my blog

So there was a strike on Thursday with council workers. Polotics aside, you would think that there would be a notice on the councils web site to tell us when they were going to resume collection of waste? No. I emailed them on Sunday, and no reply by the end of today. Pretty poor. So I used their online form. The response is "Thank you very much for your enquiry. You will receive an acknowledgement within 2 working days and a response to your enquiry within 5 working". Hmmh. Not very satisfactory, we pay over £100 a months for this shoddy service.

Are you worried about negative equity with your UK mortgage? As the credit crunch starts to bite, the predicted price drops are hitting hard and house values are dropping like stones. This Is Money have produced a useful negative equity calculator to work out the likelihood that you might be in a negative equity situation and when.

Using the Filefield and jQuery Media modules you can build a recipe which allows Drupal to automatically present video media in the right player automatically. This screencast explains how.

Well before it became fashionable to be environmentally friendly Patagonia, an outdoor equipment manufacturer were breaking new ground in becoming more responsible and accountable for their commercial activity. They have for a long time invested a portion of their profits in buying upfragile landscapes which are under threat of development and are actively involved with 1 percent for the planet.

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We are quite careful who we buy goods from. Usually we ask friends or check out the internet for recommendations. Recently we ordered a Tavistock Sideboard and Lamp Table from Arighi Bianchi in Macclesfield. We selected Arighis because we had assumed that being a well established company we would have none of the problems associated with buying from retailers such as Harveys and similar which friends had experienced. We found the shop floor staff to be pleasant and efficient, and left the store feeling confident that everything would be just great.

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When we were at one of the cafes at the Eden Project recently we noticed these rather unusual plant pots which had clearly been inspired from Gabions.

Just what we've been needing, a peaceful place to escape the town and enjoy a superb quality coffee and some nice food in a rural ambiance. The hollies Farm shop has recently opened and is clearly an immediate hit. All items served up in the cafe can be bought in the Farm shop to take home and enjoy again!

An effort has been made to ensure as much produce is sourced locally from Cheshire and the surrounding counties. The term farm shop does not do justice to the comprehensive range of quality meats, vegetables, preserves, deli food, jams and premium breads and cheeses. 

Seems I am not the only Mac user with a faulty wireless mouse. You don't have to look hard to find a forum full of complaints about the wireless mouse Apple are currently shipping with Macs. However, there is a solution, turn the mouse upside down and roll the scroll wheel on a piece of paper to clean it. Hey presto, your scroll wheel works again!

Updating a hosts file on a mac in OS X Leopard is a little more difficult than a PC.http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/internet_utilities/hostal.htmlIt is possible to edit the hosts file direct but it is a bit techie on OS X. You need to do EXACTLY the followingYou must have access to log in as the root user - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1528?viewlocale=en_US

These are a list of unix commands I find useful. It is more a personal note but I am sure you might find some of the useful.

ls -l | more : this writes directory listsing to more and allows paged listing of long results.