Revs

I was recently taken on a tour of the Microsoft research facility in Cambridge by Tim Regan from the Socio-Digital Systems Group.  You can see my some of my photos on my Flickr.

I’m trying to convince Tim that he needs to invest in some CSS wizardry from Ecru’s designer.

I recently spotted an article that questioned the correct spelling of website, or should that be “web site”?  The idea is that some people spell it one way, some the other, so should there be some kind of worldwide standard for how people say it.  Should there only be website design agencies, or can a design agency be forgiven for designing web sites?

Quite frankly, who cares… it’s a distinction that doesn’t have to be made, the focus is really on natural keyword analysis, and if your audience decide that they want to buy services from a website designer then who is to say that they are using the wrong words?  And furthermore, if they want to drop the word “site” and just say web design then I say go ahead - be my guest!

We started working with ISN Solutions several years ago.  ISN have very pleasant offices in London so I have always enjoyed my meetings there, especially because they are such a friendly and welcoming bunch of people who have a very professional approach to their work.

They provide a wide range of IT support services to clients in London, throughout the UK and worldwide.  It’s the proximity of their engineers to companies in London that makes them so desirable as a service provider.  That and their incredible responsiveness.

 Aside from providing London IT support, they provide IT consultancy and managed services for SME’s (small and medium-sized enterprises).

I had a fantastic time over the weekend in Asheldham, attending a course with some friends, run by Barry Howard from Hunter Outdoor Training.

I attended a brilliant lecture by Barry once before, so I kind of knew what to expect.  He’s a very inspiring teacher who does a lot of work with schools encouraging people to do challenging activities outdoors, instead of sitting inside all day.  He’s really into leadership skills, and is very willing to share his experience with you, without being pushy.

The course I attended involved turning up in a couple of minivans at about 8 o’clock on Saturday night in the middle of nowhere, in pitch darkness, unloading our gear at the base station, packing all our rucksacks in preparation for a “scenario”, and then walking out into the pitch black night.

I’d spent a long time preparing for the night, and my preparations turned out to have been just right.  There were a few garments I ended up not needing, including my Norwegian Army winter weather top.  I was absolutely roasting for the whole time, despite the windchill and near zero temperatures.

One of the shops I visited to get some of my gear was the Army and Navy store in Westcliff on Sea.  I sidled into the shop hoping to browse secretly, but one of the members of staff intercepted me immediately.  I said I was going for an overnight survival exercise and he said “we’ve got everything you need”.  This turned out to be true.

We ended up marching 10km, and the emergency scenario we practiced in the middle was very challenging, with the wind blowing a gale.

I’m now planning on going again, but this time with the children, because it impressed on me how important it is to practice life saving and resuscitation.  Things I last thought about when I was in St John’s Ambulance, longer ago than I care to remember!

I had a couple of disappointing experiences at Coffee Primo over the weekend so the moment I arrived home I sent this message to them on their website, although I’m not convinced their online form actually worked. 

“We went away this weekend and stopped at a Coffee Primo at service stations on the way out and the way back.

On the way out my wife ordered a load of snacks and drinks and it took a lot of persistence to get all of the items she had ordered.  We sat and chatted about how efficient they are at Starbucks, where this almost never happens.

It was my turn to place our order on the way back and I was surprised that exactly the same thing happened, at a different branch of Cafe Primo.  I had to ask for every item on our receipt to be given to me.

After we had drunk our coffee, which was great by the way, we wondered why your system works the way it does, because our first experience was not a one-off.

Initially we thought that your staff are under the impression that if they can get away without giving part of an order to a client then they are saving money for the Café Primo.  Surely this can’t be company policy though, because you would lose more in brand reputation than you would gain in retained blueberry muffins.

So it seems more generous to assume that you use your clients to enable your staff to communicate with each other, from the cash till to the dispensing counter.

Call me crazy for coming up with an idea like this – and it really is just one of many possible solutions – but do you think that when an order is taken, if your staff were to print two receipts and hand one to the people who are preparing drinks, that your staff could take responsibility for fulfilling the order, and just leave your clients to double check?”

21st February Coffee Primo update:

I got good answers emailed back to me from Welcome break.  The last email was from a manager of one of the branches of Coffee Primo that we visited, saying that what I had suggested was actually the way they are supposed to work, with two till receipts.

They are going to do some work to make sure that all staff work to company standards at all times.

I think that they dealt with my problem very well.

I think I went a bit mad recently.  We got a DVD of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King And I for Christmas and in a moment of weakness I bought the soundtrack CD on Amazon.

It includes, without doubt, the worst song I have ever heard - I Whistle A Happy Tune.   Try it out on iTunes.

