Hateful things #1

First in a new series of posts for this blog... Hateful Things will be a way of me continuing to post general disgruntlements without having to spend ages thinking about a massive post. So... without further ado...

Hateful Thing #1 - Coffee granules in the sugar

Teabag - check, sugar - check.... hang on a minute, what are these flecks of what look like dried faeces in my sugar?! ARGH!!!

You know the feeling... you go to spoon up a nice dollop of sugar for your morning cup of tea and find SOMEONE has gone and put a coffee-ingrained spoon into your sugar, leaving granules of the pollution all over the place. HATEFUL.

Caravans... why?!

Caravans have always bemused me. I have never been able to fathom why somebody would want to spend a relatively considerable amount of money on a tiny, cramped, smelly house they can tow around behind them.

Campervans are not much better, though slightly more understandable, depending on the context of their use. I know a few surfers who use them... but that is purely so they can spend more time surfing. Theirs is a surfing lifestyle, not a caravaners lifestyle.

Most people would think I am a typical driver who hates following the meandering lines of caravans through Devon's roads... and I am, but I am not really complaining about the never-ending procession of sluggish neo-troglodytes wending their way through the beautiful countryside... or at least it was beautiful, until some smoking monstrosity towing a white lump of garbage turns up to smog up the place. What I am complaining about is the lifestyle caravaners have chosen fro themselves.

See, what they will do is drive across the country to a field that is filled with more smelly white boxes and park up. Then they will proceed to set up, hooking up their water, if there is such a thing where they have chosen, putting out an awning perhaps, some uncomfortable folding chairs and then cook themselves a lukewarm meal of food poisoning on their ineffectual gas burners. This they will then do for x number of days, until it is time to pack it all away and go home again.

The drawbacks with this kind of holiday are many and we all know what they are, I am sure. But the main puzzle for me is why you would spend anything from £4000 to £20,000 on a caravan in the first place? If you go for the luxury model, you are spending enough money that, if you chose to put that money in a bank account in the first place you would have enough money (and the interest too) to get yourself at the very least nice bed and breakfast joints for the next ten years worth of holidays... and for the top whack you'd probably have enough to pay for some very nice foreign holidays in very nice hotels where they will do all the cooking for you and you don't have to empty your own bog.

I do feel it is about time caravaners explained themselves...

"The web equivalent of a dung salesman"

That is my description for these self-taught cowboys who roam around generating business for themselves and charging not inconsiderable amounts of money for what can only be described as a steaming pile of web excrement.

I shan't name people... but you can find examples for yourselves if you simply look for small business websites. As these companies are small, they often don't have a web presence and make themselves easy prey to these gobshites who manage to swindle some cash out of them for next to nothing.

Common indicators of this phenomenon are:

• splash pages - in some cases, it is fine... one of my own uses a splash page, but it has a purpose. www.mangetout.co.uk has two shops in close proximity and you'll want the right one. Whereas, the webshites will often learn a new trick and use it every time they create a site. One I am aware of does this for every site he has built. And... worse than using a splash page unnecessarily is the fact they look crap. If you're gonna make a splash page, at least make sure it serves its purpose - in this case, aesthetics.
• visit counter - why?! WHY!?! Who gives a toss if they are the 5000th visitor or the 5th? WHO CARES?! It's one of the easiest and quickest ways of making your site look completely amateur - which is why it is a prime indicator of shitness.
• today's date - cos we don't have enough things around us telling us the date. Desktop calendar - check. Wall calendar (dogs) - check. Computer desktop - check. Watch - check. Phone - check. Diary - check. Who honestly needs today's date on a webpage? Admittedly, a lot of bigger sites do this too. Commonly, news sites... but that has a purpose too. Not so for a simple presence website. Idiots.
• "This page was last updated on..." - the quickest way of making your site look dated. Okay, if you have a page that it is important to keep up to date or for people to tell if it was updated since their last visit, fine. But that's not particularly necessary on small business/organisation websites with lots of static content. All it does is make your site look feeble and unwanted by the lack of attention lavished upon it by its author. There is nothing worse than going on a site and seeing that a page was last updated five years ago. Worse, I suppose, is going to see a page that looks like it was designed five years ago and was only updated yestesrday... that's common on these scheister sites too.
• Badly cut/rendered graphics - one example of a site that was ironically pinched from us shows this perfectly - we had made a Flash intro for this unnamed site... it shows a few silhouettes of children doing various activities in an animated way... the new 'designer' chose to badly cut out the children individually and staple them back together into the header of each page on the site - not only that, but he didn't bother to recreate the header text at all and simply cut that out of the previous header too, so a mishmash of the worst of everything right there.

There are many, many more I could list - but these are the most obvious and the ones I pick up on most often. I could go into much more detail on every small crime these bedroom designers commit - but then, I commit enough of my own sometimes. I have a decent excuse though. I'm often in a rush or I am too lazy. They have none. They think what they do is cutting edge and awesome. But perhaps that's the problem. So do the muppets that they con out of their cash... I honestly wonder whether some people actually have full use of either their eyes or brain when they see examples of these people's work. They can't honestly think they're getting value for money.

The temptation to simply build up a list of all the businesses with crap websites and mail them a proposal for redesign is FAR too tempting. It's a pity that I am far too busy/lazy to do it. I'm sure that I'd nail one out of every five for a job... making it a pretty penny to earn. I do have the banker that I have a few jobs lined up for myself, which is nice... but if things get tight, I'll be knocking on some virtual doors and informing these businesses that they've been conned right and proper.

www.webpagesthatsuck.com/

New Camera

At long last I have been able to get the camera of my dreams... well, pretty much. Not top of the range, which I would inevitably buy if I were to win the lottery, but as good as I can afford! The Canon 400D has been the object of my desires since it first launched over a year ago and now I have one!

