Yesterday we held the funeral of my step-mum. She wasn’t old, she died of cancer. This isn’t the first dealing I’ve had with cancer, in fact I’m sick to the fucking back teeth of it. We all have to die but I don’t see why people should have to die in a slow and painful way rotting away to nothing whilst everybody gets to look on helpless. The impact invariably ripples out like a small stone being thrown into a flat calm lake. Once again there is a mad dash of people going for check-ups for every lump and bump, once again my long term aches and pains come to the fore, is it really time to get things checked out or do you just say fuck it, safe in the knowledge that sometimes it’s best NOT to know? I’ve lived in pain for 8 years now why even think about putting a name to it..no matter what that name is. They reckon about 1 in 3 people will suffer from cancer in their life…I do have an increased risk, I also have a wife and daughter. I would gladly take that hit 100% of the time.

And finally to top of an amazing month one of my biggest partners Affutd the affiliate side of William Hill has seen their staff in Israel go on strike. What impact this will have long term I have no idea but I’m not about to sit back and see. It’s just another great big pile of work to get through migrating links to other more reliable bookmakers instead. There is hardly a month that goes by where some major negative change isn’t occuring with one or another of my advertising partners.

If it wasn’t for the time I get to write software I’d give up this whole fucking business in a heartbeat. It’s full of wankers, liars and the sorts of pricks that I wouldn’t piss on if they were on fire in the street in everyday life. Think about that for a minute before trying to get in touch with me in the hope of pushing your next great proposal that you have to “connect with my web properties”.

Done.

(And for the half a dozen or so sites scraping my content, enjoy the fucks you fucking pricks, welcome to the world of Googles adult filter).

If anybody has a spare invite going I’d really appreciate it.

Cheers.

This could be serious, if most of your target phrases are in lower positions on the first page, a position where you don’t get massive clickthough rates then you’re about to get hit by a massive increase in bandwidth usage as Google takes a copy of your page for each search.

On the flip side there is the advantage that if a searcher does click on your result they will get to see your webpage almost instantly (how this affects popups etc I’m not sure). This could help retain visitors to your website but it’s a ying/yang trade off. Are you happy to have all your pages preloaded for the odd occasion that somebody does visit your website, if so you might be better of controlling that yourself by using some sort of server caching.

I’m going to wait and see if this turns out to be a bad thing or a good thing but my gut is telling me that it’s not going to end so well, especially for people who are currently using shared hosting for their websites.

Like all new projects there is no guarantee of a return, you plan as best you can with the current variables and then if you think it’s a goer you do it. Not only am I putting in all the work I am also talking all the risk, if it doesn’t pay off I suffer financially.

So how bloody annoying is it then to find out at this point that the government has changed some tax rules (details not important) that means they’ll rape me of even more money?! If I knew before I started what I know now the margins wouldn’t have worked and I’ve not have started. I’ll do all the work, take all the risk and should I succeed the government will take a large chunk of any profit. It totally pisses me off the way they just announce things willy nilly with no forethought of giving people time to plan ahead.

What this change also means is that come April I would actually get to keep more of my income if I was an employee instead of self employed. The “reward” for me taking the risk of self employment is losing all statutory employment rights, taking home less pay and being treated as a second class citizen should the worst actually happen. What a strange way of encouraging small business?

On the other hand they have announced large increases to benefit payments.

I repeat again – Governments Are Dickheads!

How Many Categories To Kill The “New Post” Page

If you’ve ever used WordPress you’ll know that when posting it gives you the option of ticking multiple Categories. At around about 8000 categories you’ll notice that this screen suddenly stops loading properly.

How Many Categories To Kill The Categories Page

The only point on this page where all categories are loaded is the option to choose a parent from a drop-down. For this reason it seems to be much more resilient than the New Post page. I finally started getting unable to allocate memory errors at between 25000-27000 categories.

How Many Categories To Stop The Blog Functioning To Visitors

Honestly, I never found that limit. Even without the ability to use “New Post” or manage Categories the front end of the blog worked absolutely fine way up over 35,000+ (which is where I got bored). As long as you’re clever in where you list your categories there isn’t really a practical limit on the front end.

The main factor seems to be that a lot of the built in category functions stop working at around about 25,000 categories. Whether it’s the default 30 second timeout that PHP has or more likely memory problems I can’t say for certain. Either way, if you’re on shared hosting and want to be able to use the WordPress back end fully and not spend all day waiting for things to load (to create posts etc) I’d suggest sticking to below 6000 categories. Of course if you’re using a VPS or even dedicated hosting then you’ll get much more mileage.

For my project I’ll be writing a custom CMS, oh well, you can’t win them all.

You’ll still find the official XBox 360 steering wheel for private sale on Amazon from time to time. If you were the sort of person who is highly organised you could have bought up a stock of these for between £50-£60 over the last 6 months. In 3 days time you will be able to get a hell of a lot more than that for one. Right now they are totally sold out, I couldn’t find a single second hand one for sale in the whole of the UK! That’s how you could have made big money from this software launch, selling a real life product! That isn’t going to help me though because I’m not super organised. Not only do I not have a stock of steering wheels to sell I haven’t even got one to play with! Like thousands of other Xbox 360 users I’m left scrambling around looking for any controller that might “do”. What are the Xbox 360 steering wheel options? Not great to be honest:-

Mad Catz MicroCon Wheel and Pedals – Looks very lightweight and hasn’t too many good reviews from what I’ve seen. As far as I’m aware this controller doesn’t have force feedback either. The market isn’t exactly flooded with stock of this wheel.