After Jimmy Page fractured his finger, delaying their performance, the surviving members of Led Zeppelin will reunite in aid of the Ahmet Ertegun education fund for a show at The O2 in London on 10th December 2007, with Jason Bonham filling in on drums. 

Led Zeppelin wrote 84 songs.  If you could choose your 10 favourites for them to play on December 10th 2007 which would they be?  The older ones?  Tons of stuff from Four Symbols?  Personally I really like In Through The Out Door, but if you’ve only got 10 songs to play with you’ve got to leave a lot out. 

Select your perfect Led Zeppelin set list for December 10th 2007

Don’t forget to answer the question which song would you start the concert with?

I am exceptionally proud of my son’s performance at the East of England Youth Championships fencing tournament at Brentwood College today, winning the gold medal for epee in his age group.

Bram’s awesome trainer Chris Green runs the Club Activ8 fencing team.  It took me a little while to find their website because I couldn’t figure out what name to search for, should it be Active 8, eight, Activiii or Activ111?

The East of England event was a qualifier for the British Youth Championships.  Fencers who wish to enter these competitions must enter these regional championships.

My son is on the Essex chess team (I’m a proud father, I admit it) and today he played on a tournament featuring Essex, Hertfordshire and the Munster chess team from Ireland.  I met the guy who organised the tournament from the Irish side and learned about their chess supplies website.

It really is time we replaced our chess clock and they’ve got loads of chess sets, chess boards, chess clocks and related paraphenalia.

The PAS 78 Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites are a set of guidelines that set out how to commission an accessible website. The new guide is designed to ensure that websites that are new or being maintained are user-friendly for people with disabilities. The report was created through consultation with a variety of advocacy groups including the DRC, RNIB, AbilityNet and the W3C.Crucially, following the guide might demonstrate compliance by the website owner with the UK Disability Discrimination Act which requires websites to be accessible to disabled people.

PAS 78 sets out the steps that you need to follow to ensure your website accommodates the widest possible audience, dealing with the creation of an accessibility policy, the selection of web developers, and the vital role of user testing and maintenance.

PAS 78 is not a British standard, but it is developed using similar techniques, and results in guidance for people who are building websites, rather than standards. It identifies the need for accessible websites to adhere to W3C guidelines, and should include a description of the disabled users to be consulted during the development of the website.

This is great news for Ecru because we have a history of working closely with disability charity AbilityNet on major web development projects with the Crown Prosecution Service and Disability Action In Islington where these processes were engaged.

PAS 78 doesn’t make reference specifically to either WCAG 1.0 or the current draft WCAG 2.0 because of the need to be version neutral.

Website designers will need to be able to describe how their solutions meet the accessibility targets outlined in accessibility policies, describing how their design processes follow ISO 13407 Human-centred design processes for interactive systems, and describe how they will validate early designs with users, including disabled users.

Ecru’s easy to use content management system has already demonstrated it’s ability to deliver standards compliant accessible code, passing independent audit by AbilityNet on the Disability Action In Islington project which achieved AAA accessibility.

Ideally, website testing should be undertaken by users with medium and severe vision impairments, mild, medium and severe motor difficulties, medium dyslexia and mild to medium learning or cognitive disabilities.

Get in touch with Ecru.co.uk to discuss your accessible web project.

I find this video amazing. For a start, it’s helpful to see things from the point of view of motorcyclists who weave through traffic. But also, the biggest obstacle is other motorcyclists who don’t weave fast enough!

I am accustomed to wearing clothes that are easy to wash, but after buying a dozen black T shirts from The Gap and then looking like I only owned one T shirt that I wore all the time, I thought it would be a good idea to buy a different T shirt, and as a result have learned a big lesson about reading the washing instructions before simply throwing a new garment in the wash.

I bought three T shirts and a pair of shorts. It was one of the T shirts that was the culprit, made by Mantaray - an attractive reddish orange number with a picture of a Volkswagen Caravanette on the front.

Here are the washing instructions:

This one contains most of the information I now really wish I hadn’t ignored.

Label 1:

There are five pictures; a 40 degree bucket of water, a crossed out triangle, a crossed out square with a circle in the middle, an iron with two dots on it and a crossed out circle.

Wash as wool cycle
Warm iron on reverse
Reshape whilst damp
Do not tumble dry
Do not iron print
Wash separately
Wash inside out
Do not pile whilst damp
Remove promptly from washing
Machine at end of cycle
Do not rub isolated stains
Dry away from direct sunlight

I can only claim to understand two out of the five washing symbols, the temperature thing and the picture of the iron. The others are a mystery.

So I was supposed to wash my cotton T shirt as if it was made of wool. I don’t iron ANYTHING, so the ironing instructions were not relevant to me, although it’s worth observing that the picture of the Volkswagen is off to the top left, so if I didn’t iron that but did iron everything else then it would probably look a little odd.

