http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/house-and-home/property/cost-of-living-loft-conversions-447990.html

http://www.above-it-all.co.uk/lofts/pictures/01b.html

http://www.simplifydiy.com/building-works/extensions/loft-conversions

http://roomuptop.blogspot.com/

ok croissants are bad, but they taste soo nice!

I like this receipe as it tells you how to make them, and then freeze them so you can eat just the 1 you want rather than an entire batch!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/database/breakfastcroissants_89.shtml

This weekend I had the fortune of being taken away on a suprise mini-break to Ireland, I had a great time however there were a series of things which made me think about Ryanair.

ok, we travelled on ryanair because it was the cheapest and they happened to fly to an airport we wanted (in ireland). I think they’re okay but if I had to line them up in order I’d place them above some package holiday flight operators and below easyjet. One of my key factors is the fact that they have to keep on telling people how great they are. If they really were that great we should really know.

It starts with the fact that as soon as you get to the gate you get told “You may only have 1 bag as your hand luggage, any food/etc you have bought must be contained within the same 1 bag”. This is repeated numerous times.

Then you get on the plane, and then realise that the seat pocket which would usually hold a safety card has been removed (probably because that costs money, money they have to avoid to keep the flight cheaper) and the safety card has been moved to a sticker in front of your face. Where its not a massive problem it does leave you wondering where to put things somewhat.

The overhead storage on my flight had london tube like ryanair avertising saying “Worlds Best Airline, Cheapest Flights Guaranteed” etc/etc. It really did feel like I was on the tube. Is this completely necessary?

Then as soon as I landed I’m played an announcement saying “Yet another on-time flight, ryanair have the most punctual service of any other airline”.

My impression is that Ryanair tend to fly to smaller airports and are mostly short haul, therefore its fairly unlikely that these small airports are going to have problems with air-traffic, so quite frankly this statistic doesn’t make me more likely to buy another ryanair flight, if anything the continual announcements are less likely to make me have a higher opinion.

ok their pricing model has removed all hold luggage (I can only assume they mostly cater for people travelling light), but I wonder whether this really works.  Families must make up for a fair proportion of travel and they surely dont all travel without luggage. But ryanair is the company who considered charging to use the toilet and also have considered charging obese people more to fly. How long until we get a tax for being ideal weight (your thin, so we use less fuel to fly you so you can have a discount!) or something equally mental.

I think I prefer pain and simple and I would probably consider flying with Easyjet if it was a matter of a few pounts difference, probably just to avoid the announcements!

Irish Airports, grr.

somehow I get the impression Shannon Airport must be being operated by Ryanair!

Airports are annoying at the best of times, but Shannon airport in Ireland really annoyed me today. I arrived, then waited at the departure lounge (not really knowing if it was one of those airports which had no chairs the other side or not), then when the gate was announced I made my way through security, hmm. I’d thrown away the re-sealable plastic bag that gatwick gave me when I arrived, so I asked for one. The reply I got was “You can buy one from the machines over there”, looking slightly bewildered I walked over to what looked like a gum ball machine, which was infact dispensing resealable bags for €1 ! Realising that I’d packed my money and didn’t knowingly having a €1 coin, I told the person that I didn’t have one and could I use another clear bag, the answer was No, either find a euro or bin the items. Great Attitude. So I unpacked my bag, and progressed to search for a coin, fortunately i found one else I think I probably would have got fairly annoyed. It was one of those bits where you’re not sure if you can go back to the terminal or not.

Oh for those who are interested, there is another lounge on the other side which is reasonably sized! although the gates appear to have enough seats for 2 people! so dont go too early else you’re going to be standing up for a good half an hour or more.

The annoying thing is; its the airports that require that I have toiletries in bottles smaller than 100ml and that they are placed in a clear plastic resealable bag. Now I accept that if i want to take toiletries that I will have to buy them but quite frankly offering a 1c plastic bag wouldn’t harm anyone, I’ve done my bit buying overpriced tiny toiletries anyhow.

I guess they need to pay for the giant gum ball dispencing machine, and the fact that each bag is housed in a giant tough plastic ball, to me it was a giant money making expense which made me think that Shannon Airport are penny pinchers. So if you’re travelling from Gatwick to Shannon dont forget to keep your complementary resealable plastic bags, or better still take a tonne from Gatwick and give them to Shannon airport to hand out!

Ok, you’ve all seen the recent Natwest Adverts with them being all helpful

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=194oL3-Q8QI&NR=1

Well what they obviously dont show is the 20 odd people getting frustrated who are waiting. Its fair enough to try not to rush your customers but sometimes they could do with wrapping up the old ones so that the existing customers (such as myself) dont end up waiting 30 minutes just to hand in some ID along with a letter at the request of natwest.

