Supercod - Personal Blog

Had a fantastic night last night with Chris and George from Sunshine.co.uk and Mark and Bruce from Existem AM. What I thought was out for a few beers after work turned in to an epic virtual golfing tour of a few of the worlds most famous courses. Chris has booked us in for 4 hours, provided the beers and got the food in, what a guy!

Have to say being a non-golfer and only having ever had 2 lessons in Portugal (thanks to Paul Wheatley for them) it turned out that I was actually not bad at the driving the ball far and accurate down the course, however my putting and chipping was really poor so it was a good thing we where play in 2 teams where you could play on the basis of selecting the best shot to go on with, so I was the opener for my team, then they done the rest LOL but we done well.

Anyway turns out this place has been open 18 months and I never heard of it, so if you like burgers, beer and a bit of golf where you don’t need to walk far and can get drunk by time the 18th hole comes round then I would highly recommend try The Golf Lounge out, based in West George Street, in Glasgow.

On Saturday I started calling around different Lawn Mower repair places in Glasgow see who could fix my Honda Izy Lawnmower. I call the first one they have 3 week waiting period, calls next one they have 2 weeks waiting period, calls the next one 3 weeks also, thinking this is no good, finally get to the last one and they tell me it’s a 1 week waiting period. I am like ok, how much will it cost to repair, “oh it will be £70 whatever is wrong with it unless we can’t repair it inside the costs or parts and labour up to £70, then we will tell you but that be £20 for checking it”.. ah ok, so flat rate fee regardless if it just needs the oil changed.

So thought feck this, I am going to look up Google with the problems my Lawnmower that costs over £300 could have wrong with it, I find this simple page where guys says.

1. Check you have fuel (check, I bought new fuel and added it)
2. Check your oil level (check, I pulled out the dip stick thing and it was at correct level)
3. Check your spark plug (ah, didn’t even know lawn mowers had them LOL)

So I check where the spark plug is, I looked for manual on where it is and how to remove it, I find a video on Youtube about spark plug removal, turns out I have a spark plug ratchet, I have know idea why I bough one of them. So I remove it and it looks a bit black but to be honest I have no idea what they should look like so I head off to a car parts place and buy a new one, cost me £2.35 I install it and what do you know the lawn mower starts working, I repaired it myself with use of Google, and £2.35 go me LOL … to think I was going to just go to Costco and buy a new one cause I couldn’t be bothered with the hassle, glad I didn’t now and can finally say I am handy around the home/garden

Today Leona and myself took Adam up to his Primary School visit at Hillington Primary. It gives Adam a chance to see what a class room would be like along with the other kids that will be starting with him and for the parents you get an introduction to the school, booklets and information and can ask questions.

It was pretty interesting hearing how they finally sorted out reading and writing and is now done in a way that children can learn by using not only the words but sounds and actions to remember them, indeed I remember getting this kind of teaching when it was discovered was dyslexic and at the time it was specialist one on one stuff as the school couldn’t cope with it, but glad to see finally worked out all kids could benefit from that type of teaching.

A good friend of mine Julie is heavily involved in her children’s school (as is Paul helping with football coaching), she has been member of the Parent Association for what sounds like ever and get the impression that she works dam hard to make sure the school gets the extra things it needs and I am seriously considering doing the same, probably not in primary 1 but can see how it really benefits the schools if they have active fundraising and help to make sure the school is able to meet the expectation of the parents and local community, I did note that no dads are involved in the Parent Council in Hillington and wonder what the reason for that is.

Anyway the epic journey of 7 years in primary and 6 years in secondary starts this August, can’t believe Adam is ready to go to school now

I been friends with Matt for years ever since we meet via the original A4U forum many moons ago but it was only today that I worked out that Matt shares the same birthday as my mother-in-law Catherine LOL so happy birthday to them both, hope you have a lovely day.

Time to update your Flash Player, to 9.0.124.0 (however that’s just until Adobe release another version hopefully soon) as looks like an exploit is doing the rounds on some websites that could install software to steal your usernames and passwords.

Article over at Security Focus, gives more details “Adobe investigates Flash Player attacks”. Update your Flash Player today at the official Adobe site, go here to do this now!

Way hey, I finally got my Blood Elf Paladin to level 70, my first Horde, this brings the total number of level 70’s in World of Warcraft I have to 4. On the Alliance I have 3 level 70s, a Shaman, Priest and Mage

I totally love World of Warcraft and I will be going to Blizz Con Paris at the end of June this year. Have to say it was a chore to get my Pally to level 70 as to start with I was only doing it a couple of hours every other evening so took longer than it really should have, ah well it’s done now

At the start of the year our landlords served notice on our city centre offices giving us 6 months to find a new place, as we already knew in advance that our office block was to be made in to flats we had started searching before, however it took until April before we found a half decent place. We acted quickly to make sure they had the information they needed and everything was going fine until this week, when all of a sudden the landlords of the new place stopped replying to our emails, and phone calls, we found out from another source also looking at the same office they where told end of last week that the office was no longer on the market as they where in final legal stages with new occupants, sadly not us, basically looks like either someone has come in after us with a better offer or we where getting strung along in case the other people pulled out. So that leaves us looking for a new office again (and legal costs from the other, gits), and we have until middle of August to find, and move in to a new place. Thankfully we have a few back up plans none of them ideal but then if you could see the state of what is on offer in Glasgow for a business of our size you would actually think the back up plans where very, very nice indeed.