Atomic Accessories TVR Sports Wheel – Not even out as I write this (should be available by the end of August). The good news is that it has motors and promises realistic play. The bad news is that the size of the wheel doesn’t fit F1 very well. This could very well be just about the only viable “buy new” option out there.

Logitech Drive FX Wheel – Logitech make fantastic wheels, however they didn’t want to pay Microsoft the license to allow force feedback making this wheel one of their poorer efforts. On the plus side their has been good feedback about their simulated feedback system and it look this wheel looks the part. Rare as hens teeth. Good luck getting hold of one of these.

There is also a Porsche wheel available but you’re talking some serious cash depending on configuration.

I think what I and most people would like to be able to do is to buy the official XBox 360 steering wheel from Microsoft, it’s had great reviews and would seem to be a perfect fit for the F1 2010 game. Shame it’s not going to happen. I’m seriously considering canceling my pre-order and switching it over to the dark side and getting F1 2010 for the PS3 instead. At least that way I’ll be able to get a spanky Logitech G27 wheel! Strange how there is no shortage of them available.

We got back late last Monday and I knew straight away that not much work was going to be getting done. Whilst Benidorm was a great holiday it’s a little backwards in terms of hotel facilities. I didn’t want constant communication but this was at the other extreme. 1 internet PC that I’d have to share with the dozens of kids in the hotel, frankly I couldn’t be bothered! This meant I had to deal with my e-mails on Tuesday morning, 3 hours it took me to get through them all. I’d seen that the weather forecast for the UK was great this week and with mid afternoon tides I took the chance to give my new boat a run. Fishing is my other way of relaxing, not exactly ideal when I’m just back from holiday but I’m not stupid enough to miss out on the good weather when it comes, besides my job gives me a lot of freedom – I take passive to a whole new level!

And that’s just about been my last 2 weeks, I have hardly touched a computer, had plenty of fun and still made more than enough to keep the wolves from the door. How much? That would be telling and I just can’t be sure WHO is reading this blog. It’s not a bad life really is it? I should probably also mention the backlinks part of the title. Before I went away I had a fairly major blow with one of the services I use stopping. I decided to expierment and set a few things in motion and have stumbled across a fantatsic system for nailing top Yahoo rankings. Every page I’m trying it with I’m hitting the top spot for 3-4 word mid competitive phrases on Yahoo. There has been some fallout on Google but I’m just starting to see that rebound and settle again whilst the Yahoo rankings are holding firm. Anyhoo if it all works out nicely I might drop a few hints and tips in a later post

Then today I’ve been using the family PC, surfed to JohnChow.com and got the same alert:-

A search on Google for “kanius.net malware” reveals a Warrior Forum message that has been deleted.

Is anybody else getting an alert from John Chow’s site? Something doesn’t seem quite right with this?

The first sign that life wasn’t going to make this easier for me happened almost as soon as I signed up. A viral infection that I hadn’t seen since I was 16 decided to have another go. For the 2 weeks before I went on holiday I couldn’t do any gym work. It killed my planned routine on the cruise ship as well and even though I did manage a lot of walking on holiday I never honestly felt above about 70% the whole time. Then just as I thought I was getting over one thing I ended up with a chest infection. I’m still on antibiotics for that but again it killed my gym routine and since returning home I’ve only been 6 times. All in illness has cost me 5 weeks of gym time.

Undaunted I was still confident enough to go for a “decent” walk, if nothing else I needed to see how much it had taken out of me. The short answer is quite a lot. Less gym time equals me carrying more weight (about 5 pounds more than I’d like) which equals my sciatica causing more problems. In the case of my walk my back problems were causing me to put too much weight on my other foot. Tendanitis, 1 week before the big day!

Still I was confident enough to do the pre race registration. I have some good tablets to manage the inflamation and it’s only 32.5 miles after all. To be honest I was considering stopping at an earlier 19 mile checkpoint by this stage but secretely I was still hoping for my original target.

Then last night, the night before the race I was due out for a meal with some friends from Thailand. The meal itself was fantastic, I limited myself to only a couple of beers. I left the casino early leaving them to party on. I was being good knowing that I had to be up at 6:45 this morning. I woke up feeling fine, then as I slowly came around I had feeling in my stomach, one I know well. Thirty minutes later when I finally managed to get out of the bathroom the writing was well and truelly on the wall. There was no way I could even consider walking if I’ve got to run to the bathroom every fifteen minutes.

So that’s why I’m sat here typing instead of walking, a total failure. The Parish Walk will have to wait for another year, it just wasn’t supposed to be this year. But what’s the point in all this? Besides just a general whinge there is a simple message here, I’ve had similar experiences with websites I’ve tried to build where it seems that absolutely everything is against you. You pound against the current determined that you’re doing something right, most of the time what I’ve found is that it was just never worth all that effort. There is a lot to be said for the path of least resistance and living the easy life. When something isn’t meant to be then it’s just not meant to be, don’t beat yourself up, move on to something else, onwards and upwards.