False information in Political Life

I have just been reading a blog post on the site of Duncan Crow (Conservative Councillor for Furnace Green on Crawley Borough Council) about a misleading mailer put out by Labour in the local area

Now whilst I don't know the in's and out's of this particular case from my experience with the Local Council it is really not a surprise, I have always found the comments made in many political flyers to be very misleading at best and downright deceptive at worst. When I was campaigning I regularly read things that entirely mislead the reader and encountered many tactics like the one Cllr Crow mentioned where something that can not be accepted is proposed simply so it has to be turned down.

I have always wondered how effective this kind of dirty tricks campaigning is as I would hope that the general public would be too smart to go for this, but then as the people who do it keep getting elected I guess my faith in mankind may be a little too idealistic. But anyway my main reason of bringing this up is to say isn't it time that the contents of Political literature is checked for accuracy? I find it crazy that the Advertising Standards Commission do not have the power to check these things for accuracy, in fact you can make any outlandish claims you want and to hell with the truth (I call this the Lib Dem Model)

Going forward I would like to see not just the leaflets checked for honesty (With very harsh penalties for deliberately misleading voters) but I would also like to have all politicians held to account for the contents of their manifesto with an annual review where they would have to update the electorate on progress against what was promised, this doesn't mean that plans can't change as that would obviously hamstring the council to a policy that may be 3 years out of date but at the very least if they are not keeping their promises they need to stand up and say why.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year to anyone who finds this, as 2013 ends and 2014 begins there is a whole world of possibility and delight and I hope that some of it will come your way.

Thanks, Adam

Twitter user: Brilliant Ads

For those of you on Twitter I can definitely recommend @Brilliant_ads many examples of what happens when Advertising folks actually start thinking - You notice their are no ads for Perfumes there, not really a surprise!!

I definitely liked this one for a Swedish bookshop, simple and yet controversial and funny, it will get spoken about and yet would have cost peanuts to produce.

George Osborne Awarded Briton of the Year???

So the Times today announced George Osborne as Briton of the Year 2013 thanks to the economic recovery he has "brought about" I'm afraid I can't agree with this as all actions taken by politicians cause harm to the economy the best I can give him is that he "may" have caused less problems than someone else, but then that can't be proven one way or the other.

It has been pointed out that the award is likely to be motivated by politics coming from The Times who are not exactly anti-Osbourne but it's no different than the Guardian giving the person of the year accolade to Snowden, someone they helped risk lives for the sake of circulation rather than freedom.

So who would I have picked? To be honest I can't really think of anyone who had a stand out year, I guess that is to be expected after all the heroics of 2012 but if I had to give it to someone it would probably be Ed Miliband for standing up almost every week at Prime Minister's Questions even though he is clearly going to be exposed as rather simple yet he keeps getting up, he really is an example to us all on tenacity.

Are Shoppers Ripped Off by Sales?

 

I saw an article on the Daily Mail Website claiming that shoppers were being "Ripped Off" by shops having what they called "Psudo-Sales" Apparently lots of shops have put their prices up just before the sale period so that when they reduce them it appears that it is an even better deal than they think.

Luckily I can now solve this problem with a basic lesson in Economics - The Value of something is equal to the price the owner is willing to sell it for and the buyer is willing to pay for it! What this means is that if you are willing to pay a price for something then it is good value, if you are not willing to pay a price for something (Then why would you buy it) it is bad value, it really is this simple. If you buy something that you don't want or pay more for something than you want to then there is a simple saying that fits here about "A fool and his money..."

Movie Review: Walking with Dinosaurs 3D

This weeks Cinema visit was to see Walking with Dinosaurs in 3D, Now this film broke one of my cardinal rules when selecting a film to see - Being in 3D, Normally I will not go to see a 3D movie as I really don't find the technology adds anything whatsoever to the film, I am not entirely sure what it is supposed to give - other than headaches but I can assure you that at no point during the movie did I forget I was in a cinema and start to believe I was in fact in Cretaceous Era Alaska so no idea why studio executives think I would prefer to watch this film with big black glasses on instead of with my own eyes. But I digress the fact is that both my Wife and Daughter love Dinosaurs so I really didn't have much choice in this so I went to see it.

