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Inside Out Personal Excellence Through Self Discovery

November 2nd, 2011 by Admin, Filed under - Books

Book Review by Bruce Thompson

Inside Out – Personal Excellence Through Self Discovery – 9 Steps to Radically Change Your Life
Jeroen Coenen and Gareth Stubbs – MX Publishing – ISBN 978-1-907685-67-5

Inside Out by Jeroen Coenen and Gareth Stubbs is a journey of self discovery in a readable and entertaining paperback. Their down to earth, no holds bared introduction gives you all the history and credibility you need. These guys have been round the block, down in the gutter, clawed they way back out and managed to build their own success story. In their unique style, using Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), personal anecdotes, exercises and inspirational quotes they will take you on a journey which can help you achieve success, love and personal fulfillment. Working through this book will help you achieve better results, and may inspire you to do what you always dreamed of.

Jeroen Coenen and Gareth Stubbs are both NLP Master Practitioners, and the inspiration behind Ego Invenio, their movement for personal excellence through self discovery. Ego Invenio are passionate about the results that people create in their own lives, and through our their personal experiences have discovered some pretty powerful tools and techniques which they are sharing with people. Let Jeroen and Gareth take you on a journey to personal excellence, taking what you have within you and truly boosting the results in every area of your life whether it be career, relationships, finances or life style.

If you don’t yet know Jeroen and Gareth from their events and trainings, you will want to meet them after you have used this book. A colleague of mine picked up Inside Out – Personal Excellence Through Self Discovery, and opened it at one of the exercises. Once she realized what it was about, she asked me where could she get her own copy!

Buy the book, complete all the exercises and experience for yourself how to turn your life inside out, and achieve the results that you have always wanted.

Inside Out – Personal Excellence Through Self Discovery – 9 Steps to Radically Change Your Life Using NLP, Personal Development, Philosophy and Action for True Success, Value, Love and Fulfilment.

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Free Blog With Every Web Hosting Package

April 1st, 2010 by bgt, Filed under - Free Blog

As part of our drive to encourage the art of Blogging, TechCo Hosting are offering a Free Blog with every web hosting package sold. Yes! That is right, a FREE Blog, set up and ready to go! All you have to do is log on and start blogging.

So why would you want a blog anyway? Well if you are in business, how would you like to increase your market share, without spending a fortune on a TV add campaign? Or for a charity, how would you like to get your message out there, without eating up your income on leaflet printing and distribution? Or as a budding journalist, or keen hobby writer, how would you like to build up a loyal following of readers while doing what you enjoy?

For those who understand the commercial advantages of running your own Blog, and are ready to start now, Please Click Here to contact us and get underway. If you have not yet fully realized exciting prospects and opportunities offered by running your own Blog, then read on.

What is a Blog? According to Wikipedia, a blog (a contraction of the term weblog) is a type of website, maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. According to Quantcast, around 250 million people visit one or more WordPress.com blogs every month, and view over two billion pages on those blogs.

Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog, so as a Blog author, you become a blogger! There are over 22 million WordPress bloggers as of February 2010, so you will be in great company.

How does a blog work for you to increase your market exposure? Simple! The web search spiders from Google and Yahoo! among others, traverse the web looking at pages and indexing the content. The spiders like sites where the content changes frequently, and can mark the content higher in the search rankings as a result. When you add content every day, the spiders visit and index it, and if you are providing the information that people are searching for, then you get your share of visitors. What business would not like to have more customers visit their store looking for their products?

Just try this simple exercise: Go to Google and search for your main product in your local town. Is your website at the top of the list, or on the first page? This works for charities too, as you can see if you search for your main aim, strap-line message or vision. Click here to search for End Leprosy Now on Google

If you are employed in Health and Safety then put all your useful tips and tricks on the Blog for everyone to benefit. It increases public awareness, and may bring visitors who would pay for your service. If you run a business making Widgets, then each time you make an improved version you write a piece about it and put it on your Blog. Tell your customers and confound your competitors! If you are in Human Resources and discover a new technique for dealing with stress at work, then write it up in an entry on your Blog. You get the picture? Does it sound too good to be true? Why not start a blog and get the feel for the blogging experience yourself?

Click here to take the next step

What if you are in a one to one business like portrait photography or beauty therapy, where the bulk of your business comes from personal referrals? How about creating a website showing your photos or cosmetic tips, and your online booking form?

Does this work for musicians and other performers? Of course! You can post video clips, music samples and gig dates on your blog, as well as providing links to buy your products, CDs, DVDs and Tee-shirts!

What if you work in business coaching or personal development? Why not start a blog giving motivational tips to your readers, and a daily inspiring thought?

If you still need convincing, why not take one of our web hosting packages and get yourself a FREE blog installed and ready to go! The package gives you full facilities including email accounts, mail forwarding and auto responder, FTP access to upload files and photos, a MySQL database environment, and PHP scripting so you can make your new web site dynamic and responsive.

Best of all though we will install a free blog with every web hosting package, so that you can be up and blogging at once. Yes, that is a Free Blog With Every Web Hosting Package! What more can we say?

Ok! So what is the catch? Well, we can only provide a limited number of sites installed with the Free Blog, due to the time it takes to load and configure!
Make your decision, take action, and get yours NOW!

