Clairol nice'n difficult

Shhh... don't tell anyone but my wife uses hair colourant.

Clairol have been advertising on TV a product called nice'n easy colour blend foam. The advert made it look easy to use and I'm the one who gets to apply it so we gave it a go. Here's my opinion and you can probably tell from the title what it's going to be like.

First - it's NOT a foam. A foam is defined as a colloidal suspension of gas in a liquid. In other words it's thick and creamy with very small bubbles. Think shaving cream or spray cream - they are foams but Clairol nice'n easy is a FROTH - much bigger bubbles, think of the froth you see sometimes under a waterfall or the froth on top of a bubble bath.

Second - it's NOT easy. In fact it's the hardest colourant to apply I ever used. It runs. It fails to wet long hair. it's far too easy to get on skin and clothes.

Third - the results are poor. There's not enough 'froth' to cover hair as long as that in the picture on the box. Added to that the colour isn't as deep as it's made out to be.

Maybe if you have very short hair this stuff might be OK but we will NEVER buy this rubbish again. Back to the drawing board Clairol!

Well done Number 10!

Today I went to the 'Number 10' website to find out if anyone had created a petition about one of my pet hates - VAT on ebooks.

It took a while to find what has to have been the last government's better ideas the e-petition site but when I did find it I discovered that it had been closed down in the run-up to the general election (6th May 2010) and hasn't re-opened for new petitions.

Just after the election we were told that it would reopen later in 2010 but now here's what you get if you go through the process:

Notice that the date is now 2011 and that no date other than the year is given!

So well done UK Government! You've taken a valuable method of the UK public making their feelings known to government and squashed it! Maybe those petitions were just too inconvenient? So much for your 'big society' policy!

So I can't voice my opinion on the Number 10 petition site. I can however put the details here and the public can voice their opinion by adding comments.

Petition to the UK prime Minister

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to remove the VAT charge on the sale of electronic books and magazines.

More details from the petition creator

Paper copies of books, newspapers and magazines are subject to a VAT rate of 0%. It is anomalous that electronic copies of these same items are subject to the current standard rate of VAT (20%). The effect of this tax is to make, in many cases, the e-book version of literature more expensive than the paper copy despite being less expensive to produce and requiring almost zero shipping costs.

The manufacture of printed paper products requires thousands of tons of raw materials and an enormous amount of energy in production and transport each year. The public is reluctant to pay more for an electronic copy than for a paper copy. Many look for a less expensive and often 'pirate' source.

By charging VAT on e-publications the government is encouraging piracy, squandering raw materials and adding to fossil fuel use.

That darn cat...

...decided to have a lazy afternoon.

...decided that it wasn't a good idea to jump from the fence onto the surface of the neighbor's algae-covered pond.

...is convinced that if it's raining at the back door then it will be just fine at the front door.

...decided not to play with the goldfish.

...decided that the Christmas tree was a new toy for him to climb.

...somehow decided we were moving and made sure she wouldn't be left behind.

...decided to sing to us every inch of the 300 miles to our new house.

...decided to wait and see if anything came along.

...decided earphone cables and broadband telephone lines make a great teething ring but power cables don't taste nice.

...decided that baby rabbits should be carried over the rabbit-proof fence round our garden so that they could play with them. Since they proved pretty boring playmates they were left to munch on our flowers.

...decided to jup onto y laptop and in doing so hooked a claw under a key on it. As a result y '' key no longer works!

Installing MS Office 2010 - What a palaver!

Having finally bought Microsoft Office 2010 to replace the pre-release version I've being using for the last year I sat down to install it at 11:00am this morning. I finally completed the process at 3:30pm; a four and a half hour marathon!

Now if you just bought Office 2010 when it was released you probably were able to install it without problem completing the whole process within 20 minutes. Some of us tested the beta product and then the pre-release version. Now, however these are about to expire and it's tie to install the full product. That's where the problem started.

As soon as I tried to install Office 2010 I got this error message:

Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s):

Microsoft Office 2010 does not support upgrading from a prerelease version of

Microsoft Office 2010. You must first uninstall any prerelease versions of

Microsoft Office 2010 products and associated technologies.

Correct the issue(s) listed above and re-run setup.

Oh well - that meant a trip to the control panel and 'Uninstall a program'. I selected the Office 2010 pre-release version and uninstalled it. Back to the installation DVD and I got:

Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s):

Microsoft Office 2010 does not support upgrading from a prerelease version of

Microsoft Office 2010. You must first uninstall any prerelease versions of

Microsoft Office 2010 products and associated technologies.

Correct the issue(s) listed above and re-run setup.

Huh? I just uninstalled it! Maybe I needed to do a restart first? One restart later I inserted the installation DVD and got:

Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s):

Microsoft Office 2010 does not support upgrading from a prerelease version...

OK. Now let me just check I actually uninstalled the right version - Yep - it's gone and I remember that I had to remove Office 2007 before I could install the prerelease of 2010. Time to go visit Microsoft's site to see if there's a fix!

