The year has almost gone…

Well the year is drawing to a close, thank God, and to be truthful I will view it with some mixed emotions…

It started well with me taking the company from a lowly sole trader to a more established Limited Company. I wanted to do this for several reasons but the main one being it gave me a lot more opportunity for growth and stability…

May bought a massive change for me when I purchased www.helmstore.com It was the largest singular investment I have made to the business and it’s also been the most successful! It was nerve wracking spending a considerable amount of money on something that I wasn’t 110% sure would succeed. As it happens, turnover has tripled with the acquisition and bought with it a huge increase in the customer base so I think it’s safe to say it all worked out quite nicely!

Growth in the hosting and design business was very strong throughout the year until November when a mini-disaster struck and very almost put us out of business. Those of you that host with us will know the full details but needless to say it was a very traumatic and stressful couple of weeks..

It was those events that really made me realise what a fantastic and loyal group of friends and customers I have as without them, I wouldn’t be writing this now…

So what’s planned for 2006?

Well there are several new sites launching for clients as well as the beginning of a project that I’ve been toying with for quite some time and I’m sure it will be a winner. I’m looking forward to the New Year and I’m pretty sure it’s going to be a good ‘un!!

Yeh I know…

Knowing full well how much I like Little Britain and obviously consuming too much of the Christmas spirit, one of my good friends Alex from www.redtigerdesign.com knocked up a quick graphic that he suggested I use on the redesigned hosting site…

Yeh I know

Somehow I dont think it will be appropriate, but it’s good enough for the blog… 😉

I’m slipping already…

You know I promised myself that I would make more of an effort this time round with the blog and I’ve started to slip already! I have a very good set of excuses though…

I’ve been working pretty damn hard on various client projects that are launching December/Jan 2006, I’ve given www.helmstore.com a face lift to fit the new company branding and to get people used to the new look for when v2 launches next year…

I’ve been running around like a headless turkey (very seasonal) ferrying people about for Christmas shopping and what seems like tonnes of food and gallons of drink, we have a total of five parties we are either hosting or going to over Christmas/New Year…

And I’m knackered to be honest! The one saving grace is that I’ve booked my holiday for July, two weeks in a villa on the costa brava with another eight members of the family. Some serious drinking going on there I can tell you! If you’ve ever met my mother-in-law you will know exactly what I mean…

So that’s the reason for slight blogging hiatus but then again I’m a a great believer in that if you have nothing interesting to say, don’t bother…

Looks like this entry just broke my own rule!

This will be a spolier for the kids but hey ho…

There are approximately 2 billion children (persons under 1 in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist (except maybe in Japan) religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas Eve to 15% if the total, or 378 million (according to the Population Reference Bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.

Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, feed the reindeer any snacks left for them, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house.

Assuming that each of there 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks.

This means Santa’s sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second – 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysees space probe, moves at a pokey 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.

The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (900g), the sleigh is carrying over 500,000 tons, not counting Santa himself. On land a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 150kgs. Even granting that the ‘flying’ reindeer could pull 10 times the normal amount, the job can’t be done with eight or even nine of them – Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, by another 54,000 tons, or roughly 7 times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).

600,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous ar resistance – this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earths’ atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vapourised within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.

Not that this matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from 0 to 650 m.p.s in .001 seconds, would be subjected to acceleration forces of 17,500 g’s. A 250 lb Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 lbs of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs to mush and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.

Therefore, if Santa did exist, he’s dead now.

Merry Christmas.

Goodbye Google, I’m leaving you…

My dear Google,

For many years you have been my closest ally on the Internet. You have found things I never knew existed, including things I wish you hadn’t found. You’ve been rock solid and not a drama queen in your design and simplicity. You’ve stuck by me through thick and thin…

Trouble is over the last couple of years you’ve been getting rather fat and lazy. You performance in the search department has been lacking and you keep giving me results that I didn’t ask for. You’ve got loads of friends but to be honest, they are paying to take advantage of you and leading me astray with their links…

Hell, even I paid to be one of your closest friends and all you did was bleed my credit card dry and gave me nothing in return.

You’ve stopped going to gym and have turned into a gargantuan who seems intent on swallowing up the world with you mail, stats, mapping services, all of which I have tried to enjoy with you but I can’t help feeling that you’re getting too big to fit into that streamlined home page…

So I’m leaving you. I’m not sure who will be my new search mate but they will most likely be a reflection of what you used to be; fast, accurate, streamlined and a search friend not an enemy…

Goodbye…..

Blink and you’ll miss it…

Just recieved my copy of Blink by Malcolm Gradwell from Mike at www.sharpsbooks.co.uk

This is a bit of a deviation from the normal type of books I indulge in where they normally centre around the SAS or thrillers. In a nutshell it’s a book that explores what happens when you look at something and have a “gut feeling” that something is just not right but your brain can’t quite work out why.

I read a review somewhere, I forget where, and it intrigued me so the order went in. I’ll post a short review when I finish it which could take some time…

There should be a law against this…

Dear Tony Blair,

Please pass a new law banning the creation of websites such as Yetisports.org

The simple reason is that the use of such sites leads to:

  1. Crankiness when you lose
  2. Excessive use of the mouse button
  3. Inability to concentrate on normal life
  4. A strange urge to have “just one more go”

and that’s just for starters…

These types of games are more addictive than crack and if you think that de-classifying cannabis was a good way to reduce addictions to harmful substances then this should fit nicely into your plans…

Thank you,

Phil “My finger hurts” Williams

Time to get fit..

Been visiting Cameron Caine for a while now. The owner, Cameron Caine amazingly enough, has developed a unique and highly original way to get and keep fit.

In a nutshell he has taken the idea of exercise and turned it on it’s head creating an area where you can actually enjoy throwing lumps of metal about and doing generally exhausting things. Personally it’s wearing me out just reading the damn thing but he has managed to achieve what very few people do these days and that’s that he has created something original.

Take another example. The Million Dollar Home Page created by Alex Tew. Now Alex first popped up on the Shell Livewire forums, where I am a regular poster, some months ago and asked everyone what they thought of his idea. I said it was genius and I’m glad to still say that as he amassed an obscene amount of cash in a few short months.

Sadly, also within a few months, the idea has been copied to hell and I’ve yet to come across a single site that even remotely measures up to the original. The key is be original and creative, don’t be lame and just become a follower…

Spammers

Just a word of warning if you are a spammer or a spam bot reading this blog and are thinking of posting your crummy link to various medications that would improve the quality of my sex life or offering me the opportunity to grow hair where there really shouldn’t be…

  1. I will ban you and your IP permanently from my servers (yes I do own them)
  2. You will then be tied hog style to an eight foot length of bamboo
  3. “Show me the way to Amarillo” will then be played at ear bleeding volume whilst you have red hot needles inserted through both eyeballs
  4. I’ll turn up on your doorstep armed with enough pizzas to feed an entire family for a year and several skips ready to take away your wordly possessions including your well thumbed copy of “1,000 ways to really p**s people off”

Harsh? Probably…

OK I’ll drop that damn song from the list… Better?