I was helping on the candy floss stall on Friday night (a very cold but dry night) as part of my councillor role - and was immensley impressed with the organisation and the turnout.  The village was absolutely buzzing - it was great - so many people I didn't know and mostly young families.  Also some of the youth's hanging around.  Thankfully I wasn't doing the candy flossing - Alan Moffat was chief flosser - and a good job he did too!

It did make you realise though just how large the village is with so many people around.

Received the best of the Human League double CD the other day.  When trying to play it through Windows Media Player, it was partially disabled by the CD's software which then tried to play it on a featureless media player provided by EMI.

Why do they not understand what is happening to music and their customers.  Why don't they understand people want to listen to it on their PC's not their hi fi's (i read an interesting report that sales in the US are down substantially this year).  It is possible to overcome this infringement on my music purchase, simply close the software then open windows media player.  However, it does not copy cleanly onto my PC when converting to MP3.  I wish to do this as I cannot be bothered to keep changing CD's on my system - rather I wish to let 8 hours worth of music go without interference from me - they just don't understand.

Next obstacle, as I can't do clean MP3's to my PC I cannot then burn a CD to use it in my car - which has an MP3 player.  This means I have to change CD whilst driving (more dangerous) and it doesn't have user information such as title and artist etc - really really really annoying. 

Then they blame consumers for declining sales. Not so EMI - why can't you also understand that churning out manufactured bands isn't what is going to secure your long term fugure - the Human League is up to 25 years old - I can't see Hearsay being repackaged and resold in 25 years time - very short term thinking.

I wish they'd wake up, spot the music trends and work out how to deliver to the customer what they really want....

Since its rolling updates started about 6 months ago, Google is no longer as predictable as it used to be.  I have a few web sites that I'd have put as a banker for being a number one position or at least first page, yet they are struggling to get up there.

For example, I'm currently targetting moses baskets as a keyword search term for The County Collection yet the old page which had nothing on it was ranked no. 78 and has this week disappeared and the new optimised page is nowhere.  Maybe I'm expecting too much too soon.

No hockey for the first XI today so a busy day at home - working - did further work on a speculative project and also some other work in progress.

Was pondering how to make the move up from a semi detatched house up to a detatched in the local area, that is roughly a £100k jump, no way we can do that.

Crystal Palace drew 1-1 with Coventry - last minute equaliser by Coventry oh well.

Amazing how Rugby has taken off in England - walked past Chalfont Common yesterday and there were a few kids playing Rugby rather than the usual football.  Have heard quite a few comments recently about how rotten football is in terms of money all the way through the game, the supporters and attitude and much more.  Wonder if we are seeing the start of its demise.

After leaving the bird table empty for most of the summer, I have thought that the last week or so is about right for putting more food out with berry supplies probably now less.  As I'm typing I am watching many birds eat from the table - starlings (about 7 of them), sparrows, robins and unfortunately pigeons.  A magpie has also dropped in.

Need to investigate whether I should be putting out bread or not - someone told me that is the worst thing for them.  Trouble is putting out nuts only attracts the squirrels.

The next round for hockey was announced yesterday.  An we are over to Cheshunt who we played last year.  Though they look better than the side we played last year as the edged out Mill Hill last round.  We of course got there by beating Harlow 6-1 in the pouring rain.

So no team building saturday night away fixture this round then...