The big warning hidden in there though is that I should have washed it separately. It can’t go in with anything else. And now I know why. The reddish orange dye is totally temporary. It wouldn’t have surprised me if it was coloured white when I took it out of the machine, because everything else had taken on its colour, including my new green camouflage print shorts.

What we are looking at here is the princess and the pea of the T shirt world. But it doesn’t stop there because there are some other quite significant warnings on the second label. The good thing about this second label is that the print is at least visible, unlike label 1. The bad thing is that it has the sort of warning that I would have expected to have signed in triplicate before taking ownership of the garment, it really is that severe.

Label 2:

This garment has been dyed using a special process. The colour will fade with each wash giving a unique aged appearance. Due to this dye process it is advisable to avoid direct contact with light Coloured materials and upholstery. Please follow the wash care instructions inside the garment.

If I had been bothered to read the serious warning that was hidden in there I would have learned that there are some things I shouldn’t lean against while wearing this T shirt, and I should be very careful about relaxing back on a settee because I am likely to stain it reddish orange. When you think about it, many relaxed positions that you put your body in mean that you are leaning against something, so it’s worth thinking about just how much relaxation you are going to be able to do while wearing this T shirt.

I am seriously worried that my skin will go reddish orange if I carry on wearing this thing.

The good thing is that I now have a whole collection of clothes in a new and unique shade of reddish orange. The bad thing is that I can’t bring myself to run a whole wash cycle just for one garment.

So I have the following warning that I think Mantaray should get customers to sign before taking ownership of this particular garment:

Warning

Only buy this garment if you want to have more reddish orange in your life, such as on the upholstery in your house, in your friend’s house, at your place of work, in the places you visit. Seriously, don’t go out in the rain in this thing, or get it wet, because you are liable to cause an ecological disaster. You really will not believe how reddish orange this thing is. And the reddish orange likes to escape at any opportunity, so carefully monitor where you are sitting, or what you lean against. Treasure your early days with this garment before the red light receptors in your eyeballs become ineffective because everything in your surroundings has suddenly become reddish orange. You are likely to cripple yourself with debt trying to wash and care for this T shirt away from any of your other clothes. You might consider building a whole separate wash room just for this purpose, and paint the walls red so you don’t have to worry about staining. Wave goodbye to your planet which will soon become uninhabitable because of the global warming you cause when you keep running those wash cycles with just one garment. And when you are wearing this garment do not under any circumstances relax, because scientific tests have shown that when you are relaxed you are likely to be resting on something, and whatever that thing is you are unlikely to want it to become reddish orange.

Flickr is so good that I publish all my photos there now. The photos here on Revsorg are still worth a look, but for more visit my Flickr

This is the review I just had published on Amazon.co.uk of a Bic Biro that costs 14 pence:

Since taking delivery of my pen I have been very happy with the quality of ink deposition on the various types of paper that I have used. On the first day when I excitedly unwrapped my pen (thanks for the high quality packaging Amazon!) I just couldn’t contain my excitement and went around finding things to write on, like the shopping list on the notice board in our kitchen, the Post-it notes next to the phone, and on my favourite lined A4 pad at the side of my desk.

My pen is the transparent type with a blue lid. I selected this one in preference to the orange type because I like to be able to see how much ink I have left so that I can put in another order before I finally run out.

When the initial excitement of taking delivery of my new pen started to wear off I realised that I shouldn’t just write for the fun of it, this should be a serious enterprise, so by the second day of ownership I started to take a little more care of what I wrote. I used it to sign three letters, and in each case was perfectly happy with the neatness of handwriting that I was able to achieve.

I have a helpful tip for you that you might not know about - if you let the ink dry for a few seconds you can avoid the smudging that sometimes happens if you rub the ink immediately after writing. Fortunately the ink used in this particular Bic pen seems to dry very quickly.

On the third day of ownership I went on a trip to London and took my pen carefully packed away in my brief case, but I needn’t have worried, this isn’t some temperamental ink pen that leaks when you store it at the wrong angle. I sat at my meeting and confidently removed the cap from my pen and it wrote flawlessly, almost immediately.

I notice that the barrel of the pen has been crafted very carefully to fit in the pen holder down the edge of my Filofax. It’s not so grippy so that it is hard to remove when I want to make a quick note, and yet not so loose that it falls out too easily when I open my Filofax in a hurry. Maybe the choice of surface texture on the pen has some part to play here, because it seems that the inside of the leather grip on the pen holder in my Filofax has just the right level of adhesion that I can be confident when I need to reach in and get my pen it’s going to be just where I left it!

