A Time of Magic

Automating the invitations

admin — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 12:34:52 +0000

We’ve all moved on miles from the days when the kids would hand make their birthday invitations for their friends, haven’t we?

These days hardly anybody would think of doing them by hand so we’re constantly regaled by cards produced to professional level standards. Even the business of printing your cards on your own printer is going away to be replaced by ones done by professional printers, albeit to your own design of course.

It does save a heap of time naturally but I do miss receiving the hand drawn invitations.

Is education becoming a more life-long experience these days

admin — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:24:13 +0000

With the economy being in the doldrums, I’m sure that many of us have wished that we’d added to our skills base before now.

However, it’s getting easier to do that as time goes on. For instance, I’m in the midst of a two year online course which will update my computer skills considerably and have sketched out some courses for the next few years to bring my qualifications completely up to date.

Doing that kind of thing is becoming more and more an ongoing necessity these days. If your original degree is more than four or five years ago then it’s time to update it or to add to your skills base in a different area.

Do you breast-feed?

admin — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:13:10 +0000

Breast-feeding seems to come in cycles like many things.

After the major promotion of breast-milk a decade or so back with campaigns to make it more socially acceptable in public areas, the interest in it seems to have died down considerably in recent years. Ten years back and you’d have seen women making a point of feeding their baby in public but I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen it done in a public place.

Whether that reduction in the visibility equates to a reduction in the amount of breast feeding being done is quite another questions obviously. The benefits of it certainly haven’t changed and it makes a great start in life for your baby as it always has done. Is it just that it’s become less acceptable to do it in public these days?

Do you buy when they add the super- or hyper- labels?

admin — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:08:09 +0000

Ordinary things never seem to be quite enough for us these days, do they?

Just about every product seems to come in super- or hyper- or some equivalent to that. If it isn’t that, there’s the temptation to imply that it contains some prohibited ingredient or other. Hence probably the current promotions of hydroxycut reviews in the diet pill industry.

There’s nothing explicitly “wrong” about this kind of promotion of course but it does seem to be nearing the end of its life at the moment as more and more people are becoming immunised against this type of marketing. What will come next though?

Getting rid of those acne scars

admin — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:04:09 +0000

The problem with acne is that sometimes you need to consider acne scar removal after it’s gone from your life.

Covering up the spots when they are an integral part of your life is a pain when you have them but, of course, there’s always that temptation to pick away at them. Not a good idea for the long term but something that many of us obviously do so getting rid of those scars at a later date is also something that will need done in due course. Best to wait ’til you’re over the acne obviously.

Jobs in healthcare when the economy is flat

admin — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:00:57 +0000

When the economy isn’t doing too well it can pay to check out the healthcare job listings.

Whilst many are obviously specialist posts that you’re simply not going to be able to do without substantial amounts of training and education, there are a lot of non-health specific jobs that get listed on the healthcare job listings sites. Moreover, there are also quite a lot that don’t require massive amounts of training which is something worth considering if you’d like to add another skill-set to that which you already have.

Cuts there remain to come, but healthcare seems to be one of the areas where they’ll be felt that little bit less than elsewhere.

Getting a good clean-out

admin — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 19:33:10 +0000

Cleaning out your colon is one of those things that seems like a good idea.

After all, there’s all kinds of, how can one put it?, basically pre-toilet material up there. It’s your internal sewer, isn’t it?

Well, in some ways it certainly is. That’s where the stuff sits before it reaches the toilet after all. However, a lot of it isn’t just sitting there – it’s being processed with lots of useful things being taken out and absorbed into your body. So colon cleansers like colonetix need to be careful that they don’t clean everything out. Some of it consists of bacteria that are required to make things like vitamin K (an essential part of blood clotting) that your body needs and which aren’t supplied by way of your food.

Yes, there’s gunge, and, yes, it’s not a bad idea to clear it out now and again but be mindful of some side-effects and be sure to take supplements to make up for some of what was cleared out for a while afterwards.

Preparing for the big four-oh

admin — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 15:37:27 +0000

The 4oth birthday seems to have more of a significance than any of the other “oh” birthdays largely for historical reasons: it represented the half-way mark for one’s life.

However, when you’re looking for 40th bday gifts for her, none of that matters. It’s a difficult one to call as women rarely want their age bandied about and still less so when it’s the 40th with it’s feeling of “over the hill”.

Best to steer clear of anything highlighting the actual age I think!

Experimental blogs

admin — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 23:19:13 +0000

Will I ever get an audience is a question that I’m sure a lot of bloggers ask themselves when they’re starting out in blogging.

The problem is that almost all blogs run into the sand within about three months so getting through that barrier is critical. They stop for all kinds of reasons naturally. Some find that blogging just isn’t for them and that explains a whole lot of the abandoned blogs on the various free blogging networks. Others start a very specialised blog and when whatever they’re writing about finishes, so does their blog which obviously explains a lot of abandoned travel blogs and university based blogs. Most confusing are the blogs which seem to be powering ahead and which just stop one day for no apparent reason at all.

One category must be the experimental blogs or at least those which turn into experimental ones. For instance, some years ago I started On a Postcard with the idea that it would be a collection of very short blog entries on the two broad themes of “daily life” and “something to ponder”. To be honest the idea just sprang out of the availability of what seemed like a great domain name and thus wasn’t a great reason to kick off a blog. Well, as you might expect from such a beginning, the blog ran into the sand after a while. However, interestingly one post managed to pick up a lot of traffic because google picked up the image on it as a featured image. Anyway, that set me thinking about it and towards the end of last year I revived the blog as an experiment into attracting hits via images and also of intensifying the hits by way of writing further articles based on the search terms that the blog was attracting.

How’s it doing? Well, it’s only been going properly for a couple of months now but already it’s getting a steady stream of hits relating to relationships for reasons which escape me and for cold weather clothing for seemingly sensible reasons. So, I’ve written a short sequence of posts on each of those areas to see what happens.

If this approach is a success I’ll roll it out to my other blogs in due course but ’tis early days yet.

Getting rid of that unwanted tattoo

admin — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 23:04:15 +0000

Even if you’ve put a lot of thought into the idea of having a tattoo before considering things like the design and placement, it’s still possible that at some point in the future that you will want to think about removing it.

But what does a tattoo remover actually get up to?

The problem is that a tattoo is basically designed to be permanent. It’ll certainly change over the years as your skin changes but the ink will remain within your skin essentially forever. Or, in short, it ain’t going to be an easy thing to remove.

So what the tattoo removers do is basically to erase the whole area of the design. Since the ink is within your skin this means that it’s generally going to leave a scar broadly overwriting the are where the tattoo used to be. Thus, small tattoos are easier to get rid of than large ones and the young lady’s tattoo shown here wouldn’t realistically be possible to remove.

Definitely a case of think a lot then think some more before deciding to get that tattoo.