The Internet is getting uglier every year. Whether it is the amount of ads on websites, social media feeds and surrounding thumbnails, the cookie pop-ups on every single website with the worst and ugliest offenders being the news media and even government websites, it is getting worse. But you never noticed, because it has been creeping up on use steadily over the years. Just stop and have a mindful look right now at the website you are on. Not this one of course, this one (Medium) hasn’t yet been polluted. Maybe Ev Williams - CEO at Medium has learnt from his days at other tech firms?
The Unknown
Because of our conditioning throughout our lives by our parents, our teachers, business leaders, the government and ourselves, it means we can only function properly with what we’ve known.
When unknown situations arise like a global Pandemic, we can only resort back to what we have experienced in our lives so far. Our craving and clinging to how things used to be kicks in and our mind will stress continuously until such time that the known shows up again. That’s why so many people protest against lockdowns and their perceived removal of freedom.
Bicycle
I have been cycling from a very young age whilst growing up in The Netherlands, the whole infrastructure there means that the cyclist has a higher priority over motorised vehicles, which everyone respects because everyone is a cyclist, yes indeed without exception. There are more bicycles than people in The Netherlands, some might even say it’s a problem with so many discarded cycles all over. This would be a nice problem to have here in the U.K.
When I moved to the U.K. in 1977, I cycled with fear and today 44 years later I still cycle on U.K. roads mostly in the countryside where I live, but still with fear, huge fear.
The issues with cycling on U.K. roads can be summarised as follows:
The Insolvency Fraud
Whenever there’s a crisis in the world the fraudsters wake up big time! This current pandemic is no difference. Insolvency, debt, closures, stock clearances, company sales, you name it, if you’re a company you will be receiving a ton of these emails.
Most of the time you ignore, delegate to junk and delete, sometimes though it’s worth investigating who the fraudsters are and how they can have legitimate companies. Next time I wish to come back as an investigative journalist. I would love to do that work, but for now I only did a few tap, tap, click, click and discovered the small minded fraudsters.
Great Joy!
This is by far the longest scam email I have ever received. Worst still it’s almost perfect English and surprisingly my email service provider didn’t pick it up through its spam filters. I will be having a word with them!
Good day,
Please, do not take this message and information as joke because doing so is at your own peril / detriment. I don’t have much to say here but will make it brief and straight to the point for your quick action. I am sending this confidential message to you in private with utmost fear for my work, life and family.
Dom, dom, dom…
If you click through the tweet below and keep clicking through the threads you will discover 65 tweets by Dominic Cummings listing all the failings by the British Government in connection with it’s response to the global pandemic resulting in 128,000 deaths in just one short year.
More than Spam!
I received an unsolicited email from a company I have never heard of, called Spencer Humphries [warning — do not fill out their form!].
It was sent to my business email address. I have no idea who these people are, have no relationship with them. The subject line was, “Staying Alive (UK) Ltd — R&D Tax Credits Qualification”, which is indeed the correct company name. They must get the list from somewhere. See the main image below included in the email.
What is PAI?
PAI is a personal physiological activity indicator, based on heart rate data, combined with daily activity intensity and multi-dimensional dynamic comprehensive evaluation of personal physiological data, converted into an intuitive PAI value through an algorithm. It does not depend on a single item of data, while it allows you to have a comprehensive system to understand the physical condition.
Only a certain intensity of daily activities or workouts is required to acquire a PAI value. According to the research results of the HUNT Fitness Study *, keeping your PAI above 100 will help reduce the death risk of cardiovascular disease, and increase life expectancy.
We’re not a team!
The people in the U.K. have been remarkable. The vast majority of us have followed the rules, have respected the Lockdown, have socially distanced and continue to do so, wear our masks, have stepped up and taken the vaccine, plus many more sacrifices, including not receiving any financial support from the government whilst large corporates are receiving millions.
Other countries around the world are struggling, struggling with infections, not being able to roll out the vaccine that fast, being too optimistic early on and on top of all that have been struck by Covid variants, e.g. South African, Brazilian, Indian variants etc.
And now the promised unlocking process in the U.K. is under threat because the U.K. government have never been tough enough on incoming infections.