Today is the fourth day of ownership of my pen, and I have to say I’m starting to treat it like an old friend. I walk around the office with it clipped in to my shirt pocket and someone in the accounts department actually asked to borrow it while we were both standing at the photocopier. Would you believe it, they actually tried to walk away with my pen! They were very embarrassed when I called after them as they walked down the corridor and asked for it back. You will be happy to know that it is now back, safe and sound in my top pocket, ready and waiting to start writing again.

In summary, I would happily recommend this pen to anyone who is planning on writing on paper. If you are considering a writing implement for some other surface such as writing on a CD, or other non-porous substances then another pen might be better suited, but if it’s just plain old paper then I think you will probably be well served by this particular model.

Our friends over at Skills Workshop provide excellent personal and corporate presentation skills training. In a recent course that I attended with this brillant and friendly company provided me with lots of practical techniques that have already started to help me make my presentations more memorable and effective.

The thing about presentation skills is that you can never be over-equipped, there are always new techniques to learn, and skills that you think that you already have under your belt that really need honing.

Right from the word go the Ecru content management system has delivered measurably accessible websites for our clients, but part of the process has always been carefully considered advice at every stage in the process. This is because some of the accessibility issues can’t be contained within the technical environment, there are a number of factors that have to be thought about and dealt with by people.

The first time this lesson really came home for me was when we built the DAII website that was independently audited and approved as W3C AAA accessible by AbilityNet. The website contains a user forum, and the fact that we had to consider was that at any time someone could log in to the forum and post a message that broke an accessibility rule. There are measures that you can put in place, such as a simple administrative check, but that involves an administrator being there every second of the day. The main way we dealt with this challenge was to make the system simple. This benefited DAII’s users, because our research showed that they were likely to be non-technical people from the point of view of web publishing, but also because we didn’t throw in every single piece of forum functionality including the kitchen sink, this lack of complexity assists in the management of accessibility standards.

But there is some Ecru technology that is specifically engineered to be complicated, technical and that goes beyond what you would have thought as being necessary to achieve accessible output in our content managed websites. Our challenge is for this to happen without adding to the complexity of the system from the point of view of the user.

An example is our multi stage filtering process that takes content that is input by users, applies a standard set of rules to take out inaccessible formatting, highlighting inaccessible font characters, replacing badly formed XHTML and storing this in the database without the user ever becoming involved in the process, beyond the identification of which characters have been highlighted and removed because of their lack of accessibility.

But it doesn’t stop there, we then sweep the database applying standard rules to further clean up the code, and then when it is presented as web page content to website visitors we catch another bunch of accessibility issues. It makes the idea of belt and braces seem rather lax!

And then, if you’re the sort of website manager who wants to know they can get their hands dirty editing raw XHTML code, we can always give you the “edit XHTML” button - this allows you to make the subtlest of accessibility fixes to your code, the sort of factors that only an expert would be aware of. We added this function in response to a recent BBC article that said government content management systems lacked the ability to work directly on HTML.

This combination of technical and manual processes is a comprehensive pincer movement, where inaccessibility gets squeezed out, and you end up building websites to the highest possible accessibility standards, but without sacrificing brand and design ethics along the way.

Find out more about the Ecru content management system and ask for a demo!

There are a lot of unhappy people right now. Allegedly, Getty Images have been sending letters to people, many of whom claim to be entirely innocent (or at least ignorant) of the fact that Getty claims they have been using their photos without proper licences.

There is a great deal of discussion over at Sitepoint about Getty Images

If your website contains a photograph that is owned by Getty (bear in mind that they own iStockphoto now as well) and you can’t prove that you bought the appropriate license then you could be in for a big shock, a financial shock, that is, because according to the Sitepoint discussion the bills amount to thousands of dollars and pounds.

There is also a Corbis Images thread.

I went to Brands Hatch with my son on 28th August and have put a small selection of my photos online. The sun was shining, and the cars looked ultra cool, particularly the Aston Martins and Ferraris. And the Lamborghinis…

See my photos of the cars at Brands Hatch

I’m a great supporter of visionaries - people who see the world with clarity, unhindered by the constraints that most of us impose on our actions. For example, if you thought the core set of fonts that most of us suffer on our computers was up for grabs, would you send a letter to key players at Adobe and Microsoft to suggest your own personal additions to the list?

No, and neither would I, despite my lack of satisfaction with Arial, Verdana, Times New Roman and the like.

The fact is, right now I’m in love with ITC Stone Sans. And I’d love it if I could stick ITC Stone Sans in my list of fonts in my CSS and expect that anyone but me would be able to see my web pages rendered in the style that I hoped.

But Andrei Herasimchuk isn’t shackled by these cares, in his open letter to John Warnock c/o Adobe Systems he asks John to consider releasing between eight and twelve core fonts into the public domain, with the benefit that it will have many positive ripple effects for years to come.