As usual, finding what I wanted on the MS site was a torturous business but at least their introduction of using Bing to search the site makes things a little easier. Eventually I copied out the error message and searched for that.

I found quite a few people were having the same problem and I eventually found a post on http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/officeinstall/thread/52c744aa-d1c5-4aec-9c52-d76bc05eea40 where a Microsoft Support Moderator suggested I run a tool called cleanc2r to fix the issue. I followed the link provided to get the tool and of course discovered it had been replaced by a different tool. Fortunately the link took me to the new location of this 'Fixit' tool and of course when I got there it referred to removing Office 2007 from Windows XP and not to Windows 7. back to Google search engine where I entered the error message AND "Windows 7"

This time I found another Microsoft Support Moderator who pointed at a page http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290301 This time the link actually worked!

The new page told me to do exactly what I had already done but if that didn't work I should use the 'Fix it' link below to remove the problem. This time there were three of them and I chose the one for Office 2010; Microsoft Fix it 50450.

Running it gave me a brief flash of a command window followed by the usual confirmation window to confirm I really wanted to use the program. A licence agreement window followed next followed by a window making a backup of the registry. Finally I got another brief flash of the command window and - nothing! 'A bit unsatisfactory' I thought ' I would have expected the program to tell me it was finished'.

Back to the Installation DVD and I got:

Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s):

Microsoft Office 2010 does not support upgrading from a prerelease version...

This was beginning to get tiresome! Back to the search engine and I followed a few more of the 29 results to find that all of them eventually pointed me back to the same page which I'd just tried. Eventually I found one saying the 'Fix it' link didn't always work first time and I should try it again!

Back to 'Fix it', the same procedure but this time the second command window stayed open and took ages to run through. Once it finished it was back to the installation DVD and I got:

Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s):

Microsoft Office 2010 does not support upgrading from a prerelease version...

More searching on Internet eventually found Microsoft instructions to delete a couple of registry entries, to clear temporary files from the computer and to empty the recycle bin. 5Gb of temporary files deletion later it was back to the installation DVD and:

Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s):

Microsoft Office 2010 does not support upgrading from a prerelease version...

At this point I began to wonder how someone who is not quite as computer literate as I would be coping. Back to the search engine.

Looking on the forums I found lots of people with the same issue who had all followed the Microsoft advice and still couldn't install Office 2010. Eventually I read something about making sure all Office ad-ons had been deleted including the 'Add a smile' feature installed with the pre-release version. Mine was still there and promptly got deleted and...

Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s):

Microsoft Office 2010 does not support upgrading from a prerelease version...

Out went the Windows Live Office stuff...

Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s):

Microsoft Office 2010 does not support upgrading from a prerelease version...

Out went 'Outlook Hotmail Connector (Funny! I never use Hotmail so I definitely didn't install that!) and...

SUCCESS! I was now the proud owner of an Office 2010 installation.

It only took me four and a half hours. Simple huh?

Finally I could get back to editing my book 'A Vested Interest.'

US Version	UK Version

Facebook Games

I wonder how many Facebook users have stopped to consider just how much money the writers of the more popular Facebook applications - especially games - are making?

• Let's assume that just 5% of users occasionally buy 'extras' for their game.
• Lets assume that they spend just £10 on this per year.
• Lets assume that the figure of 'monthly active users' you get from the games Facebook website is wildly inaccurate and the true figure is 50% of what is stated.

So here's a list of how much the top 30 Facebook games are making based on those rather conservative assumptions:

Game	Users	£ Earned
1 Farmville	60,343,013	15,085,753
2 Frontierville	31,031,304	4,654,696
3 Café World	22,180,662	3,327,099
4 Mafia Wars	21,793,134	3,268,970
5 Treasure Isle	15,509,210	2,326,382
6 Happy Aquarium	13,052,368	1,957,855
7 Bejeweled Blitz	11,995,628	1,799,344
8 Petville	11,628,197	1,744,230
9 Restaurant City	9,696,574	1,454,486
10 Happy Pets	9135056	1,370,258
11 City of Wonder	8,840,339	1,326,051
12 YoVille	7,579,517	1,136,928
13 Zoo World	7,036,293	1,055,444
14 Fishville	6,873,782	1,031,067
15 Happy Island	6,286,697	943,005
16 Kingdoms of Camelot	5,891,589	883,738
17 Social City	5,575,999	836,400
18 Hotel City	5,246,913	787,037
19 Baking Life	4,904,453	735,668
20 Country Life	4,412,287	661,843
21 Farm Town	4,065,029	609,754
22 Monster World	3,905,525	585,829
23 My Empire	2,819,505	422,926
24 Island Paradise	2,422,170	363,326
25 Tiki Resort	2,364,724	354,709
26 Tiki Farm	1,278,580	191,787
27 My Vineyard	919,963	137,994
28 Zoo Kingdom	727,327	109,099
29 Crime City	628,109	94,216
30 Middle Kingdom	378,463	56,769

It seems to me some of these games are making a fortune! While they are considered 'free' games, sooner or later the majority of users will buy an item for their game and these repeated purchases quickly mount up until they exceed the value of a game purchased on CD/DVD. Unlike the CD/DVD game Facebook games are in a constant state of development too so there is something new to keep the players coming back.

