Practical Notes on Product, Data & Systems

My brain wave just now while sitting at the pool:  Hotel Floor Plans, Room Numbers, Views & Interconnecting Doors. Fact one Facebook is promoting it's "Groups" functionality heavily at the moment It's basically "special interest groups" that it does by matching your profile (it's an AI based match) with groups that are made by anyone - in an effort to get engagement.  Having a lot of success with this for B&B.co.uk and also using it as a User - I joined the Corfu group to get information about Ferry tickets. So Facebook doing the marketing basically for you if you have a Facebook Group, because it increases engagement with the site. Fact two We doing this big tour now; France, Italy, Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, Greece.  Then we will take a ferry back up the Adriatic, loop into Slovenia (see Bella & Kirst), and the back via James' villa in Antibes, and then back home.  One problem we have with the kids is I want to see the la...

There you have it:  Brexit has stopped "freedom of movement".  Yup - YOUR freedom of movement. Incredibly, incredulously, incompetently thousands of Brits who live in the EU actually voted FOR this: Anyway this article is not for you.  Please stop reading now. Barry and Diane :  Coming back to the UK to vote OUT, even though they live in Benidorm.  I wonder how they getting on? How to get around it?   The fact is you have 90 days in any 180 days in the Schengen zone.  That is from Portugal all the way to Finland.  This is a little confusing; some of us are used to "visa-run" from places like Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore or Hong Kong: you just leave for a day, and come back and get another 6 months or whatever.  This is NOT the case with Schengen.   You have a rolling 90 days in 180 .  Yup that right... no more go out in September, come back in April stuff for you. A better way to calculate might be "How many days have I s...

I read Austin Meyer's account of his fight against a patent troll .   It does seem unfair, and likely to stifle innovation. Is it not quite easy to fix?  Surely in order to get a patent infringement case settled the patent holder must have to show  active development? If there is active development this compensation payment can based on relative investment to the patent "infringer?"  OMG:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG9UMMq2dz4 So it appears to be some sort of scam being perpetrated in the Eastern District of Texas with families who Should Know Better being involved.  Judge Father and Son Lawyers - this a joke? Whole buildings setup with fake companies.  Wow. Making the US of A look more like a banana republic everyday.

I may have stumbled on a better way to elect MPs: Read it below...  But first let me give you some background. The UK still uses the archaic "first past the post" voting system.  This needs to change.   Back in 2011 there was a referendum on changing this to the Alternative Vote .  We were already living in Spain then, but I followed it closely - the campaigns and the themes . At the end of the day people said.... "It's all too complicated ... we stick with the status quo". What a shame.   Fast forward to 2019 and Boris was able to lie through his teeth campaign with a clear message and get a thumping 80 seat majority - by getting a few more racist old people in the North to vote for him  than would normally do. Ultimately there was a majority of vote for Remain-parties but the way the cookie crumbled down the constituency-lines meant Boris and his team of ultra-right wingers got in. What can be done about this? I been looking at all the pletho...

Wouldn't it be great to work together and create a "distributed search engine" with the index spread across thousands of peer nodes - a Google beating thing of beauty and love and money. Sadly the latency, speed, algorithmic and storage requirements make this a non-starter .  Try the state-of-the-art example like  yacy  and you'll see what I mean. It's just occurred to me - something that might be as least as lucrative ( 1 , 2 , 3 ) is a "link database" - and several factors easier to code and manage..... ....Who fancies giving it a go?

 It's been very easy for Brexiteers to claim that Pro-Europeans are un-patriotic or even traitorous . Who wouldn't want to "break free" of a "foreign power" and make our own way in the world? This is very disingenuous. By entering in the EEC/EU the UK agreed to be in partnership with other countries and share rules.  So it wasn't a case of "them ruling us and we can say nothing", and if it was wished to be simplistically stated, then it would "them ruling us, and us ruling them back"... "however much Germany [or insert other country] is ruling us, we are ruling them back in equal measure". I recently watch a documentary on YouTube about the Windscale disaster.  Click the YouTube video that is set to the part in the film where it is recounted. In 1946 the Americans' policy on nuclear secrets changed.  Britain was no longer allowed to share or participate in what the USA was doing in terms of nuclear weapons. This came as ...

This is the logo from the Live Aid concert's back in the 80s.  I just thought it is such a smart logo that I'd put it here and say that.