Namaste
On Monday 17th May, 2021, the U.K. will start to open up from Lockdown and officially we will be able to start hugging again. It’s hard to believe that we are experiencing a time when our Government has to give us permission to hug each other. I’m sure that parents haven’t stopped hugging their little ones and partners haven’t stopped hugging each other, well at least those that live together. I appreciate that older people in our society are desperate to feel a hug from their younger family members and of course why not?
The Indian Variant
We had a news conference in the U.K. today advising us that the Indian Covid-19 variant, B.1.617.2 is of serious concern and rates doubled in a week.
It sounds more like the latest iOS software release than a virus variant.
Basically this variant could cause some disruption to the U.K’s opening up plans, which start on May 17th.
Price increases during a Pandemic – are you really serious?
I sent the following email to an accounting software group from which we rent their ‘KashFlow’ accounting software. They are part of the Iris Software group. My email is self explanatory, the above table shows how the monthly rental has increased substantially since we started with them in 2015. My email below went to customer support and I copied in 6 of their senior execs on 29 April 2021, I’m yet to receive a response. The execs email addresses on their website were cloaked as Exec1@iris.co.uk and for each of them, they had a different number behind the word exec. Talk about being a number in an organisation!
Our human suffering dictates our direction of travel.
Every single human suffers in their life, it’s part of being a human. We make most of our decisions to avoid suffering. For example we swallow a pain killer to avoid pain and as such we become conditioned to swallow painkillers for the rest of our lives.
In the U.K. the sales value of over the counter pain killer drugs was 658 million* pounds in 2020.
*Source statista.com
British Politicians are a laughing stock!
The British public have always treated its politicians with disdain and the latest flat refurbishment scandal by Prime Minster Boris Johnson has caused a huge amount of public and media outcry.
Accusations of political donations monies used, the inappropriate timing and maybe even an illegal process are all swirling around Boris’ head.
His very clear answer is NO!
Chalkboard Thoughts — April 27, 2021 — Episode 17 — Dependent Origination
Chalkboard Thoughts — April 26, 2021 — Episode 16 — Conditioning
So, I’m wondering now whether it is better to write as yourself instead of having a publication on…
So, I’m wondering now whether it is better to write as yourself instead of having a publication on Medium?
In the new app UI I see many publications titles and to be honest I don’t really want to read them, I’m more interested in seeing an article written by a person as supposed to written in a publication.
Unlockdown — April 2021
A Pint of Beer with a map of the UK drowning inside of it!
The UK is unlocking
Our suffering is ending
We can spend our furlough pennies
In the shops providing they’re still there
We can’t wait to get drinking
It’s not like we stopped any time soon
There’s nothing like drinking in a pub
Or in their garden that will do
How I managed to uncover Google’s ineptitude
Google is a 1.5 Trillion company whose share price is at an all-time high and whose CEO gets paid $4 million per year with 135,000 full-time employees worldwide.
I have been so disappointed with the amount of spam I receive via Google’s servers without them intercepting them.
In December 2016, I opened a G-Suite Google account, which has recently been renamed as Google Workspace [2020]. I wanted to do this in order to have it speak to a CRM account I had at the time and also for it to speak to an online calendar booking app. A lot of apps these days give preference to Google when adopting integrations. I only wanted one email address, my business one and one calendar a simple solution, but still it would cost me a handsome price of £3.30 per month (£39.60 per year). 3 years later in May 2019 it increased to £4.14 per month (£49.60 per year) and then in October 2020 to £4.60 ( £55.20 per year).
This is a 40% increase in 4 years of using the service. Not only is this abusive, it’s also scandalous and unacceptable considering we’re going through a pandemic and quite frankly business is tough.
My domain, which is with Hover.com has provided me with a small mailbox for just $20 or £11.00 per year, a saving of £44.20 or 80%!
What is Web Accessibility?
For the past few weeks I have been attending a digital marketing tweet chat on Twitter, #ElevateChat. The chat is hosted by Sarah Clarke of Dufferin Media and she does an amazing job in asking great and challenging questions to all who participate.
This week I found the toughest one yet, the topic was about web accessibility, something I know almost nothing about.