Andrei’s personal list includes Adobe Caslon Pro, Adobe Jenson Pro, Franklin Gothic, Frutiger, Futura, Gill Sans, Helvetica Neue, Univers andWarnock Pro, but actually he leaves it up to Robert Slimbach and the other typographers at Adobe to decide which fonts should go on the list.

Not satisfied with engaging just Adobe, Andrei is also calling on Steve Jobs and Steve Ballmer to include these fonts in the Mac and Windows operating systems, including them into their next system updates. This is the part of Andrei’s plan that makes his objective achievable - that we could start creating website designs that look that much more engaging because the fontography is better - and actually expect that our website visitors would be able to see our sites the same way we do.

My only request is that ITC Stone Sans is considered for inclusion in the list, it is just sooooo elegant!

I recently created a new website where I post reviews of film TV and DVD’s that I have watched called Watch This!

It’s been quite a learning experience in a way that I didn’t anticipate. I’ve been watching telly for years, and thought I had a pretty clear idea of what I like and what I don’t, so what could be simpler than starting a film review website where I can post a review every time I see a programme that I like.

But it really isn’t that simple, and the realisation actually came quite slowly to me, and hit home when I started to read film reviews by experts - you know, people who are actually paid for the benefit of their knowledge, rather than people like me who just want to force their opinions on unexpecting victims.

It’s all to do with how informed you are, and with some writers that quality just floods off the page and you can’t miss it.

The best I can say for my reviews is that they are personal, and I make genuine comments about how the things that I watch impact me in my life, so hopefully they’re good enough to actually read rather than just pass straight by.

What has been really good for me though is realising that writing reviews is a skill I don’t have yet, but it is one I am convinced I can develop - every review I post moves me forward in that sense, so at least I’ve moved from a state of unconscious incompetence to a state of conscious incompetence.

Check out Watch This!

 want to share our recent success with the online project management system Basecamp. We have had successful results, so much so that we quickly moved from their free service, through to their more feature-laden account that enables us to manage everything we do at Ecru.Some of the key features of their system are:

- Very clear views of every aspect of your projects, easily able to see who is doing what, and when

- Manage multiple projects without confusion

- The joy of ticking tasks off of your outstanding list, and everyone can see the progress that their colleagues are making

As I say, we started off with a free account, and had already upgraded to a more advanced package within the hour because it started working for us immediately.