The question is are we, the users, getting value for money from our games? A quick trip to the user forums of many of these quickly lets you know just how many people are unhappy with them. What amazes me is that people keep playing them! Especially the people who are spending real money. I guess it's a matter of not wanting to waste the money spent already.

Let's look at two examples from these games; both zoos. Zoo World and Zoo Kingdom.

Zoo World is making millions yet go to it's discussion board and you'll find complaint after complaint. The only people answering these complaints, however, are the other game players.

Zoo Kingdom's discussion board is the opposite however. There are few complaints and those that appear are quickly answered by the game developers. Read the comments there and you'll find many end with praise for Blue Fang who developed the game.

So why is it that the positions of these two games are not reversed? It beats me! I do know though that I like the community spirit there so much that I host a Zoo Kingdom Hints & Tips website for it.

It seems to me that those game firms who have not yet caught on to the potential of social media websites for earning money are missing out and if you are looking for a profitable investment a small business just starting the climb up the Facebook games league is worth looking at.

The Election. What went wrong?

The UK held a general election on 6th May 2010 but things didn't quite go as smoothly as expected.

here in the UK we've grown accustomed to feeling smug about how 'we hold elections properly' and smile at the feeble efforts of other countries where there are complaints about vote rigging and people being denied their right to vote. "It could never happen here," we say. Except it did!

Today's news is full of stories about people who went to vote, stood in a queue for an hour or more only to be denied their right to vote when the polling stations closed at 10:00pm. Some people were even in the building but because they hadn't been given a ballot paper by 10:00pm they didn't get to vote.

That wasn't my problem though. I arrived earlier at 18:45 and passed the clerk my voting card only to be told that it's number had already been marked off the lists as having already voted.

The clerk phoned someone to ask procedure and after about 15 minutes got a call back to say I was to be given a pink voting slip and that it and my electors card were to be sent in in a sealed envelope rather than put in the ballot box. Hardly a secret ballot.

I asked the clerk that I be informed of the result of the enquiry that would be made about this.

I told the clerk that I had lived at my address for two years but this was the first time I had voted in an election there (I was away in previous council elections).

It seems to me there are three possibilities:
1. That the clerks made an error and both crossed off the wrong number on their lists.
2. That the number on my electors card for some reason was duplicated
3. That someone had given in my name and address and had 'stolen' the vote.

Let's assume that the first scenario happened. There were two clerks checking the electors lists for each voter. Is it likely they both got it wrong? Only if they were copying each other's work - surely that would be poor procedure.

How about the second scenario? I've seen the electors list used and didn't spot a duplicate - neither did the two clerks.

What about the third possibility? I asked the clerks what happened to the lists they marked the voters off on and got an evasive answer. It seems to me that these lists should NOT be allowed to fall into anyone's hands since knowing who did not vote in elections would allow someone to impersonate that person in a new election. I was surprised to see the clerks giving back electors cards to voters. That hadn't happened in previous elections and I can imagine quite a few being added to street litter or deposited in bins outside the polling station from which they could be retrieved.

It seems to me that apart from a need to get more people through the system quickly there is also a need to tighten up security. I suggest at a minimum voters should be asked for proof of identity if they turn up at polling stations without their poll card.

On a lighter note I received an e-mail from David Cameron. Here it is:
You'll notice that the e-mail was sent to me at 12:24 am on Friday 7th May.
No wonder David didn't get a majority in parliament. He's been telling his supporters to go vote 2½ hours AFTER the polls closed!

Climate Folly

On the one hand we have the global warming alarmists who tell us we are heading for disaster due to carbon emissions. On the other hand we have the climate sceptics who tell us that Man's impact on the climate is relatively minor and that carbon taxation is just another excuse to raise more money and that it will ham the economy.

There are some good and bad points made by both sides and as a result confusion reigns for many. What is certain, however, is that if we do nothing about the fossil fuels we are burning then we are heading for disaster.

The trouble is that we are burning vital and finite natural resources. We will run out of these - or at least get to the point where it costs more in energy to extract these fuels than we get in energy using them.

At the moment we are like the man who fell off the top of the Empire State Building who was heard to say as he passed the fifth floor "Well I've fallen 97 stories and I'm all right so far!"

We have to stop using these resources other than as chemical feedstock. We must put all our effort into developing renewable energy resources and we have to start doing it now! OK we can devote some resources to nuclear energy but the horrendous problems we are passing on to future generations means that we should concentrate on developing nuclear fusion not nuclear fission.

I hear much of people saying "We'll stop burning oil and natural gas in our cars and use electricity instead." Duh! Where do these people think most of our electricity comes from?

So there is a case for cutting carbon emissions and 'going green' is a good idea. Just don't let yourself be fooled by many of the green claims such as 'Save oil by using paper or reusable bags instead of plastic ones' (See the great plastic bag con) and buy white recycled paper (See Don't print this). As to government vehicle scrappage schemes - they are an environmental disaster for a car less than 15 years old.