They have since corrected the mistake, but I am one of those people who tends to take screenshots of things like that, just in case…

Netherlands Win World Cup?

Working with websites all day I can see how this sort of thing can happen. Although I would say that CBSNews needs to give its users a little more training

This bit of news was, in fact, how I learned who had won the 2010 world cup. I didn’t watch the final, or indeed, any of the matches during the contest.

This time the article was titled: “How ‘BT Sarah’ spies on your Facebook account: secret new software allows BT and other firms to trawl internet looking for disgruntled customers.”

Here’s the link

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1284363/How-BT-Sarah-spies-Facebook-account-secret-new-software-allows-BT-firms-trawl-internet-looking-disgruntled-customers.html

My first gripe with this article is the use of the term “secret software” to describe something that takes literally 2 minutes to do and doesn’t even require any software to be installed. Any company can keep track of their brand through a simple Twitter search, but things like Google alerts are also useful. Indeed, a Google search for the term “social media search” reveals site after site who provide exactly this service, and almost all of the time it’s free!

Secondly, social media is an excellent way of keeping tabs on the general feel of your brand online. I would absolutely expect all brands to track their own name on social media sites as the bare minimum of online presence. In my opinion, a company with a good PR department will proactively solve problems that their customers are having using this mechanism.

Think about it, how likely are you to buy from a company a second time if they sort out all of your problems for you on a personal level? The fact that you might have had trouble in the past becomes irrelevant when they turn around and are actually nice to you.

One important lesson the Daily Mail seems to forget time and time again is that *ALL* social media sites allow you to protect your updates from everyone. People have full control over who sees any content on these sites (yes, even on Facebook), so any content they put there is done with the full expectation and understanding that it will be read by someone else.

I really don’t see the problem here.

• Turned 30.
• Changed jobs.
• My son started school.
• Visited Windermere on a family holiday.
• Started writing #! code.

Whatever you are doing in 2010 I wish you happiness and prosperity.

So I have deleted the Twitter posts and some of the older posts that I don’t like too much.

What I might do is to rarely update this blog and create a front page that links through to my social media profiles and other sites. I may even change the site over to Drupal, which I have been doing a lot of work with recently and quite like how it’s put together.

The Ethical Meta Tag

My search engine strategies are always ethical, but rather than assume that the search engines understand this I employ the ethical meta tag. When I am optimising a site and I want to make absolutely clear that what I am doing is all above board I would use the following tag in the head section of our page.

<meta name="ethical" content="whitehat" />

Other values of the content attribute include blackhat and greyhat, to cover all eventualities.

Big Truck Title Tags

Rather than having tiny little title tags that don’t describe very much I like to take the approach of creating not just big, but really, really big title tags. This is accomplished by a simple process of copying and pasting the entire contents of a page into the title tag, thus resulting in a keyword rich and relevant title tag.

Roll Of The Dice Heading Tags

As you know, there are 6 heading tags (h1, h2, h3, h4, h5 and h6) so rather than do the usual thing of starting with a h1 and working down; I use a dice to decide which heading tag to use. Every time I come to write one in the code we just throw a dice and use whatever value appears. This keeps the content of each page fresh and interesting for search engine spiders.

Schrodinger’s Cat Search Results

Rather than actually tell anyone what their search results are I prefer to take a more pragmatic approach. If everyone involved assumes that a site will be either "ranked" or "not ranked" then by not checking we are creating a state of quantum flux. The site is both "ranked" and "not ranked" at one and the same time. If anyone actually checked the results the quantum waveform would collapse, so in order to prevent this I simply ban everyone from Google.

By using these RG techniques (and a few others) I can help you to optimise your site and help you achieve the rankings you want.

To answer this we need to look at how substances are diluted in homeopathy. If we take a typical homeopathy cure for insomnia, which happens to be pure caffeine, we would start off by diluting this into 100ml of water.

We would then take 1ml of this solution and dilute it into another 100ml of water.

Dilute 1ml of original solution in 100ml of water

This is the same as diluting the original solution in 10,000 ml of water.

Take 1ml from first solution and dilute it into 100ml of water.

The process is called serial dilution and is normally used when diluting solutions of chemicals or even bacterial cells. When diluting bacteria we would start off with billions of bacterial cells in a solution and dilute them serially in 10ml of water 3 or 4 times to achieve a solution of liquid with a countable level of bacteria. This solution is then spread across an agar plate and incubated. The resulting growth of bacterial colonies can then be counted and the original concentration can be worked out.

