The Pinged Hobbit

Ask any one who knows me and I am sure they will tell you I am a bit of a procrastinator. I have a tendency to leave things till the last minute. I’ll get out of bed at the last possible moment. Continue reading »

Following on from my recent post about TV programs from my childhood I thought I would recall some of the films that defined my childhood. Being a child of the 80’s there are some pretty icon films that I grew up with. Mind you there are some pretty damn crap ones as well, still at least I managed to avoid the detritus of the 70’s . Continue reading »

There are various ways to increase sales in a growing business. You can use the Internet to further your brand awareness to the population at large. If you are making enough money you can even go as far as advertising on some other media like television or radio. There is one major source of increased sales that the majority of people under appreciate, that is your existing customer base, people who have already dealt with you in the past should be much easier to deal with again. No matter how much you increase sales, no matter how many new customers you bring in, there is a finite limit to how much you can expand. Your existing customer base is an untapped resource in most cases. Returning to existing customers and either cross selling or up selling can lead to massive amount of revenue. The key to being able to tap this resource however is to build a strong relationship with the customer. To build a strong relationship you have support the customer as well as you can. Below are some useful methods for improving the customer support process no matter how large your business is.

Continue reading »

Society is evolving so rapidly that sometimes it’s hard to remember how things used to be. The speed at which technology advances is quickly changing how the world works. It’s 40 years since we first went to the moon, yet the computer that sent us there had less power than a modern calculator! Lets face it there are somethings we all experienced growing up that our children will never have to know about, heck there are somethings I experienced growing up that people 10 years younger than me don’t remember! Continue reading »

Unfortunately for most of us the chances of getting to work from home all the time are pretty slim. As much as we might not like it we are going to have to spend time in the office, personally I find office time to be my least productive time of the day. Working at home I find it much easier to concentrate on a task then I do in the office. I’m sure that I am not the only one that suffers from this. From looking around our office I would say I am not the only person who struggles with this issue. Here are some of the biggest productivity killers as seen in our office: Continue reading »

It’s annoying when you need to open a file that’s been sent to you only to find that you need some expensive piece of software to access it. You know how it is, someone sends you a psd file but you don’t own photoshop. What do you do? It’s happened to us all. But there are places out there that can help: Continue reading »

The number of people capable of building a web site is growing daily (I said capable, I didn’t say good . Something else that is also growing along side this is the number of web based applications being built. More and more developers/people with some know how are devoting time to producing some kind of application that uses a web based language like ASP or PHP. The hard part about building something that uses a server side script like PHP is that it is impossible to test your application with out access to a web server. I suppose you could just upload it to an active web site and test it live on the internet so to speak. Would you be honestly comfortable releasing something that hadn’t been tested? It would be all too easy for some one to find an exploit to use that causes serious problems. I’d say it’s much easier to have some way of testing this on your local network, that way if you have no internet access for some reason at least you can keep working
Continue reading »

Lately I’ve been feeling a little nostalgic. Thinking about the past and things that I remember from my childhood. It all started a few weeks ago with the release of the new Transformers movie, revenge of the fallen. Reading the reviews after it’s release made me think back to when I saw the original Transformer’s cartoon movie and finding out Spook was in the new movie didn’t help (he is the voice of Galvatron in the original movie), so much so that I ended up going setting about watching it. Took me a while to find it mind but it is out there online if you know where to look, although split into multiple parts.

Watching this old time favourite of mine got me thinking of what other shows I used to watch, shows that I just simply couldn’t miss. If like me you’re a geek who grow up in the 80’s and 90’s some of these shows probably defined your childhood just like they did mine.

Continue reading »

One thing I hate is being lied to. I like honesty, tell me the truth and I might be a bit upset but I will appreciate you for it. You will go up in my estimations for your honesty. Tell me a lie that I find out about and well, you’re in for a quick route to my most hated list. One thing is for sure I won’t do any kind of business with you. I’m not the only person with this point of view I am sure, everyone hates being lied to and in this day of search engines it’s much easier to be caught out than you would think. Continue reading »

If you use Skype you probably know all about the Skype In service. You pay a monthly fee and get a phone number you can give out to people which they can call from any phone and you received the call on your computer via Skype. Continue reading »