Karl & Theo Albrecht Germany Supermarkets £18,400,000,000
Ingvar Kamprad Sweden Retail (Ikea) £16,000,000,000
Lakshmi Mittal UK Steel £14,900,000,000
Bernard Arnault France Luxury goods £12,300,000,000
Johanna Quandt Germany Cars (BMW) £11,900,000,000
Roman Abramovich UK Oil, Investments £10,800,000,000
Liliane Bettencourt France Cosmetics £9,100,000,000
Amancio Ortega Spain Fashion £8,500,000,000
The Herz family Germany Coffee £7,400,000,000
The Brenninkmeyer family Holland Retail £7,100,000,000
Stefan Persson Sweden Retail £7,000,000,000
The Mulliez family France Retail £6,900,000,000
The Oeri/Hoffmann family Switzerland Pharmaceuticals £6,800,000,000
Adolf Merckle Germany Pharmaceuticals £6,600,000,000
Duke of Westminster UK Property £6,600,000,000
Silvio Berlusconi Italy Media £6,300,000,000
Vagit Alekperov Russia Oil £6,300,000,000
Vladimir Lisin Russia Steel £6,100,000,000
Michael Otto Germany Mail order £5,900,000,000
Luciano Benetton Italy Fashion £5,800,000,000
Leonardo Del Vecchio Italy Eyewear £5,700,000,000
Michele Ferrero Italy Chocolates £5,700,000,000
Viktor Vekselberg Russia Oil and metals £5,700,000,000
Mikhail Fridman Russia Oil, banking £5,500,000,000
Spiro Latsis Greece Shipping £5,200,000,000
Birgit Rausing Switzerland and UK Industry £4,900,000,000
Hans Rausing UK Packaging £4,900,000,000
Philip & Tina Green UK Retail (BHS Arcadia) £4,900,000,000
Serge Dassault France Aerospace £4,900,000,000
Hilary Weston Canada/RoI Food £4,800,000,000
Leonard Blavatnik Russia and UK Finance £4,700,000,000
Fentener Van Vlissingen family Holland Energy, retail £4,600,000,000
Rudolf Oetker Germany Food, shipping £4,600,000,000
Oleg Deripaska Russia Industry £4,500,000,000
Hansjorg Wyss Switzerland Medical technology £4,400,000,000
Alain & Gerard Wertheimer France Fashion Chanel £4,300,000,000
Alexei Mordashov Russia Industry £4,300,000,000
Reinhold Würth Germany Industry £4,300,000,000
Vladimir Yevtushenkov Russia Telecoms £4,200,000,000
Andreas and Thomas Strungmann Germany Pharmaceuticals £4,100,000,000
Ernesto Bertarelli Switzerland Biotechnology £4,100,000,000
Suleiman Kerimov Russia Finance £4,100,000,000
August von Finck Germany Investments £4,000,000,000
Francois Pinault France Luxury goods £4,000,000,000
Maria-Elizabeth & Georg Schaeffler Germany Ball bearings £3,900,000,000
Mikhail Prokhorov Russia Metals £3,900,000,000
Hasso Plattner Germany Software £3,700,000,000
Maersk McKinney Moller Denmark Shipping £3,700,000,000
Rafael del Pino Spain Construction £3,700,000,000
The Landolt family Switzerland Pharmaceuticals £3,700,000,000
Vladimir Potanin Russia Metals £3,700,000,000
Walter Haefner Switzerland Software £3,700,000,000
Curt Englehorn Germany Pharmaceuticals £3,500,000,000
Friedrich Flick Germany Investments £3,500,000,000
German Khan Russia Oil, gas £3,500,000,000
David and Simon Reuben UK Property £3,300,000,000
Prince Hans-Adam Liechtenstein Investments & art £3,100,000,000
Sir Richard Branson UK Transport (Virgin) £3,100,000,000
Nikolai Tsvetkov Russia Oil, banking £3,000,000,000
John Fredriksen UK Shipping £2,900,000,000
Karl-Heinz Kipp Germany Real Estate £2,900,000,000
Alexander Abramov Russia Steel, mining £2,800,000,000
Alicia & Esther Koplowitz Spain Construction £2,800,000,000
Erivan Haub Germany Retailing £2,800,000,000
Alexei Kuzmichov Russia Oil, banking £2,700,000,000
Sabanci Family Turkey Banking £2,700,000,000
Charlene and Michel de Carvalho UK Inheritance, brewing and banking £2,600,000,000
Iskander Makhmudov Russia Mining, metals £2,600,000,000
Reinhard Mohn Germany Media £2,500,000,000
Thomas Schmidheiny Switzerland Cement £2,500,000,000
Antonia Johnson Sweden Food, energy, telecoms £2,400,000,000
Giorgio Armani Italy Fashion £2,400,000,000
Jean-Claude Decaux France Media £2,400,000,000
Klaus-Michael Kuhne Germany Shipping £2,400,000,000
Peugeot family France Cars £2,400,000,000
Vladimir Bogdanov Russia Oil and gas £2,400,000,000
Bernie & Slavica Ecclestone UK Motor Racing £2,300,000,000
Leonid Fedun Russia Oil and Gas £2,300,000,000
Madeleine Schickedanz Germany Retailing £2,300,000,000
Athina Onassis Switzerland Shipping £2,200,000,000
Gianluigi Aponte Switzerland Shipping £2,200,000,000
Heniz Baus Switzerland Retailing £2,200,000,000
Mahdi al-Tajir UK Oil, Investments & Water £2,200,000,000
Boris Ivanishvili Russia Mining £2,100,000,000
Earl Cadogan UK Property £2,100,000,000
Joseph Lewis UK Finance £2,100,000,000
Russell De Leon and Ruth Parasol £2,016,000,000
Gerard Louis-Dreyfus France Commodities £2,000,000,000
Nadhmi Auchi UK Finance £2,000,000,000
Poju Zabludowicz UK Property & hotels £2,000,000,000
Russell De Leon & Ruth Parasol UK Internet gambling £2,000,000,000
Sean Quinn Ireland Quarries, hotels & insurance £2,000,000,000
Simon Halabi UK Property £2,000,000,000
Victor Rashnikov Russia Iron and Steel £2,000,000,000
Poju Zabludowicz £2,000,000,000
Eddie & Malcolm Healey UK Property, kitchens £1,900,000,000
Klaus Tschira Germany Software £1,900,000,000
Otto Beisheim Germany Retailing £1,900,000,000
Rainer & Michael Schmidt-Ruthenbeck Germany Retailing £1,900,000,000