In order to achieve a dilution factor of 30C you would transfer 1ml of solution into 100ml of water 30 times. To work out the actual amount of water needed to directly dilute the original substance we need to multiply the volume of water by the amount of times we dilute. Because we are increasing the dilution factor of the original solution by 100 each time we dilute we must multiply the initial solution by 100, 30 times, which is also 100 to the power of 30. Working this out gives us a very, very large number.

100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 x 100 = 100³⁰

This works out to the following number

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ml

This can also be written as 1×10⁶⁰ ml, or a 1 with 60 zeros behind, which is equivalent to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 litres or 1×10³⁰ litres.

To work out how big this is we need to convert it into cubic meters, there are 1,000 litres per cubic meter so this sum is quite easy.

1×10³⁰ litres / 1,000 = 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 m³ or 1×10²³ m³.

This is clearly a very large number, and because humans have trouble understanding just how big numbers are we need to put this figure into some sort of context. There are 9,460,536,207,068,016 meters in a light year so this roughly works out at a cube of water 10,570,225 light years across. Since our own galaxy is about 100,000 light years across we could fit it into the cube over 100 times.

We can take this a step further by looking at how long it would take to drink this amount of water. Assuming that a dose is 10ml we can work out how long it would take to consume the whole thing. Let’s say that we have 6 billion people, and we give that population 2 billion doses of the solution every second.

1×10⁶⁰ ml / 10ml pre dose = 1×10⁵⁹ doses

At 2 billion doses per second and 6 billion people we would be administering 1.2×10^{19 doses per second.}

Time required = number of doses / number of doses per second
Time required = 1×10⁵⁹/1.2×10¹⁹ = 8.33×10³⁹ seconds

1 year is about 3.1557×10⁷ seconds so this works out at:

8.33×10³⁹/3.1557×10⁷ = 2.64×10³² years or 260 million trillion trillion years.

The universe is only 13 billion years old, so if we assume that 25% of this mixture must be consumed before a single atom of the original solution is contained in a dose (which it probably wouldn’t). This is still 6.6×10³¹ years or 66 million trillion trillion years.

Amazingly, even if you take the dilution factor down to 13C this is still the same as a single drop of the original solution in all the water on earth. I find it astonishing that anyone could even slightly entertain this as being feasible. Talk about crap based medicine! If you think that homeopathy works then I have one question for you. Would you take a homeopathic contraceptive? Try it and let me know about the results.

If you are wondering how to test homeopathy then go and buy a homeopathic solution of 30C of caffiene (the cure for insomnia) and take about 600 times the stated dose. I absolutely assure that the only effect it will have is to make you want to go to the toilet, lots. Of course homeopathic remedies are also available in sugar form and I don’t advise you swallowing over 6kg of sugar as it will probably make you ill. Note that it won’t be the homeopathic remedy making you ill, just the volume of sugar.

If you want to check this for yourself and are wondering how to divide 1×10⁶⁰ by 1,000 without breaking your calculator did you know you can use Google to do maths? You will need to type the number in long hand (as in 1 followed by 60 zeros), but it will work.

After some research on the internet (Google is my best friend) I found that this was due to blowing a fuse.  This happens when you try to use your windscreen washer when it is frozen. If this happens to you then don’t worry, you can just swap the fuse and you will be fine.

Skoda Fabia Fuse Panel

Skoda Fabia Fuse Panel Ledgend

The fuse box on the Fabia is located behind the driver side door on the main dashboard panel, next to the stearing wheel. To open it just find the little notch in the bottom half, pop your key in there and twist it.  The whole thing should come off, but it is a little tricky.

To get things working again just replace fuse 21 with a 10 amp fuse.  If you don’t have a fuse handy you can swap the broken one (make sure it is broken) with fuse 32, which controls the back windscreen wiper.  This will mean that you can drive to your local fuse shop and pick up a fuse even if it is raining.

To get the fuse panel cover back on just put in the panel by lining up the three hooks on the straight edge and push it towards the front of the car.  Once you have it nearly in place you can either hit it in with your fist or just close the door on it.

To stop this fuse blowing you need to make sure that your washer fluid is not frozen before you use it.  You can always increase the concentration of the fluid to prevent this from hapening during the winter.

[Update: Images taken from Fuse Panel Layout fabia-vrs.com. If you have any Fabia problems then take a look, it's a good site with lots of information.]

However, I’m not sure what else to say really.

Maybe I’ll think of something in the new year.

If anyone is reading this, then I wish you a happy and properous new year. By prosperous I mean both financially and in terms of happiness.