Now the first thing that struck me about this was that they took everything that was great about Walking with Dinosaurs the TV show/Documentary and after they had removed it filled it with endless rubbish, the beauty of WWD on the BBC was that it was a nature documentary showing us creatures that are long since extinct but in the style of the documentaries we had grown up with, in short it was a revolution, this movie however replaced all of that with a story staring a small dinosaur on an adventure and featured a cast of talking dinosaurs and a bird as a narrator. Now I don't want you to think that I disliked this film, it was an OK film my problem is that it is the complete opposite of what made the Documentary Series, books and the Live Show so great (And yes I have seen all of them - as I said my Wife loves Dinos) This film would have been better placed as a sequel to Disney's Dinosaur than a feature length Walking With Dinosaurs, But if you can cut off the absolutely pointless starting scene (With Karl Urban who I would assume has kids who like Dinosaurs as I can't imagine he saw this as a career progression.) and the ending when the humans come back what you are left with is a pretty light fluffy "Runt comes good" story.

My best advice for this film (Obviously other than my usual advice of watching it in 2D) would be to switch the volume off and just enjoy watching the Dinosaurs and the stunning scenery.

BBC News - 100 Things we didn't know last Year

Just read through the BBC article 100 Things we didn't know last Year and despite the fact that I knew 5 of them previously:

10. The House of Lords has a rifle range.

28. Tears do not fall in space.

37. The French call a walkie-talkie a talkie-walkie.


40. Time doesn't fly when you're having fun (we just remember a lot more detail than normal after enjoying something so think it went quickly).

92. Americans pronounce gifs as "jifs"

There were still some very interesting new facts:

3. It's easier to pick wet things up with wrinkled fingers - suggesting an evolutionary reason for getting "prune fingers" in the bath. - I always love an evolutionary advantage

8. Women look their oldest every Wednesday at 3.30pm. - I am really not brave enough to test this theory. 

21. "Aunt" is the most popular pornographic search term in Syria - Really hoping it means something else in Syria!!

25. South Africa was included in the BRICS as it made for a better acronym than Nigeria. - Have often wondered why they were included.

70. Cuban rescue workers use sniffer rabbits to find people in collapsed buildings - Probably the cutest entry on the list.

82. Amazon's original name was to be Relentless - and the URL relentless.com still redirects to the company website. - Interesting and I admit I checked it right away, you can do by clicking here www.relentless.com

96. In Brazil barbecuing is a form of public protest. - Must have been a lot of Burgers floating around this year then!

Anyway, Check out the article as it has all of the links to the original articles.

So This is Christmas

Well not the best start to the Christmas festivities with a fence panel blown down the road, a flooded garden and now holes in my roof, all in all not really set to put me in the Christmas Spirit.

Still it is the season to be Jolly so here is a cat in a Snow Storm

If that doesn't cheer you up a little then nothing will!

Oh the Irony as Denis MacShane is jailed

It is not without a small amount of Irony that Labour MP Denis MacShane is jailed for expenses fraud.

MacShane who submitted false receipts for over £12,000 was forced to resign when he worked for the BBC for making a hoax call accusing then Home Secretary Reg Maudling of being a crook.

Maybe it was his belief that Government was full of crooks that got him involved in the first place!

Will Adebayor's two goals bring some pride back to White Hart Lane

 

Well after a 6-0 defeat to Man City and a 5-0 Defeat to Liverpool AVB as sacked, I'm not going to say if I agree with the decision or not but as a Spurs fan I'm not surprised and I will say it distressed me less than seeing Harry or Jol going as those two sackings were hard to take, anyway as always on to the future and despite an initial set back to Tim Sherwood's Managerial caretakership, in losing 2-1 to West Ham to go out of the League Cup, we were back to winning ways this weekend thanks to two goals from Adebayor. Now for years I have been joking with mates that Adebayor would be the top striker in the premiership if the season ended at Christmas, year after year he seemed to blast out of the blocks in September only to disappear entirely come January so perhaps despite AVB losing his job maybe he had a master plan, leave Adebayor on the sidelines until December and hopefully he will still be knocking them in come May, seems to be working so far.

