Essy and I are going away to South Wales for a few days. We need to be in Newport on Monday morning so we’re taking the caravan and spending tomorrow night and Monday night there for certain. After that it depends on the weather and how we’re liking South Wales. We’ve both got the week off work so there’s no pressure to hurry home if we don’t want to.

I’ve not been to South Wales for years and years, so long ago infact that I can’t remember much about it at all. Any suggestions for things we shouldn’t miss, or places to go, while we’re there would be very welcome.

By chance I came across www.oyyy.co.uk and whilst looking around found Samsung SM215TW 21 inch WSXGA+ TFT LCD Monitors at £0.01+VAT with 6 in stock!! Too good a bargain to miss so I bought all 6 for £0.06 plus £2.99 for delivery. Here’s the confirmation of the purchase at £0.01 each which I made via Google Checkout :-

Your order has been sent to www.oyyy.co.uk.
www.oyyy.co.uk is responsible for charging and shipping your order. Have questions? Contact www.oyyy.co.uk.
# 22 Oct www.oyyy.co.uk charged your VISA xxx-1031 for £3.05. “GOOGLE *Oyyy co uk” will appear on your credit card statement.
# 22 Oct www.oyyy.co.uk received your order.
# 22 Oct You placed an order with www.oyyy.co.uk on 22 Oct.
Google Checkout sent a copy of this receipt to xyz@loades.net
Order date: 22 Oct 2009 15:22 GMT+01:00
Google order number: 934683854330999
Delivery Status: Not yet shipped

(I’ve changed a few things in this to remove my full address and telephone number). But then I received this e-mail :-(

Dear Mr Loades

Kind Regards

Can I demand 6 x 21″ LCD monitors at £0.0.1 each plus, of course, VAT at 15% ?

It would be great if I could :-)

We went to The Brook last night, this time to see Manfred Mann’s Earth band. Absolutely superb! If they come back in the future we’ll be there again.

Here’s a little taster of their music.

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.

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.