Ah the trails of running a business, thankfully got few people around me who can deal with checking out offices to save me seeing the crap ones (however I have seen a few so maybe they need to vet them better LOL) but all in all moving offices is not top of my “want to do list” but certainly creates a challenge for a business that has expanded every year since we started, especially when we had pretty good, well priced and very centrally located office right on George Square. I guess it doesn’t help with everyone else in the building all looking for offices of similar size at the same time, so I won’t be letting on where we are thinking of moving to at this stage, just in case they stumble on this page LOL

Fame at last, I am in the Newspapers (again). When a bunch of us from Paid On Results (top right photo) went to the races last week, we got our photo taken by an Evening Times photographer and to be fair with far more interesting people around I didn’t expect we would actually be in the feature. I think Colin is trying his best to look like he won some money on the races LOL!

Yesterday I went to Rosshall Hospital in Glasgow, I been waiting to be seen on the NHS however it would be several months before my appointment would come through and while it’s not an emergency I didn’t fancy waiting this long, so I looked in to Private Hospitals. Initially I thought you could only visit one of these if you have Private Healthcare Insurance but it turns out they operate a self-pay scheme meaning you can be pretty much seen for and treated for most things in matter of weeks.

I called up last week and was given a brief outline of the costs involved, and was asked what Consultant I would like, having never been asked this question I had not expect it so hadn’t done any research. I was speaking to one of the ward nurses and ask her, who would you pick and she recommend one to me. I then looked him up on Google to see what I could find, interestingly he is one of the top consultants at the Royal Infirmary Hospital and if I was going the NHS route I probably would not have got to see him or if I did he certainly would not be the one carrying out the operation as it’s pretty minor as these things go. In fact what I found very interesting is that if you have the money you can pretty much meet a specialist consultant in most fields in matter of days, however you do need a referral letter from your local GP (and that I found took longer to get than the appointment to see the Consultant, madness!)

So the consultant explained what would happen and offered next week for the operation, now clearly he is undertaking this work after hours and on his days off from his NHS work, so not impacting anyone waiting to see him on the NHS but it got me thinking, why doesn’t the government pay these guys who want to work extra hours and days money to do this, wouldn’t everyone get treated and seen much quicker that way?

One interesting thing came out of the conversation with the consultant, he explained two things I didn’t know, 1st that most private hospitals in Scotland don’t treat children, you can meet a consultant who can explain what the problem is but you can’t get treated as most places don’t have paediatric nurses, kind of making Private Healthcare Insurance a bit of a waste of money for children (however I have a friend who has had very positive results going private with her kids) and 2nd thing was he doesn’t have Private Healthcare Insurance himself, simply said your better taking the money you would pay each month and saving it up, this way when you need access to Private care you can pay for it yourself and probably over the years have money leftover and I guess if you think about it, it costs £1,000+ a year for most people and if you have not been to hospital much or at all for many years and generally healthy that could be a considerable amount of money building up and besides long term conditions are not covered anyway.

So looks like the best idea is to apply for a BMI Card (the hospitals credit card that can only be used for medical stuff inside BMI) as you get 0% interest free for 6 months after any health care purchase and then a typical APR of 9.9% and save up the money I pay on Private Healthcare Insurance in something like Premium Bonds each month.

My company, Paid On Results has been shortlisted for two awards at this years Affiliates 4U Awards. Its split in to two sections, the judge based awards and for this we are up for Best Network Innovation 2008, not bad when you consider how many Networks are in the UK, and even with the least amount of investment Paid On Results still manage to bring out new innovations all over the place. And the section picked by the community we have been short listed for Publisher’s (that’s Affiliate to the man in the street) Choice of Network 2008. This one has more respect as it’s voted by the people who actually matter, the Affiliates themselves. However I don’t hold out much hope of us actually winning as we don’t have the budget to beg for votes, currently a couple of the networks are doing the rounds begging for votes, so all the best to them

It’s not the winning, it’s the taking part, yeah that’s a load of rubbish, it’s all about the winning but at least we got selected, many “bigger” Affiliate Networks with money to burn didn’t even get picked either by the judges or the Affiliates, that speaks volumes in it’s self, so while winning is better then taking part, at least we got selected for 2nd year in a row so I guess we must be doing something right