etsting the rss feed

testing...

Art from a burst pipe...

There's a burst pipe in front of the house, it's a redundant outside tap.. I took this a couple of days ago. Converting to mono, and giving it just a slight tinge of blue for a more glacial appearance, and a little sharpening was all that was required.

Click on it for a larger image.

Cheers

Liam

Looking over to Windermere from Alcock Tarn

Looking down on Grassmere in the Lake District

Converting HTML quickly so that you can post code.

Hi all,

as you may have seen in the last post, I put up some pretty HTML. In order to do this so that it knows it's just for show, rather than actual code that the browser needs to parse, I found a handy little tool here..

http://www.accessify.com/tools-and-wizards/developer-tools/quick-escape/default.php

that takes the brackets etc. and converts them to escape characters.. for instance < is written as &lt;, and > as &gt;

Just though it may be useful to some of you.

Cheers

Liam

For the Tapestry blog

Hi Tapestry,

here's the code for your template to link to other blogs..

<!-- Beginning of side bar links -->

<br />
<h2>Other Blogs</h2>
<br />
<a href="http://www.theerrorblog.blogspot.com">The Error Blog</a>
<br />




<!-- End of side bar links -->

then scroll down the code in your template untill you get to this bit... (It's about a third of the way down the template code) and put that chunk of code in where I've marked, making sure that it's above the

</div>

tag.

<div class=\'widget-content\'>
<a href="http://umbrellog.blogspot.com/">
<img src="http://www.eureferendum.com/images/umbicon.gif"/>
</a>

.....Code for links goes here.....

</div>

When you want to add more links, then just use the same format for the link..

<a href="the full url including http">The text you want to appear</a>
<br />

and add it underneath the previous one.



Cheers

Liam

Those robbing b...........s!

Hi all, after a long break...

it takes a budget to get me going again. As some of you know I'm the Vice Chairman of a Social Club. It's part of a Community Centre and offers a nice little club to the local community. Since the smoking ban, trade has dropped off somewhat, and just recently, the suppliers increased the price of drinks by just under 4%. This happens once a year, and they're not a charity, but it's reasonable. We increased, for instance, a pint of Fosters/John Smiths by 8p to £2.23 from £2.15 last month. Now we have to put up the prices again from Monday by 5p to £2.28 for the same drinks. What they fail to mention in the hyperbole about increases in duty is that you also have to pay VAT on the rise, hence 5p not 4p. In 5 weeks, through no fault of our own, we will have increased the price of a pint by 13p.

Unlike our bigger commercial rivals ie. the pubs, we don't have a chain where we can play off prices across various establishments to keep ourselves competitive.. for instance put a few pence on Fosters in one pub, and sell it cheap in another. Do that across the range of products, and no one pub suffers a massive increase across the board.. you can always attract custom with one special offer or another.

We don't have that option, and really have three main brands, Fosters, John Smiths and our House brand spirits, which increased from £2.15 to £2.25 last month (per 50ml), and with the latest increase will now be £2.30.. 15p increase in 5 weeks.

This is a service that we offer the local Community, and make just enough profit to pay the staff and a token rent to our parent Community Association.. in theory. I reckon if we lose three or four regular main customers we'd struggle to stay afloat.. and these increases may just be enough to do this. At the moment we have three evening shifts staffed by volunteers (Mrs Liam and I cover two of those ourselves) as it is, to keep the wage bill down.

I have no idea why the sudden need to increase duty by so much, as it is, as all supplier increases provide an increase in current duties, and of course the VAT that increases automatically along side. I've checked previous budgets, and previous increases go as follows..

1998 1p
1999 0p
2000 1p
2001 0p
2002 0p
2003 1p
2004 1p
2005 1p
2006 1p
2007 1p
2008 4p

..more than half as much again as has been the combined increase for the last decade, in one fell swoop.

This budget, which does nothing for anyone really.. OK, they're looking for the grey vote with the increase in Winter Fuel Allowance; could be enough to finish a Not For Profit community organisation, and in the South at least, Community interaction is sketchy at best. Of course, as the profits generated are used to fund the Community Centre that we are the registered trading arm of by way of rent revenue, this has knock on effects for the whole place.. pre-school, playgroups, Guides, Brownies, and a hall for private functions such as weddings etc... you get the idea.. the hub of a community of 5,000 odd people could well become but a note in the annals of the Local Historical Society.

Well thanks Darling.. and organ grinder Brown.. nearly 2 decades of hard work by myself and three or four other hard working volunteers could go down the pan, just because you couldn't.. to coin a phrase, run a piss up in a brewery.

I may well post later.. I'll be spending much of this evening discussing the potential fallout with the treasurer and secretary (Mrs Liam). You'd probably do well to have your metaphorical earplugs at the ready.. I may use a rude word or two.. which will get edited by breakfast, as my Mum sometimes reads this. :)

Cheers

Liam

testing

just testing something

Hey everybody, it's snowing.

Here's a couple of pictures from Thursday's snowfall..

Click them for the bigger versions of course.





Cheers

Liam

Hi all,

here's another sunset piccy.. this time at Bosham in West Sussex. Hope you like.



As usual, click to enlarge.

Cheers

Liam

Sunset at Southsea..

Hi all,

on a visit to Southsea yesterday evening, I took these..

(as usual, click on them to get a bigger version)

Lamp Light



Lighting Up



More "arty" than my usual pictures, but I like them.. :)

Cheers

Liam

Old England in the fall

Hi readers, :)

well Autumn seems to be upon us now, so I thought I'd better post up my latest couple of photos. These were taken at the weekend, at Winkworth Arboretum near Guildford in Surrey. I hope you like them.

Click for the large photos as always.






Cheers

Liam

Hi all.. (optimism eh?)

I haven't blogged for a while, and you obviously don't feel the need to comment on Jimmy Hendrix, so how about a few more pictures..

These have all been taken over the weekend, at a local nature park.



The swan is a pretty simple composition but I think it works quite well.



Old England in the fall..



A kingfisher..

This is the best I've got so far of the kingfishers there. Taken with a 300mm lens on a 2x converter.. on a DSLR that's a focal length of 900mm.. handheld. So it's not that bad an attempt really. They're so fast when they fly, as this one shows..



that if they land you just have to snap away and hope that you got it. Still, that'll be my challenge over the next week or two.

I've got plenty more to show, so this will probably be a photo blog for a little while.

Cheers

Liam

Hendrix

Hi,

just a quickie..

Not to everyone's taste, but if you like guitars this is a classic.



Click here to comment!

Cheers

Liam

Photos from The Lake District

Only a fortnight between posts.. wow. :)

We went to the lake district last week, and here are a couple of images. The first being from Tarn Hows



and the second is of a bee..



er.. 'cos I like it. :)

Click them for bigger images, as usual.

I took in excess of 1100 photos up there, so I'll no doubt get around to putting up a few more eventually. If I get my coding head on at some point, I'll set up a couple of galleries on my other site.. which is in dire need of some more things on it.. :(

And I think I need smilies as well. So little time etc. etc.

Cheers

Liam