The Big Blog

It’s been a month since I last posted and I have to say that I’ve enjoyed not blogging. It’s been nice not to have to blog, or to blog about rubbish which no one cares about (okay a few people read regularly, but I was getting bored). I’ve been blogging here for almost four years now, and I think it’s about time to stop.

I’m going to leave the blog online though incase this is just a whim, but I don’t think it is. I’ve even been neglecting visiting other people’s blogs and slowly my feedreader is clogging up.

As for the ’secret project’, you’ll be surprised to know that I haven’t done anything much on it, and instead have perferred to have an almost total self-imposed exclusion from the web. I’ve had too many things on the go at one time and instead of concentrating 100% on one thing I’ve had to give miniscule atention to a lot of things, and so somethings have been neglected. I need to remove these and get down to the bare bones of what I can feasibly manage. It’s a bit like a spring clean, and I’m just getting rid of all the things gathering dust.

Somethings I can’t just abandon and will have to find suitable donors, but this blog is not one of them, and I do like it as an archive, and will maybe migrate it as that, purely for me to look back on.

To all my fellow bloggers it’s been a good time, and I may crop up from time to time on your comments, so watch out.

au revoir

Adem

I’m going to be developing a new website soon, and let me just say it’s very exciting. I can’t really talk about it at the moment as I’ve still got lots of ideas running through my head and don’t want to commit myself too soon as it might take a while to get off the ground. Sounds interesting? Well for some of you it will be, and for some of you it won’t. Not really grabbing you is it?

I spent the weekend doing some research on it which has helped me quite a bit, but do you know what the hardest bit is? Thinking of a domain name. Rubbish eh? I can get the site going, do all the work, but then when it comes to thinking of a relevant domain address that is easy to remember and type, and that is unique and identifyable then I’m stumped a bit. I think I’ll draw up a shortlist and keep looking at them and hopefully something will inspire me as we all know there are some terrible doamins out there.

The BBC reported yesterday that Marks & Spencer is to begin charging its food shoppers for carrier bags, with customers paying 5p per plastic bag, all of which will be donated to an environmental charity Groundwork which invests in much-needed green spaces in neighbourhoods.

We use an awful lot of carrier bags in the UK, about 13 billion a year, which is crazy, and something definitely has to be done to reduce this.

I know a lot of people will be in uproar against this but to be honest this is the only way that it can happen as we can’t trust people to simply cut down on their bag usage. Bags for Life have been around for quite a few years now but I still don’t see a huge amount of people re-using these week-in week-out.

If you have to pay for something then you will think twice about if you really need it, and shops such as Netto and Lidl have been charging for carrier bags for a long time now, although I think for them it’s more a matter of reducing expenses rather than saving the planet.

Just because we’re used to getting plastic carrier bags it doesn’t mean that’s the right way of doing things and today Gordon Brown has warned retailers he will force them to cut down on plastic bag use if they do not act voluntarily, and so it looks like M&S timed their campaign quite well.

Next up is to get supermarkets to reduce the amount of packaging they use on their products.