Bailing on a Bakery

My local supermarket just redid its bakery section, from self-service to an assistant behind a counter. It's a nice-looking redo, with wood trays, racks of bread, and that wonderful smell of fresh baking. And I won't be shopping there any more.

I took a look at the assistant – or more specifically, I looked at the assistant's hands, wearing those now-ubiquitous blue gloves.

• The blue gloves with which he picked up and paper-bagged a loaf for the lady at the front of the queue...
• the same gloves with which he held out a hand and took her cash...
• the same blue gloves which he then used to work the till...
• and the same blue gloves he used to pick a coin up off the floor when he dropped it giving her her change....
• and then he opened the next bag and with the same gloved hand picked up four rolls for the next person in line.

I  left the queue at this point.

It's not an uncommon problem. For some reason, when working on food service, assistants wearing gloves tend to assume the outside of the gloves are clean because their hands on the inside of the gloves are clean.

The baker I went to as an alternative during the rebuild doesn't use gloves. It does have hand sanitiser on all the walls, and signs to use them, but all the staff are bare-handed. Does this worry me when they pick the food up? Hardly. They use tongs. And wash them.

Read more.

This blog has moved to http://www.rablogs.co.uk/tirial where the original articles can be found.

It's official

It's official In three days after I started moving sites, I've started getting Adsense credit for them. The same sites that Hubpages insists were getting several thousand views, and Adsense clicks, and yet Adsense was recording no traffic or clicks? They've just earned their first £1. That is in one day, on Wizzley. My real problem is that having looked at the hubs Hubpages are complaining are 'spammy' the reason is very simple: Hubpages has added nearly three times the affiliate links that were on the original articles. If I have a single href for an image and text they've split the image into its own article and put the href in a text box elsewhere. If a href spanned two lines? That's now two href's. My table tags for data layout? Gone. This isn't the type of work I want my name on, and it is certainly not what I created, so I'm stripping the lenses from hubpages to wizzley. Still having problems reminding google that these pages have moved, even though some of them have been down for three months, but hopefully the traffic going to wizzley will get the point across... Does anyone know how to get them to realise this? Alternatively do I just file DMCA on hubpages, requesting a 301 redirect? Read more. This blog has moved to http://www.rablogs.co.uk/tirial where the original articles can be found.

System errors?

System errors? Here's an interesting case from one of my earlier IT consultancies: The problem: For many years the company had sent out an email newsletter, text-only, with a substantial and growing subscription. Then suddenly subscribers started vanishing in droves. The challenge: find out why. Was it a system error, a virus, they'd had turned the IT department upside down and found nothing. The answer: Marketing had discovered PDFs, with images and hyperlinks and whizzy things, and redid the newsletter into a full hyper-linked system without telling the newsletter writers. This had taken the email from 10K to 2MB, because obviously since they could open it on their PCs, so could everyone else... The moral: Make sure you know what your audience wants  (and that interactive PDFs can get blocked by firewalls that let plaintext emails through). Read more. This blog has moved to http://www.rablogs.co.uk/tirial where the original articles can be found.

And we're off - migration is underway!

And we're off - migration is underway! It seems hubpages has been quietly delisting several of my pages. I should care. I don't. I'm moving them all to Wizzley anyway. The Jervis Bay one has just gone, so if anyone can notified google that the content is no here: http://www.wizzley.com/jervis-bay that would help. But it is confirmed. On 26th October 2014  Hubpages pages insist that Adsense is set up correct and I just needed to give it time. They also insisted I was getting lots of pages views. As of 2015, Adsense has recorded not one page view from hubpages...and Hubpages won't take Amazon affiliates or even my US tax number, so they really aren't worth it. Read more. This blog has moved to http://www.rablogs.co.uk/tirial where the original articles can be found.

And changing anti-virus...

And changing anti-virus... 2015 seems to be a year for new beginnings. After many years I am finally moving away from Avast after their new Grimefighter update deleted my sound card drivers as unnecessary and then asked me to pay for the privilege of it blocking any attempt to repair them. Then it tried to force me to update software that is used for backwards compatibility testing, delete software that runs under Win98 compatibility mode, and hijacked my browser repeatedly while throwing popups everywhere. Avast has turned from a good anti-virus that I budgeted to buy last year, into continuous and annoying popups trying to sell me stuff - a.k.a. malware. Fortunately it did it before I spent any money this year, so now I am looking at Kaspersky and other alternatives. You know, the ones that don't hijack my browser on load and that have started to wiped saved sessions to the point where I have to use a plugin to keep my tabs... RIP Avast - until Feb 2014 a very good antivirus. Post Oct 2014, a piece of quasi-malware that has done more damage to my PC than a virus ever has. Read more. This blog has moved to http://www.rablogs.co.uk/tirial where the original articles can be found.