Monthly Archives: October 2009

8° Maratonina di Cremona

Well done Rebecca!

Rebecca is my daughter and she lives in Milano. Today she ran in the Cremona (about 100kms from Milano) half-marathon finishing in 1 hour 45 minutes and 13 seconds which placed her 342nd in her category, there were 2,400 runners. Her full result is here. She lives in Milano but her office base is in London which she commutes to every Monday, returning home on Thursday or Friday.

From YouTube, here’s the race.

Comments here please!

The bane of my life is dealing with comments to postings which are nothing of the sort. These comments are spam promoting pills, stocks, wholesale goods etc. They are posted not so much in the hope that that anyone reading them will click on the link but so that search engines see many links back to the spammers site. These number of links help promote the site to a higher search engine position.

So here’s my strategy for dealing with them:-

1. In an attempt to make sure it’s a human making the posting, not a robot, everyone must answer the simple maths question. However, I think some robots are able to get over this :-(

2. Comments are approved by me before being visible. BUT, once your first comment has been approved later comments don’t need approval (make sure you enter the same e-mail address each time, it’s not published).

3. I’ve added some more ‘traps’ including one which spams the spammers own site!

Now I’d like to see if everything is working. Please would everyone post a comment here and let’s see if the good ones come through and we lose the spammers. Thanks.

What a good idea

An Isle of Wight bus company is starting its own car scrappage scheme. Southern Vectis is offering a one-year travel pass worth £720 to people who hand in their old car, scooter, moped or van with a current MOT certificate. The full story is here.

Two at once

That’s what they always say about buses but locally it’s true about bus companies as well. In the space of 7 days Southampton had two new bus companies providing services. The most heralded new comer was Greyhound with it’s Southampton to London service which commenced on 14 September. Just 1 week before Greyhound arrived Travelguest launched an express bus service, the Dorset Sprinter , between Southampton and Bournemouth.

The Dorset Sprinter introduction was low key, at least as far as I was concerned, because I’d never heard of it until I saw one whilst waiting to catch the Greyhound to London. I then did a Google on it to get the detail. Compared to a Greyhound bus the Dorset Sprinter looked more like it should be attending a vintage bus rally – it was an 18 year old Leyland Lynx. It will be interesting to see if the route is viable. The express route which at first you’d think was definitely viable, Southampton to Portsmouth, has been tried by several operators but has never run for long. Will Southampton to Bournemouth do better?