The match itself it has to be said was a little more nerve racking than I had hoped from Southampton but as they have Drawn with City and United so far this season (And beat Liverpool) it was never going to be a stroll in the park, Spurs showed several defensive weaknesses which have been evident for a few weeks now (Can't believe the defense was the tightest in the league at one point.) but at least they are now balancing that with some goals at the other end and although Soldardo again had a desperately bad game in front of goal wasting at least 3 chances in 10 second half minutes, he is at least getting into the right positions and linking well with the other players I think as long as we keep faith with him then once he gets a couple of goals he will probably not look back, all in all whilst I am not going to get excited about beating Southampton the future definitely looks a little brighter than it did.

NSA Spying - This time it's personal

Funny to read this morning that the NSA have been spying on companies as well as world leaders including the one I work for.

According to this article at france 24 there are 60 companies being spied on so my every word could be getting recorded! to be honest I would be very surprised if they were listening to my calls - I would like to be that important but it is a few years away yet, and even if they were monitoring me I would simply feel sorry for the poor analyst who had to listen to my conversations about data and CRM


To be honest I always assume I am being monitored anyway so this won't change how I am speaking.

Presents at Work

Not sure if I have mentioned this before but I work in Marketing and part of the job is to purchase promotional items was very happy today to receive a Christmas gift from a Promotional Products Supplier Called All Wag Promotions.

Please don't think I am turning this blog into an Advertising Blog to try and get free stuff - Unless Mercedes are reading and feel like sending me a new car!!

But the reason I decided to Blog about it is that the Personalised business card holder is really cool and a really nice touch and I am a great believer that good marketing deserves to be talked about. (Obviously this is likely because I am in Marketing.) Although all being equal even before this I would have recommended All Wag as they have always been great when dealing with them so I don't feel like too much of a Freebie Whore.

Stocks and Shares

I am a big fan of the stock market - to be honest I am a fan of anything that creates such a wide variety of statistics but having read Rich Dad, Poor Dad I have started to realize that I have not been paying enough attention to money producing assets.With that in mind I am going to create a HYP (High Yield Portfolio) which I am going to update on here in case anyone else is interested in my portfolio and wants to start a discussion about it.

My current portfolio contains the following shares.

Barclays
BP
Lloyds Banking Group
Royal Bank of Scotland
Tesco
Vodafone
National Grid

Now those of you that know about dividends will guess that this portfolio wasn't constructed to be a high yield portfolio as I bought all of the Banks during 2009 as I sensed a bargain, experienced investors will also notice that this portfolio is very badly balanced with 3 out of 7 banks over the next few months I am aiming to get this balanced as well as pick up some more High Dividend Payers. I will update when something is interesting but this is where I find myself at the end of the calender year. (Although the divs are calculated as a financial year so divs paid between now and March will be added and final Yield will not be finished until March.) Also I bought National Grid only a few months ago hence have not yet received a Dividend.

*For full disclosure I should say that I do indeed own all of these shares however the volumes are worked out on investing £1,000 in each share (The Purchase price is the price I paid but I didn't buy £1,000 of each - I just don't want to tell the world too much about my finances.)*

Anyway this is the state of my real/modified portfolio that I will be updating around the time I make any real trades.

MS Excel Split Postcode

If anyone is stuck with anything Excel or Access related then send me a note and I will try and help, I love Excel and am always happy to try and discover new skills.

On this note I was asked a little while ago how to split a postcode in Excel, as it was put to me:

"How do you split the first part of the postcode out when it can sometimes be 4 digits and sometimes 3 digits."

Now there is a way to do this using isnumeric - but I found a much simpler way is to look at the part of the postcode you know doesn't change which is the last three digits, the last three digits are always three so therefore you know that the space will always come from the fourth space from the right.

=LEFT(A1,LEN(A1)-3)&" "&RIGHT(A1,3) 

Here what I am doing is trimming off all but three digits from the left and then concatenating the three right most after adding the space so 

RH11RH, RH111RH and R111RH will become RH1 1RH, RH11 1RH and R11 1RH respectively.

