Apparantly the big news in the Westcountry is that the A303 is to be closed some time early next year, with a 40 mile diversion. The BBC has more details and the Highways Agency press release is also available.

I wondered why neither the HA nor any of the press articles I’d seen bothered publishing a map. While they’re happy to describe an elaborate route in text, it took me less than five minutes to knock this up.

The visual view is – I think – much more explanatory than any text, and it adds instant impact to the article.

Good morning! It’s just gone 7am and those programmers out there involved in EPOS and e-commerce systems are either sitting smug or are running around trying to get the computers updated before the shops open.

Today’s the day standard rate of VAT (sales tax) drops from 17.5% to 15%, in a move by the Chancellor to encourage spending. Whether it works or not remains to be seen, I’ve heard that many shops are simply keeping prices as-is, and pocketing the slight difference in markup from each sale. Some high-street shops have bizarre “offers” highlighting the VAT drop as the reason but (in one case) “offer ends 3 December”.

In view of all of this number-crunching fun, I’ve produced a handy VAT Check Sheet for download, which allows you to see the VAT difference, new totals and how much shops should be dropping prices. I think the numbers are right but if anybody has any corrections, thoughts or comments I’ll be happy to update.

It’s been a fair while since my last post. Various reasons come to mind but for me the biggest focus of the last six weeks has been my company, which has taken a far greater chunk of my attention in recent times.

While plenty of things have happened recently, I’m going to try focusing on my business as the basis for a series of new articles on this blog. I’m hoping to talk more about my experiences, ups and downs with the hope that this kind of writing will be useful to others.

The usual common-sense disclaimer applies: anything I write is personal, (usually) unqualified and should not be viewed as definitive. Simply take them as they are: anecdotal.

I’ll be writing the first article real soon now, and you are actively encouraged to reply and give your own thoughts.

Last Friday I spent the day in Old Broadcasting House, Leeds with a group of like-minded people interested in starting, or already on their freelance journey.

The event, organised by Stephanie Booth was originally intended to be a larger conference but due to disappointing numbers it was cancelled. The attendees were instead invited to a smaller, less formal gathering called SoloCamp.

The twenty-or-so of us who attended spent the day talking about a variety of issues: Finance, Confidence, Growth and Clients. The full overview of the day can be found on the SoloCamp wiki.

This was my first “BarCamp” style event, and I took the opportunity to get some presentational confidence by moderating the Growth session. I had a bit of a stumble with the session as my ad-hoc material quickly ran out, but thankfully the session turned into a rather interesting discussion about Hype Cycles towards the end (thanks to Dennis!).

All in all, a very interesting and educational experience. It gave me renewed enthusiasm about getting my company up and properly running. It also had me thinking about charging policies, marketing and finance, all of which are very important to a vulnerable technology start-up. More generally, it has been a great pleasure meeting a variety of individuals, from various backgrounds who I hope to keep in touch with.

Finally, I’m back into doing something that I love – fiddling with new ideas.

Today, Google released Google Gears 0.4 with geolocation. For those of you not yet aware of Google Gears, it’s an attempt by the big G to enhance the client-side with a variety of rich add-ons, such as local databases, offline services and smoother integration with the host OS.

Gears is also available for Windows Mobile devices and, with the addition of geolocation, adds some exciting spice to the mobile platform.

Previously I’ve made aborted attempts to use a combination of Navizon (a mobile tracking service), Fire Eagle (Yahoo!’s location “platform”) and iamnear.net (Tom Taylor’s very handy directory of POIs). It works to a point, but is a hopelessly elongated way of serving geo-aware content from a web browser.

With Gears 0.4 it’s now possible for the browser to interrogate directly the user’s location, through a combination of cell IDs and GPS (where available). The natural conclusion is to slap this tool onto the front of something like iamnear.net, et voila, you have a location-aware website puling information directly from the client.

Without further ado, check out my painfully basic demo – you’ll need Windows Mobile 5/6 and Google Gears (if it is not detected, it’ll prompt you to install).

As a bonus, the site will also work on your desktop, but I’m presuming that’d only be available with a GPS dongle of some kind?

I’d love to spice it up a bit – actually without presuming too much I’m fairly sure this is a natural upgrade to iamnear.net and other sites… if you have any thoughts feel free to post below

A bit of a spooky advert from Facebook. Does it really know me that well that it serves up ads featuring names of websites I used to run?

Good news. Going Solo – the “one-day educational conference for freelancers and small business owners” is open for registration. First 25 registrations get the special early-bird discount and pay just £150 (which by all accounts is going fast…).

I’ve been freelancing for about a year now, and running a small business for over six months. It’s moving fast, and I’m enjoying learning a great deal from first-hand experience and others’ stories. Going Solo looks like a great opportunity to get first-hand feedback from like-minded people. I’m hoping to get a lot from this event.

Here’s another random tip from the dark recesses of my warped explorations:

You know how pretty much every DVD out there has some annoying “copying is bad mkay” video where the teenage girl is downloading some film stupidly fast? Criminals always have the best Internet connections… anyway, a lot of them have a list of countries at the start. Looking for United Kingdom? Well, it’s on page four of four, at the end.

The point of my rant is that if you choose some weird random country (Belgium seems to work), quite often it’ll skip the copying warning, thus saving you those precious thirty seconds of your life you’d otherwise not be able to fast-forward through.

Clearly Belgians don’t copy stuff then.

BTW, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is a very funny movie

Apart from anything else, this is the first time I’ve seen the BBC News site quote an expletive directly. In previous circumstances (usually articles about swearing on live broadcasts) they’ve always seemed to dodge the exact wording of expletives.

In a recent reader survey* the most popular articles on this blog are the ones which help with day-to-day technical problems. Here’s a rundown of a few more handy tips while they sit on the ol’ noggin:

• Many programs in Windows (Microsoft very much included) share consistent keyboard shortcut. A recent personal disovery is that Ctrl+Backspace can often be used to delete an entire word.
• Google Translate is ace. It’s really come far and I now rate it above Babelfish. With more languages than ever before, and with dictionary, text and website translations it really is a must-have for people who have reason to search foreign sites. For instance, it is with Google Translate that I found that the Dutch for cattle grid is wildrooster. And the world is a better place now I know that.
• Renaming a file? Click it and press F2.
• Deleting a file and want to bypass the Recycle Bin? Hold down Shift and press Delete.
• Browsing a website? To open a link in a new window hold down Shift when you click it. To open in a new tab, hold down Ctrl.
• To rapidly lock a computer, press Windows key +L.
• Onions release a chemical that reacts and turns to a mild sulphuric acid in the eyes (hence the stinging). To counter this, peel the onion underwater or keep your onions in the fridge.
• While Alt+TAB lets you go forwards through your list of open programs, Alt+SHIFT+Tab lets you go backwards. It’s all a bit cack-handed, but if like me you have loads of programs open it can be very useful at times.
• Alt+D in most web browsers selects the address bar so you can start typing a new web address.
• Lots of programs let you drag and drop things. For instance, in most web browsers you can select text then drag it to another window; to a textbox or to something like the address bar. You can also drag images (e.g. to the desktop or a local folder) and website links (to your Favourites folder; the address bar or the Home icon to set a new home page). Try it and see.
• In a web browser, the backspace button can normally be used to go Back a page (unless you’re in a textbox at the time). If that fails, try Alt + Left Arrow.

Okay, that’ll do for now.

* ie. Somebody left a comment.