Thanks to an eagle-eyed consumer who posted a detailed entry to one of my favourite websites, www.hotukdeals.com, I was able to get one for £302... which is a bargain!

So far I have only been able to use it sparingly. The weather has been poor and opportunities few and far between. Today we were able to go to the farm and take a few photos along the river, which was great. Next weekend we aim to head off along the south coast of Devon. Perhaps Dartmouth, Salcombe, Kingsbridge and Bigbury... weather permitting.

Upping Sticks

So we are moving home... after living with Megan (in her flat) for the past 18 months we have made the decision to sell up and move into a bigger place... a house.

Now... that's great news, obviously. However, as anyone who has ever been through the process will surely know, buying/selling houses is a minefield of pitfalls, heartbreaks and anger management sessions.

The first problem is marketing the property you are selling. Which agent do you use? Well, you have to consider the market you are selling to, the price range and the relative costs involved with different agents. We opted for Red Homes, who are an internet and paper advert only agent. They have no office, therefore overheads are low and they can offer a rate of 0.75%, which is great! Considering the flat is a first time buyer type property and a value of £127,500 is low, we thought internet (rightmove.co.uk) and the local paper would be enough.

That hasn't quite proven to be the case. We marketed the flat half way through January. Between then and now, two other flats in the same block have been on with two other agents (Underhill and Haart) and both sold... one of them sold the day it went on the market. Now, that seems to suggest we are in a popular location. Also, knowing that one of the flats that sold was in a right state and needed massive modernisation AND was £7000 more expensive... we rightly feel that we should have sold by now. So we are in the process of switching agents.

Second is finding the place you want. This has two main areas of contention. One is what both Megan and I want and how those two ideals don't marry up into a nice compromise most of the time. Megan wants a big garden (or decent garden) which must be south-facing to get the best of the sun. I want a nice kitchen and big lounge. So far we have found a handful of properties that fit both bills, but they've been snaffled up in the meantime cos we've not been able to make an offer. Or we have found properties that one or other of us are keen on, but can't make compromises on.

We are also seriously interested in a new build property in Crediton, which looks great. It is all fitted in a lovely contemporary style, great kitchen, big lounge, nice garden, garage, off road parking and up to 4 bedrooms (one of which would be my boys room of course). This would be target #1, except we really need an offer on the flat before we can make an offer on the new build.

So... it's now a two week countdown until we can switch agents and hope for a swift sale. Fingers and toes are firmly crossed.

I'm a very bad man

I've only been to the gym once this week so far, thanks to that DVD nonsense carrying over into this week... I should be picking it up from the video geezer later today... along with the Xbox 360 I have just committed to buy. Someone on the staff noticeboard at work posted one for sale... £250 for Xbox Premium Edition with the hard drive, headsets (2 of), wireless controller (2 of), battery charger and four games (Pro Evo 6, Call of Duty 2, Ridge Racer 6 and Tiger Woods) - I'll be trading in a couple of them to get me something like Gears of War and Forza Motorsport 2 or something though.

I'm a bad man

My fitness regime came crashing to the ground after just two weeks of gym use. Tomorrow the work begins once more after a week in Tunisia followed by a week of slovenly behaviour.

This weekend has been frustrating, boring, relaxing and entertaining.

Frustrating: I was asked last week to find a way of creating a DVD that would be a compilation of video clips from a set of DVDs of Exeter City football matches. I admitted at the beginning that I had never done this before, but that it should be possible. Over the course of the next few days and several software downloads later it quickly became apparent that if the DVD was to be made, it would not be me making it. Therefore, the excellent Rebecca Ramsden helped me out by giving me the number of a mate of hers who was able to help me out. Hopefully we shall be in business by the end of the week.

Boring: Due to having been away on holiday for ages, it was decided (mostly by me, I admit) that we would have an idle weekend of simply relaxing... this was achieved for the most part, but relaxing isn't half boring... normally I'd hope to play golf, but the weather was so appalling that even that wasn't really possible.

Relaxing: As stated before, it was a relaxing weekend. Due to the weather being so bad, I lounged sloth-like on the sofa, watching various sports on the miniscule TV that we are lumbered with whilst my huge one is in the shop getting fixed. This weekend's sporting highlights included the French Grand Prix, The French Open (golf) and the first One Day International between England and the West Indies. All very good and ideal fodder for the lounging sports fan.

Entertaining: Due to the sheer level of idleness, we were able to watch a couple of films that have been sitting in the pile for an age. Saturday night we were able to watch Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby starring Will Ferrell and Sacha Baron Cohen. I'd been leaving off watching it as I was going to copy it and wing it back to Amazon. However, it was encrypted beyond DVD Shrink's ability to back-up and so we watched it.. and I'm glad we did, cos it was hilarious. After it had finished I was on the computer and ordering a copy from play.com (who currently have a huge sale on, by the way). On Sunday it was the turn of Lucky Number Slevin. Another film I had modest hopes for, but was also a pleasant surprise. Quite a stylish film with a good twist that helps tie all the loose and confusing ends together. A bit like a Guy Ritchie wannabe movie with an American flavour, but was actually a rather fun film and well worth a good 3 to 4 stars out of 5.

So... that's the tale of the weekend. For this week I am hoping to get my car's huge dent repaired, for the DVD project to go off without a hitch and for my lovely big television to come back from the fixer uppers.