If you want to do the opposite then you can use this formula

=REPLACE(A1,FIND(" ",A1),1,"")  to take the space out of a postcode.

Other useful Postcode formula include

=LEFT(G2,FIND(" ",G2)-1)  to find the outcode of a postcode that contains a Space or simply

=LEFT(A1,LEN(A1)-3) to find the out code of a Postcode without a space.

  

Rich Dad, Poor Dad

I have just finished reading "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" and it has really changed the way I am looking at my finances. There is nothing in this book that is really all that different or against what you probably already know but it is constructed in a way that really makes it make sense, and although it doesn't contain anything I didn't already know what it has done is shown me that my thinking has been back to front, essentially (And very basically) I have always tried to pay all my bills and then save what I have left, this has caused me to have very slightly more money at the end of each year, I have then worked to improve my Job so that the amount of extra money is slightly more each year, according to Rich Dad what I should have been doing is improving my Assets (Basically anything that creates a passive income) so that they pay my expenses in fact other than as a way to buy assets the Job I have worked so hard to get really is irrelevant to my future wealth. Anyway as I say this is a very basic lesson I learned from the book so I am now going to try and follow the advice and see how it goes.

Since reading the book and to make sure I am not just being taken in by some slick advertising I have also read a lot of views that are against the book.

Taking both sides into account I think I would still happily recommend this book, Most of the "Anti" comments I have read are basically saying that Robert Kiyosaki isn't being honest with his stories or that he doesn't have a proven business reputation but to be honest I am not all that worried about these things as my advice is read the book and absorb the lessons but don't worry that much about the actual stories, to me it seemed these were more there to illustrate the message, they were not the message itself. (Even the books title could be seen as false as the Rich Dad referred too isn't Robert's Dad even if you believe everything in the book) So don't take it too seriously and you should enjoy it a lot.

5 Challenge Update

I wrote a blog post a while ago about 5 challenges I had set myself, before moving on with the new things that I am doing now I wanted to update, the 5 challenges I said I was going to attempt were:


2nd July to Mid August = 10,000 Steps for Pancreatic Cancer UK

September = Chiltern 3 Peaks for Ian Rennie Hospice

7th October = Blenheim Half Marathon for British Heart Foundation

14th April 2013 = London or Brighton Marathon for Pancreatic Cancer UK

1 Other to be decided later.

I completed the 10,000 steps and the Blenheim Palace Half Marathon and in April completed the Brighton Marathon (in case you were wondering it is a really long way!!)

As it turns out I couldn't complete the Chiltern 3 Peaks but instead completed (With my darling wife along side) the Bucchus Half Marathon which although only 13.1 Miles was almost as hard as the full marathon due to being off road and largely uphill.

Anyway, I have so far managed to raise just over £1,000 and am now coming into the final challenge of the five challenge series which will be the London2Brighton Challenge. (Feel free to sponsor me at http://www.justgiving.com/Adam2Brighton ) This will be an 100k 24 Hour Run/Walk but hopefully can raise some money for Pancreatic Cancer UK

Also this year I took part in the Lottery Anniversary Run which was a 5 Mile run around the Olympic Village finishing in the Olympic Running Stadium with a 3/4 Lap of the stadium, Obviously being my first year of running any events like this it was really unlike anything I had ever done before and the moment you run out of the tunnel and onto the track in front of a Stadium full of spectators was a really unique experience.

So below is my collection of Medals from my first year of running, They are the medals for (Left to Right) The Bacchus Half Marathon, The Brighton Marathon, The National Lottery Anniversary Run and the Blenheim Half Marathon.

And hopefully this time next year I will have some more to add to them!

Blog Relaunch Take ... about 7

Ok, Here I go again with yet another relaunch of my Blog, I tend to keep trying and failing to get any traction but have no intention to give up yet so lets go for it again.

Focus for the blog will remain the same, basically things I am interested about that people will either want to read about or not so expect the usual collection of Movie Reviews, Spurs Updates, Politics Rants and Tech updates. I will also be including things I find funny and my new passion which is High Yield Investing - Could I be any more interesting? Anyway for the next few days I will be posting and hopefully will keep going but then I have said that before.