hedge End apologising and explaining their position and how the issuance of the letter had arisen.

You know, yesterday I was pretty peeved with the situation.

Following reciept of this letter, I am happy again and fully engaged with being an allotment holder.

This experience holds true in business too – an unhappy customer, dealt with properly can become a happy customer again.

But strangely, these customers can become more than just ‘happy’ customers, they can become more loyal, more happy and more likely to recommend you.

So, a complaining customer isn’t necessarily a lost customer, he is giving you a chance to prove yourself – after all, he’s still talking to you.

So, Angela Ripon was on the BBC this morning making a point about utilities.

They state that the same company will offer different rates in different parts of the country – so, a provider will offer worse rates
in it’s natural territory, than others.

The reason is that in a company’s natural territory most people will use them regardless, they don’t need to be competitive to keep
customers. So, were I to do a price comparison for me, ‘Southern’ would never be the winner.

So, the obvious course of action is to shop around, but people just don’t. They often say things like ‘No, I’m happy with my gas, it never
goes wrong’. Well, yes, but for the same gas, or the same electricity, you could pay less.

So, why don’t people shop around?

Well, there is the thing where company’s will attract you with a good deal the after a while you won’t be on a cheap deal any more and
it was a waste of time. There are company’s with 30 tarrifs or more.

So, if you aren’t interested in shopping around every 6 months, the other strategy is to choose a company with just one tarriff for all
it’s customers, including the new ones. A tarrif that is pretty cheap – cheap enough to attract the new customers, although maybe not
the very cheapest at any one time.