Spotted Dick

Flintshire County Council have recently overturned a descision to rename the well known 'Spotted Dick' pudding to a less cheeky 'Spotted Richard'.

Canteen staff at Flintshire council decided to rename the pudding after immature comments from some customers.

The 'spotted' part of the name reffers to the currants where as the 'dick' is thought to have derived from the word dough.

The council has now said the pudding will return to its original name and any "childish" customers may be refused service in future.

Read the full story at the BBC website.

A Black Cat

I'd like to start by saying I'm no expert in this field. Quite the opposite.

I'm writing this small article to try and convey some of my opinions and ideas. It would be interesting to hear anything you may have to say in reply.

So it's a Monday morning and you're walking down the street. You casually notice 3 consecutive drains under your feet. Do you panic? To many this may seem a stupid question but I am aware that there really are people out there who would find the situation dreadful. Does stepping on three drains in a row really give you bad luck? To me this idea seems ludicrous. As a man of fact and knowledge, I know there is nothing to back up this theory.

There are many other superstitions you may have also heard of such as; black cats crossing your path, smashing a mirror and a pretentious cat with nine lives (more superstitions here if you're interested).
In the dark ages these may have been more believeable but in this day and age, science seems to answer for a lot more.

Moving onto Karma... If you treat someone well and with respect, will you get something good back in the future? In contrast, do you get something bad in return if you mistreat someone?

To a certain extent I can understand karma. If you treat someone well they will almost definitely treat you well back. The same as if you mistreat someone they will most probably mistreat you. Where I am lost (or may have misunderstood the concept of karma), is the idea that this well being is governed by some higher power.

Lastly, fate. Are we all meant to die in a certain way? I myself believe in God, and that he has a plan for everyone. The bible does state though that it is our choice whether we follow this plan. I do not personally believe in fate, just chance. The choices that you make in your everyday life are more influential than you think. They can affect your actions or the way you live and die, but your decisions can also have a huge impact on other peoples lives too without even noticing. If I were to drink and drive I would not only put my own life at risk, but also others.

In short, I do not consider superstition, karma or fate to be real. I believe the main factors that we depend our everyday lives on are the things in which we know, and the things in which we do not know. These are choice and chance.

Pint anyone?

There have been many rumours going around but it turns out that it's true, the government seriously are thinking of putting the drinking age up to 21.

I don't know how many people this concerns but I for one am against it. What is wrong with going to the local for a few drinks after a hard days work, when you are an adult? It makes no sense. You can fight for your country and die when you are 16, although you can't drink an alcoholic beverage that may upset your stomach until you are 21?

I'm not arguing with the physical effects that alchohol brings on people, I have seen them all too often myself. My main argument is that the majority of binge drinkers in the UK are over the age of 21.

If we want to make a difference to our binge drinking culture, wouldn't it be a better idea to just take a totally different approach to alchohol? I feel that by banning alchohol to under 21's, it's almost ageism; blaming the youth when it is not entirley our fault.

At the moment this measure is only being applied to Scotland, but I'm pretty sure the rest of the UK would follow in its footsteps pretty quickly just like the smoking ban.

I would be very interested to hear other peoples views on this.

Symptoms of the problem included :

• insufficient memory error (even though I have 4GB of RAM)
• a blank background and the image never loading
• and lastly, the actual background of Photo Gallery changing to a weird yellow colour.

I noticed a lot of people using Vista were having this problem. The cause of this error/bug is very trivial.

For some reason, Photo Gallery does not seem to work well with any monitor driver apart from the standard one which comes with Vista. Obviously the easy fix for this is to 'roll back' to the Generic PnP Monitor driver.

To do this:

1. Go to 'Control Panel' > 'Device Manager'
2. Find 'Monitor' > Right click your installed monitor (e.g. Hyundai W241D) > 'Properties'
3. Click on the tab called 'Driver' > 'Roll back driver'
4. Now restart your PC and all problems should be solved.

Hope this helps someone.

The report didn't go as well as he'd imagined.

This is an issue that I'm sure many people have become increasingly annoyed about since it's passing.

Many people are questioning why the government made the choice to cut VAT, instead of considering the many other options sitting at the table.

Everyone has their own opinion on this, but to me it seems almost absurd to cut the prices on products when we are heading into a recession, and have no money to purchase products in the first place. In my opinion, the government should have placed the money in our pockets so that we'd have something to spend, rather than flashing us cheaper price tags that we just cant afford.

When I say 'cheaper' price tags, these are by no means 'cheap' price tags. The reduction of 2.5% (17.5% - 15%) sounds great, but when you analyse it you realise that if you were to spend £25.00 in a shop, you would only actually make a saving of 50 pence. An unoticable amount from anyones wallet. To compensate for this decrease, taxes will now be raised in the near future. This won't be good for the working/middle class at all. In all honesty, this is not good news for anyone as taxes will also be raised for people with higher incomes (new rate of 45% if you earn over £150,000 P/A).

What this whole argument boils down to is the way in which these new laws have been passed. Labour have planned their whole financial report to fit with the upcoming General Election. This means that if, or probably when everything does go wrong, they will already have been voted out of power and they will no longer have to deal with the horrific aftermath of their terrible doings.

Labour are almost completely to blame for the financial crisis we are now in, and their plans can only make it worse. Many agree that the VAT cut will do nothing for anybody.

Some of the websites I currently own and run include:

www.freepaygiphone.com
www.noobme.com
www.cmyip.co.uk
www.takethenrate.com


I'm currently studying at Swansea University so I'll probably have a lot of time on my hands if you're trying to catch me .

Happy Holidays to everyone who has time off next month!

Playstation 3 with LCD Screen

Seems like a crazy idea at first right?

Who would want to give away expensive free gifts? And most importantly why?

If you're asking yourself these questions, you should have a better understanding after reading this.

When companies want to advertise, they obviously produce many different marketing strategies. Now when you think of the word advert, television adverts often spring to mind. Television adverts are broadcasted to a very large audience, but can never really be targeted at someone specific as the television channel doesn't know you or your interests.

For the passed decade, companies have began to invest enormous amounts of money into internet advertising. The Internet is a growing audience and can be targeted more easily by these big companies, as the adverts on most web pages are related to the content on that exact page.

So where do these free gifts come into this?

The gifts aren't really free at all. If they were, the companies would lose out and go bankrupt.

Another marketing idea that many companies came up with was a sort of 'try, buy and reffer' strategy, where the customer would either take a free or inexpensive trial of their services and gain a small reward from it if they referred a few others to do the same. This creates a branching effect with an exponential growth, targeting many thousands of people from the first customer. The companies do this all in the hope that you will like the service that they provide and will continue to use it.

The 'agent' company that you are then signed up with will give you a list of gifts to choose from. Referring one person normally gains you around £20 in gifts. Obviously as you can imagine, if you keep doing this it's very easy to afford anything from around £100 to £500.

Two really informative websites that I found are EasyFreeGifts.com and iFreebies.co.uk. They even display evidence of receiving gifts.

If you still don't believe this, check out the BBC Newsnight Feature:

Happy gift receiving!