little bits of everything

I heart The Guardian but it may be in trouble according to this piece on The Guardian burning platform . It's a very well written article, dragged down I feel by my comment with a smiley in it.

Regular readers of this blog will know that I post from time to time when my photos get used on other websites. I do this mostly as a way of noting it down somewhere, as well as because I find it slightly exciting. Google are rolling out a new reverse image search which is available for some people using the Chrome browser. If you go to images.google.com and there's a camera icon in the search box, then you've got it. I did a search for one of my popular pictures on flickr (below) and found 18 places which are using it. I started contacting the websites saying they were using it without permission, but gave up after a couple. You are allowed to use it so long as it's not for commercial purposes, and as long as I get credit. Those sites weren't. I'm not really that annoyed, as it's not as I make money out of my photos, but it's the principle of the thing. Most of the sites are visitors guides to Cadbury World, one of which looks a bit like an official on...

We recently had a new boiler installed. I got a quote from British Gas, because they put a leaflet through our door every so often with an offer on it. I then did some "research" and www.boilerguide.co.uk came up near the top of the search listings for "boiler replacement". Their advice was to go for a local firm. "But how do I choose one?", I thought. A while later I came across an advert on some other website for boilerguide's "get you a quote" service. That's fortunate for them, because I didn't realise they offered it when I searched before. They tried to get me three quotes, but could only do two. One company didn't call me, but another did, a local man. I also tried eon and nPower. The eon website was very unhelpful. It had a little chart saying what the steps were for getting a quote. The first step was "fill in the form at the bottom of this page". However there was no form at the bottom and you had in fact ...