Richard Desmond UK Media £1,900,000,000
Martin Bouygues France Construction, media £1,800,000,000
Sir David & Sir Frederick Barclay UK Media, retailing & property £1,800,000,000
Anurag Dikshit £1,704,000,000
Vladimir Kim £1,437,000,000
Eduard Shifrin £920,000,000
Yong Keu Cha £800,000,000
Naresh Goyal and family £780,000,000
John Christodoulou £750,000,000
Lev Chernoi £604,000,000
Vikrant Bhargava £592,000,000
Victor Chandler £500,000,000
Dieter Bock £445,000,000
Marlon Abela £400,000,000
Oleg Novachuk £355,000,000
Michael Gooch £275,000,000
Ayman Asfari £260,000,000
Elena Ambrosiadou £200,000,000
Niklas Zennstrom £200,000,000
Ralph Oppenheimer and family £200,000,000
Dr Nick Dhandsa and family £160,000,000
Ephraim Shahmoon and family £160,000,000
Roger Ames £160,000,000
Nasser Ahmed £151,000,000
Sir Keith Mills £150,000,000
David Harding £145,000,000
Anthony Lyons £140,000,000
Scott Kapnick £140,000,000
Maroun Semaan £130,000,000
Peter and Denise Coates £126,000,000
Richard Hunting and family £114,000,000
Albert Fuss £110,000,000
Anwar and Yakub Patel £110,000,000
Glenn Earle £110,000,000
Jonathan Klein £110,000,000
David Wieland £106,000,000
Tony Khalastchi and family £105,000,000
Richard Koch £103,000,000
The Marquess of Milford Haven and family £103,000,000
Shaf Rasul £102,000,000
Asif Aziz and family £100,000,000
Damien Hirst £100,000,000
Joey Kaempfer £100,000,000
Julian and Marc Worth £100,000,000
Nick Corfield £100,000,000
Paul Ruddock £100,000,000
Peter Weinberg £100,000,000
Sukhpal Singh Ahluwalia £100,000,000
Paul Stoddart £97,000,000
Anthony Cann and family £95,000,000
Gweirydd Walters and family £92,000,000
Stephen Daubney £92,000,000
Tony Langley £92,000,000
Alan Dick and family £90,000,000
Ben and Jos White £90,000,000
Peter Wheeler £90,000,000
Stephen Haines £87,000,000
Harold Sher £85,000,000
Stephen Conway £85,000,000
Sushil Wadhwani £85,000,000
Tony Williams and family £85,000,000
Austin Baird and family £84,000,000
John Rudd and family £82,000,000
John Shropshire and family £82,000,000
Abdul Bhatti and family £80,000,000
Adalat and Arshad Chaudhary £80,000,000
Alan Bekhor £80,000,000
Bernard Oppetit £80,000,000
Bob Diamond £80,000,000
Christopher Mills £80,000,000
Earl of Lonsdale and family £80,000,000
George Robinson £80,000,000
Hugh Sloane £80,000,000
Johnny and Patrick Byrne £80,000,000
Peter Mallinson £80,000,000
Peter Martin and family £80,000,000
Simon Borrows £80,000,000
Younus Sheikh £80,000,000
Caspar MacDonald-Hall £79,000,000
Peter Hargreaves £79,000,000
Stephen Lansdown £79,000,000
Stuart Monk and family £79,000,000
Jim Moore and family £78,000,000
Patricia Kluge £78,000,000
Tony Todd £78,000,000
Mike Danson £76,000,000
William Lloyd and family £76,000,000
Bruce Jarvis and family £75,000,000
Cormac and Patrick Byrne £75,000,000
Gary Corbett £75,000,000
James Lupton £75,000,000
Mike Clare and family £75,000,000
John Young and family £74,000,000
Benjamin Bonas and family £72,000,000
David Carr £72,000,000
Gordon Gibb and family £72,000,000
Graham Hazell £72,000,000
Richard Hanson £72,000,000
Brad Rosser £70,000,000
Clive Cowdery £70,000,000
Gary Brown and Jacqueline Jones £70,000,000
Gordon Sanders and family £70,000,000
Graham Anwyl and family £70,000,000
Jeremy Pilkington and family £70,000,000
Lady Nina Bracewell-Smith and family £70,000,000
Naresh Shah and family £70,000,000
Paul Dunkley £70,000,000
Simon Arber £70,000,000
Stephen Lloyd and family £70,000,000
Bill Bottriell £68,000,000
John Miskelly £68,000,000
Johnnie Boden and family £68,000,000
Nicholas Howarth and family £68,000,000
Martin Higginson £67,000,000
Tom Dalrymple £67,000,000
Michael and John Taggart £66,000,000
Phillip Yuill and family £66,000,000
Alan Miller £65,000,000
Bryan and Barry Lloyd £65,000,000
David McLean and family £65,000,000
John Cutts £65,000,000
Michael Samuel and family £65,000,000
Peter Dean and family £65,000,000
Tej and Bobby Dhillon £65,000,000
Edwin Booth and family £64,000,000
Robert Hill and family £64,000,000
Sir Mark Thatcher £64,000,000
Terry Smith £64,000,000
David and Lewis Chester £63,000,000
Tom Eakin and family £63,000,000
Iain Liddell £62,000,000
Jake Shafran £62,000,000
John Kennedy and family £62,000,000
Malcolm Denmark and family £62,000,000
William Haughey and family £62,000,000
Zameer Choudrey and family £62,000,000
Finian O’Sullivan £61,000,000
David Dein £60,000,000
Dennis Paulley and family £60,000,000
Fred Pritchard and family £60,000,000
Friedhelm Eronat £60,000,000
Geoff Dyson and family £60,000,000
Graham Mellstrom and family £60,000,000
Harley and Philip Barnard £60,000,000
Jayne Sutcliffe £60,000,000
John and Patricia Sealey £60,000,000
John Harry and family £60,000,000
John Morgan £60,000,000
Kevin Heaney £60,000,000
Larry Albon £60,000,000
Leonard Eppel and family £60,000,000
Mark Blandford £60,000,000
Patrick Ridgwell and family £60,000,000
Peter Savill £60,000,000
Philip Carter and family £60,000,000
Raj Sehgal and Sanjeev Mehan £60,000,000
Rhoddy Swire £60,000,000
Richard Northcott £60,000,000
Roger Hancox £60,000,000
Sir Lindsay Owen-Jones £60,000,000
Stuart Fiertz £60,000,000

