Sometimes I feel like putting my hands up in the air

Many thanks for all the cards, tweets and facebook messages we’ve received.

Just a couple of quick points, until she feels old enough herself:

• she won’t have a Facebook account
• she won’t have a Twitter account
• she won’t have a blog
• she won’t be joining the Liberal Democrats

She will however have her photo taken at every opportunity and have the images uploaded to both Flickr and Facebook as quickly as possible, as well as cute.argh.tc.

This simple Wordpress widget allows you to have the Twitter widget on your sidebar.

I wrote this widget for a client who wanted the new Official Twitter Widget, however all the Wordpress plugins I came across either used the plain old widget, or did their own thing with the data.
It’s based (heavily) on the work from seanys, which used the old widget.

To install either use the built in plugin installer and search for (Un)official Twitter Widget, or visit the Wordpress Plugin page and download the file, unzip it, and FTP it to your /wp-content/plugins/ folder.

If yes to all three, then my plugin may help.

Scheduled Planner is an admin plugin which appears in the Add New / Edit Post section of Wordpress. At the moment it just rests in the top right as I’ve yet to work out how to make it in to a nice widget. It shows the last two posts published on your blog, and then all the scheduled posts. Allowing you to work out if it is safe to hit Publish or if you should schedule this post for 3 hours time.

To install just download the ZIP file and dump in your wp-content/plugins/ folder or use the Add New feature in Wordpress (search for Schedule Planner)

Tested on 2.8 and 2.9.

Latest version now hosted on wordpress.org here:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/schedule-planner/

Donations welcome

If you wish to get the calendar on your mobile, you might consider using Goosync, you’ll need a premium account to sync calendars other than your primary one. They are available from £19.99.

Yesterday, after the World Cup draw I sat down and copied and pasted the fixtures using the BBC and FIFA as source reference. Two hours of work have resulted in a nice calendar in a format that I want. I mentioned on Twitter that I would share it, and got some requests back. What I was surprised to find when testing the “share” feature on the netbook logged in under Heathers account was that there was no longer an option to Search Public Calendars. Assuming I was missing something, I looked all over the Google Calendar page, still nothing. Next stop was the Help pages, a quick search for Public resulted in this The “Search Public Calendars” button is missing from my Google Calendar. All I have is “Search My Calendars”. It has 172 posts, no official reply from Google and it started back in February!

Turns out Google have a help page explaining why they removed the service

Removing public calendar search and the public calendar gallery
We’ve decided to discontinue public calendar search and the public calendar gallery. These were specialized U.S. English-only features that weren’t used as extensively as we would have liked, and proved difficult to maintain over time. We’re looking at ways to make it easier to search and browse public calendars, but for now we’ve removed the gallery and public calendar search function.

“Difficult to maintain”, were not talking about an undergrad with a project that suddenly exploded, we are talking about Google, the guys who index over a trillion webpages and ensure the search results are returned in under a second.

So for the time being if you wish to share my Google Calendar for the World Cup (all times UK based), click on the following link, and in the bottom corner click on this icon . Alternativly past the Calendar ID: rp57smf89rsb1hgo09abvq1mhg@group.calendar.google.com into the box which says “Add a friend’s Calendar” when you are in Google Calendar.

ps. My three year old Arsenal Calendar, which is updated as soon as I’m informed of fixture changes has the ID: 2fg9ab1h7b36kp037cp6qjol3k@group.calendar.google.com

Now whilst I don’t have the full information, my first point will be DON’T PANIC.

The information these third parties want are your name, number, contract expiry date and possibly your address (although not essentially needed). Bank account and account security information shouldn’t have been passed on.

It’s the same scam that has been running for years. You get a call from your Network about a month before your contract expires. They offer you an upgrade, however for some reason you can’t keep your current mobile number.

What actually is happening is that a dealer is try to get to commission from the mobile phone companies for providing them with a new customer. They lie claiming to be from the mobile company you are on, hoping you won’t notice until it’s too late and a new contact has been signed.
The way the scam worked in the past was that when you signed a new contact your details were added to a Phone Book of mobiles. Companies would store the data, wait 11 months, then call you. As the first 5 digits belonged to each network you could tell who you needed to pretend to be calling from.
However since then several things have changed. Contracts are no longer 12 months, but instead 18, 24 or in some cases 36. At which point should the cold calls be made? Now numbers are ported around as people move between networks getting the best deal on each upgrade, it’s getting harder to tell which network to customer was on last.

I remember several years ago, a colleague at work received a call from Orange advising that his phone was available for upgrade. He asked them who they really were, the response was that they were calling from Orange, he asked them again and they repeated that they were from Orange. He called them liars (rather loudly) and asked why if they were from Orange would they be calling him 3 months in to his contract with Vodafone, of whom he is an employee. The call ended pretty quick.

Remember, networks are pretty lazy at getting you to upgrade. The more months you spend with them using your old mobile, the more money they can make as they don’t need to subsides a handset.
If you do ever receive one of these calls, never commit to upgrading. Ask for a name and a number to call back on after you have had a chance to shop around. If it was your real network when you call the customer services number on your bill and speaking to an adviser, there should be notes explaining what was offered. If there isn’t anything, then it’s going to be a third party (or a very lazy member of staff).
Of course if this third party is offering a great deal on an upgrade you might want to consider taking up the offer, but remember you are dealing with people who blatantly lied to you, and could do again.

My full time job is working for Vodafone, at no point have I ever passed on customers details, nor have I ever worked for any company “offering” upgrades. Everything I have written in this post is from my experiences of speaking to these companies when trying to be upgraded and do not reflect the views of my employees.

(292409)
61 Paul Farrelly (Newcastle-under-Lyme): To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of legislation to protect (a) whistleblowers and (b) press freedom following the injunctions obtained in the High Court by (i) Barclays and Freshfields solicitors on 19 March 2009 on the publication of internal Barclays reports documenting alleged tax avoidance schemes and (ii) Trafigura and Carter-Ruck solicitors on 11 September 2009 on the publication of the Minton report on the alleged dumping of toxic waste in the Ivory Coast, commissioned by Trafigura.

Hi Ryan,

Thank you for contacting us concerning Donut flavoured KP Skips. We can confirm that we did produce these and that they were discontinued quite a few years ago and are unlikely to be manufactured again.

Before any product reaches the shelves, extensive and costly product development and research is undertaken. Only a small percentage of new product concepts reach the retail outlet and even then, products may easily fail to gain the necessary appeal. Sadly, therefore, some products are removed from sale after only a seemingly short time.

However, a longer manufactured product may also be discontinued due to a falling off of popularity, resulting in it no longer being a viable product to produce.

Kind regards,
Sue,
Consumer Services Co-ordinator.

But this wasn’t enough for us, so I asked if they had any images and they came back with this photocopy found in the cupboard.

Which meant that Simon was right all along.