I’ve been a Windows Server webfusion VPS customer for a while and I’ve recently given notice.

I’m glad i’ve given notice because the last incident took over 5 days to actually acknowledge , and had I not already started moving my customers to another server it would have caused them about 5 days+ downtime, which isn’t good from any angle, with no apology or real concern from web fusion.

I’ve had a VPS from webfusion for probably 18months, maybe 2 years (not sure why i let it run for quite so long).  My original VPS 1.0 was poor, often fell over and basically although you could rdp and do stuff you were so restricted on ram that nothing really worked, after endless complaints I eventually got through to someone who said “sorry, the windows vps dont really work and we’ve now put them on bigger servers” and I got upgraded to their VPS 2.0 servers.

The VPS 2.0 were more or less stable, although the ram limit often caused issues with sites showing as “unavailable due to resources”, which is obviously more of a VPS issue but one which webfusion/pipex restrict so much that its not really fit for purpose.  Its been like this for months, often having to reboot it once a week to keep it going. (At best i think i had 10 small sites on it not so good when your paying £40 a month).

Then my VPS stopped, interesting.. quick call and my VPS has been moved to a new data centre along with a new IP! er, what?

After searching through my emails, I found 1 email titled urgent planned maintenance, and half way down (after a lot of text ) there was a notice saying they were doing this upgrade and I needed to change my DNS ips.  Surely information of such importance should be made significantly clearer and repeated if its going to cause downtime?

Since the upgrade (which now uses Parallels Desktop Manager instead of Virtuoso) my machine un-mounted pretty much every other day, until the 25th of december when it unmounted and failed to remount.

Numerous emails to support (which is apparently the fastest way to reach support) which had no reply for 48 hours, who then replied with ” sorry our server had a fault and its now working” – then getting annoying because it wasn’t running at all !  Two support tickets later (thanks to them closing the tickets automatically) I eventually get a reply saying my VPS is beyond repair and customer services will be in touch to setup a new account in a few days. Well maybe a week has past and nothing.

So in conclusion, I dont recommend web fusion vps servers.

Don’t you just wish that people on freecycle (sorry greencycle) would stop making really stupid WANT requests;

“Seeking a small microwave 800 watt e rating cooker to keep upstairs in case of confinement to bed to save up and down journeys when ill to heat milk and light meals. Needs to be in good safe working order please.
Small tv pref flat screen as not much room with free view available for same confinement reason as above.”

My answer is; go buy it or go without, stop being greedy! asking for a microwave and tv isn’t unreasonable (entirely) but specifically a flat screen with freeview just takes the biscuit !

I’m sure Freecycle used to have a rule that you have to have given stuff away in order to place want requests. I’m feeling more like I should post “I have paid into the lottery for many years and haven’t won so would like a million pounds preferably in small notes, thanks in advance” !

The other day whilst browsing through the laminated book of dreams (otherwise known as the Argos catalog), I realised I desired some floor guards to sit underneath a treadmill I had recently purchased. Like almost everything I buy i try to surf around to see if there’s a better deal to be found and try to take into account postage, typically Amazon tends to win mostly because they offer free postage, but in this case they really were the winner as they were offering it for £11 with free postage (which was almost half price), so I ordered two lots just to be sure it was sufficient.

What transpired is that Amazon shipped it in two separate dispatches, which surely must have cost them say £3 to ship each one, and this made me wonder how much Amazon makes and how much our need for a bargin affects the countries we buy these goods from. The english pound tends to be fairly strong against currencies so I guess that allows us to buy more for our money but it does make you wonder how much it really costs to produce goods and how much competition drives the price to the manufacturer down keeping the countries unable to grow because we only ever pay peanuts for goods.

Obviously there’s fair trade for fruit and veg, but how do i know if i pay more for electrical goods, clothes or shoes that it actually helps the countries that make it. I guess there’s specialist companies who sell ethical gear, but really we should be told how much is profit to the brand and how much goes to the country who made it – i bet if we did we’d all be shocked.

Today I also stumbled across this site; http://www.storyofstuff.com/ which has much the same principles, although in a much more funky video format.

Flickr has been down for a good few hours – hope its nothing serious

http://blog.flickr.net/en/2009/10/20/thar-be-dragons/

(few hours later) phew! its back up

I recently noticed that my local freecycle brighton group got cancelled and then reformed as GreenCycleSussex, which is good for people to help other people with their unwanted stuff. But I can’t help but notice that people make the strangest of requests, nice doors, a wood burner – surely if people do have these lying around their house they’re not going to give it away just because someone has happened to post a message requesting it?

I’d like a really fancy “working” sports car , maybe a top of the line kitchen, a massive walk in fridge and tickets for two somewhere exotic, – I’m never in a million years going to be given these for free just because i’ve asked for them, but i guess i shouldn’t dismiss someone for trying!