Rob's Blog

Back in February I wrote that the promising service Homepages Friends (formally MySearchFunds) had stopped paying out, (wel, they seemed to have stopped paying me anyway).

Any members will have seen the emails they sent recently. The first one seemed to give you the option of paying your earnings to a charity instead and the second one gave tyhe option of using the earnings to offset your carbon emissions. Neither was very clear about what exactly was happening.

Today I received an email clarifying it. They are going to stop paying users for their searches (as of 1 August), and instead will be donating it to your chosen “cause”.

They do say that any searches made before then will be paid (regardless of whether the threshold is reached), but I’m not sure whether to trust that, given how long I’ve waited for my payout (they owe over £50 now).

They are still due to pay for referrals, but only a flat ratre so it could take a long time to make anything!

I decided to look for an alternative, and came across Scour. They don’t pay as much per search, but you can increase your earnings by reviewing or voting for results. It also aggregates Google, MSN (or Bing) and Yahoo results, and it all looks much slicker than HomepagesFriends (in fact it looks like a nice search engine even without the payment!). Worth a try. Of course it would be great if you used my referral link.

I’d love to hear your comments.

Sorry, this one’s going to get a little geeky.

We rented a Blu-Ray last night in an attempt to have a nice Friday night in. Unfortunately the film (Be Kind Rewind) crashed the ATI video drivers on this computer. After a couple of attempts I decided to try upgrading the ATI drivers. I was a little concerned about doing this as when I last upgraded (just after buying the computer), the intallation failed meaning I couldn’t use Catalyst Control Center (CCC) (a control panel required to use the computer with our HD TV), and I got lots of error messages. I did fix it in the end, but it was a real pain.

Anyway, I ran the upgrade, and suprise surprise it failed mid installation. CCC doesn’t work, but that’s the least of the problems. Boot up takes absoltely ages, during which it pauseds on a black screen for many minutes (I actually thought it had crashed, and tried the various windows repairs, which also took ages). The drive doesn’t recognise Bl-Rays or DVDs, and crashes if I try to. Media Player doesn’t work, and MediaPortal only works for the first time each boot.

Luckily Spotify and the various on-demand TV sites work, so we’re still able to watch TV, but the computer is a real mess.

I’m going to have to try fixing the driver (it took quite some time last time), which I might try later.

If anyone is interested, we’re running Windows Vista 32-bit, and have an ATI Radeon 3870 HD graphics card. The drivers I tried to install were version 9.6. Install at your own risk!

It’s 3:40 am and  I’m up again today rocking Izzy to sleep. It’s not too bad as he gave us over 4 hours before waking for a feed and a change. I think she got wind, but that seems to have cleared (with a few of her surprisingly loud burps) and she’s starting to settle. I did think she was getting her daily dose of gripe (she didn’t need any Gripe Water, which is progress), but it’s cleared on its own.

I picked up our new (well, second hand) car yesterday. We upgraded our 12 year old Renault Scenic and got a 2004 Grand Scenic. The old car had done very well for us. It had just under 100,000 miles on the clock, but we hadn’t exactly looked after it. It still ran very well, and had never failed to start, but we were told at the last service that it was on its way out (annoying as we’d just spent over £300 to get it through the MOT!) The most immediate problem (given the hot weather) was that the interior ventilation fan had stopped working.

The new car is the top of the range spec, which is very nice because it has all sorts of fun toys like keyless entry and panoramic sunroof. Unfortunately it was made before cruise control and climate control was standard on the top spec. It does of course have AirCon, which was on our must have list.

It also has 7 seats, 2 of which fold down into the larger boot. We didn’t go looking for the extra capacity, but decided that the extra boot space could be very useful, even if we never use the extra seats (I think there are very few adults who could fit in them). Maybe we should just have 4 more children?

Slightly worryingly, I got our newer, more reliable car home, went to demonstrate it to Abby when she got back from Bumps & Babies, and it wouldn’t start (something that had never happened to the old car)! I rang the guy we bought it off (Selby Trade Autos is his trading name). He was great – despite the car being “sold as seen” (as most used cars are), he dropped everything and drove straight out to see me. Luckily it turned out to be a minor problem which had been caused by some work that had been done on the car just before we bought it. I do need to take it to my local garage and get a fuel line replaced to stop it happening again (not as bad as it sounds), but he will re-imberse me for that.

Overall I’m very happy with my new toy. I’ll leave you with a couple of the  photos from the ad for the car, I think I’m going to see if my darling daughter will settle in bed now.

It’s just gone 3:00 in the morning, and I’m writing my first post in a long time, and I’m writing it one handed.

It’s been nearly 2 months, a long way from the relative excitement of my post a day “experiment”. Anyone who reads this regularly (I’m still not sure there is anyone), or anyone who follows me on Twitter (which I have been updating), will of course realised it’s because my wife Abby gave birth to our daughter.

Isabel Anne Ferrer was born at 11:03 on April 20 2009!

[More Photos Here]

Of course the reason I’m up so late/early, and typing one-handed is that I’m trying (and as of 03:11am, succeeding) to rock Izzy (her name was shortened almost immediately) to sleep.

I’m not sure what words to use to describe adjusting to parenthood. It has of course been amazing. We’ve had a few sleepless nights, but on the whole I think we’ve been pretty lucky. Izzy has been a pretty good sleeper, and we’ve rarely resorted to naps during the day, and haven’t been walking round like zombies.

We’ve also been pretty lucky with feeding (I say we, Abby’s been doing all the hard work). Izzy latched on almost straight away after birth, and there’s hardly been a problem with breastfeeding since birth. A lot of our friends from our NCT antenatal class have been very jealous!

A week or so ago we started to have a bit of problem with Izzy becoming fussy and grouchy every evening. This turned out to be gripe, and we’ve found giving her Gripe Water at this time calms her pretty quickly (normally after some impressive burps/farts!). Again we’ve been lucky and I’ve heard of much worse cases of gripe/colic.

Everyone of course asks how the nappy changing is! To be honest, it’s not a huge chore, and it doesn’t even seem too disgusting any more. We are using cloth nappies, which I would highly recommend and isn’t loads of work. The only problem is she’s using up to 15 nappies a day, which given we’ve only got 20 means daily washes. I may write a more comprehensive account of cloth nappies at a later date.

It’s now nearly 03:30, and Izzy’s still fast asleep (thanks to lullabies on Spotify – you should see our recent Last.fm stats!), so I’m going to risk going to bed now! I’ll try and post sooner than 2 months, I promise!

Goodnight!