I went to London today with Andy the designer at Ecru and I took a load of photos. The weird thing was that a security guard came over and asked me to stop. Apparently you have to ask permission from the owners of the buildings.Anyway, the sky was clear, the sun was shining through the clouds, and the buildings looked epic and dramatic.

See my photos of the buildings in the Docklands… until I had to stop, that is…

I went for a helicopter flight along the River Thames with Tom on Saturday. The weather was great, very clear with just a bit of haze that was less than expected for the middle of London. The pilot was very good, didn’t throw his chopper around so we felt very relaxed.I took a full memory card of photos on my Canon EOS 350D - that’s 542 images!

See the photos from the helicopter flight here

My favourite is Img_1754.jpg - Horse Guards Parade in Whitehall - the high resolution version is amazingly detailed and you can pick out people all over the place. The version you see here on Revs.org is 25% of the original so that it downloads more quickly so you’ll just have to take my word for it.

Since I started using Outlook 2003 I have accidentally sent dozens of emails to people when I meant to copy or paste using Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V.

It took me a while to figure out that I was accidentally clicking Ctrl+Enter which is Outlook’s shortcut to send your email - great, huh?

If your problem is accidentally hitting Ctrl+Enter you can disable the Ctrl+Enter keystroke combination by editing the registry.

You need to create the following registry keys:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Outlook\DisabledShortcutKeysCheckBoxes
String Value: CtrlEnter
Value Data: 13,8

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Word\DisabledShortcutKeysCheckBoxes
String Value: CtrlEnter
Value Data: 13,8

These are the keys for Outlook 2003, and you need to change the 11.0 to 10.0 for Outlook 2002, or to 9.0 for 2000.

Restart Outlook for the changes to take effect.

The question in my mind is why Microsoft made it so hard to do this?

Embankment is a commission undertaken by Rachel Whiteread for the Tate Modern Turbine Hall. Contemporary sculptor Rachel Whiteread has a reputation for having created several pieces of public art and was awarded the Turner Prize for House in 1993. She created a Holocaust memorial in Viena, Austria, and created Monument in London’s Trafalgar Square. Embankment is a huge structure made from 14,000 casts of the inside of a variety of boxes that have been stacked in a variety of ways.

I took some photos at the Tate Modern gallery Turbine Hall a couple of days ago

Embankment photos

There’s this guy who has been going around posting on a whole bunch of forums about Hacked Satellites, so I decided it was time to go public and tell everyone the real truth about Hacked Satellites and the effect this is having on cats.

HackedSatellites.com

It’s been a case of cobbler’s shoes for the last year; so many websites to build for clients, so little time.

But at last we’ve got ourselves in gear and given the site a revamp, showing the work we’ve done for our latest clients.

You can see the new site at Ecru.co.uk

It’s About Time are a company of antique clock specialists who have bought, sold and serviced clocks for over 26 years. They offer a fantastic range of clocks ranging from carriage clocks, small mantle clocks, bracket clocks and wall clocks of various styles, all the way through to longcase clocks of which they always have at least 30 on display in their 3 showrooms.

Visit their website that was designed by Ecru at:

Antique Clocks

This year we got ourselves a pair of chickens and an Eglu from Omlet.co.uk. The Eglu is a green house that they live in, and it’s fox proof.They give us two eggs a day, and hours of fun watching them walk around, eating absolutely anything they can lay their beaks on in the garden.

Our initial fear that James our cat would attack them was put aside when they chased him around the garden. You could almost see him blush…