Click here to get your Web Hosting Package with Free Blog installed

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Lifeskills Practitioner wins Make It Happen Award

November 11th, 2009 by bgt, Filed under - Latest News

Frances Barrone Certified Lifeskills Consultant has returned to Swindon to victoriously claim her Make It Happen Award from Swindon Business Breakfast Club. Frances was visiting family in Swindon and was inspired to pitch herself against competitors who wished to return to work or set up business in Swindon. The award was presented at the Tawny Owl in Swindon on 26th September by Maureen Inwards who is the European Human Resources Director (PP&M) for Intergraph (UK) Limited.

“Having survived some extraordinary events and traumas in life I see that emotions can affect wellness and so medically I support a holistic approach to health too, as many illness are stress induced.” she told us. “My husband Graham was keen to return to the family nest and take the Lifeskills Centre we had built up in Ireland to Swindon.”

The Life Skills Centre is very conveniently located in Rushy Platt just off Great Western Way at the end of Kingshill, Swindon. There is ample easy parking in a tranquil and private setting. Clients can experience a very relaxing and comfortable environment that offers restful and soothing surroundings whilst receiving exactly the right support and personal attention with a listening ear. They offer face to face meetings as well as telephone support and on line consultations.

To contact Frances to find out more about the Life Skills Centre, you can phone her on 07731 693 082 or email frances@lifeskillspractitioner.com. Alternatively, visit their website at lifeskillspractitioner.com

This article first appeared on advancedpresenters.com as Advanced Presenter wins Make It Happen Award

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Police Issue Online Madeleine Appeal

November 3rd, 2009 by Admin, Filed under - Latest News

The Home Office’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) has issued the online viral message aimed at anyone close to the person who was involved in the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. That person could be a relative, friend, work colleague or neighbour. Whoever they are, they have a secret that could reveal what happened to Madeleine and protect other children.

In order to increase the possibility of reaching that person, CEOP supported by global law enforcement agencies and specialist charities, is asking the public to help spread the message via the Internet. Detectives believe people who know Madeleine’s location regularly search her name online to trace developments in the investigation and police tactics. Madeleine went missing in May 2007 while on holiday with her family in Praia da Luz, Portugal.

Click here to see the latest Madeleine appeal

To help with this appeal, post a link to this site anywhere you can. If you chose, you can be part of the solution.

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Are You a South West Fast Tracker?

August 1st, 2009 by Admin, Filed under - Latest News ~ Special Offers

Are you one of the elite group, known as the South West Fast Trackers?

The South West Fast Trackers are a highly motivated group of business leaders, visionaries and philanthropists who have achieved a common standard of excellence by completing the Christopher Howard Fast Track to Success. While you are as likely to find them in Maui and Cannes as in the boardroom, you will no doubt recognise their solution focused approach whether it is at a Billionaire Bootcamp in St Andrews, or pounding the corridors of power in London or New York.

TechCo Hosting pleased to be providing South West Fast Trackers with web hosting support for an unbelivable price. If you are a member of The South West Fast Trackers, then you are entitled to the special reduced price hosting offer for your FREE blog!

Just Click here to request your FREE Blog!
Please note: we will be checking with the South West Fast Trackers to make sure that you are a member and entitled to this special rate!

If you are interested in this elite group, check out their website by clicking on The South West Fast Trackers

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The Reaper’s Rainbow

June 21st, 2009 by Admin, Filed under - Latest News

Book Review by Bruce Thompson
Harley Farmer – Cause publications Ltd – ISBN 978-0-9526144-0-9

The Reaper’s Rainbow by Dr Harley Farmer is a brilliant detective yarn with an intriguing and compelling plot.

A mysterious illness begins killing strategic individuals in the financial sector and the police believe that Al Qaeda are unleashing a new weapon to cripple our economy. Detective Karen Fraser teams up with Doctor Michael Blandford a former Infection Control Doctor at the hospital where patients start dying.

Together they establish a specialist team of unlikely bedfellows to hunt down the culprit. Gordon Campbell runs a computer security company whose high tech facilities becomes a focal point for their intelligence gathering and international communications.

At first sight you might be tempted to think that it is another story with a superbug as the threat, and faceless terrorists as the enemy. However, after the dramatic opening sequence, I realized that the science is bang up to date, and completely plausible. What is more, the real enemy is lurking in the corridors and boardrooms of hospital trusts everywhere.

I can relate to the bureaucracy that the author describes so vividly. I have heard those same legal arguments, which corporate lawyers utter in all sincerity, but which tell you that they have truly lost the plot. When faced with the intransigence of “the system” which would rather follow procedure than risk success, I have experienced the deep feeling of frustration to which the characters are exposed.

Surely it couldn’t possibly happen? As people started dying, I started to get that funny feeling which I haven’t felt since reading Jaws by Peter Benchley.

This is an exciting book, which kept me up late at night to find out what happened next. It is all the more gripping because it is so believable, and really could happen. I will not spoil the suspense by telling you the ending, but after you have read this book you might think twice about your next visit to a hospital for anything more than parking your car.

The bugs are real, and people are literally dying in their thousands every year from exposure to them. The products and solutions cited really do exist and were developed to break infection cycles. You really must read this book. Then I suggest you send a copy to your local MP and recommend that they read it too!

Harley Farmer is a PhD Virologist who lectures at international conferences.
Amazon UK have a listing for The Reaper’s Rainbow click here to visit Amazon

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Jacquard’s Web

January 23rd, 2009 by bgt, Filed under - Books

Book Review by John Weller
James Essinger Oxford University Press ISBN 0192805770

Arguably the first programmable machine was a loom built by the son of a French silk worker in Lyons. Lyons was the capital of the silk industry in France and produced much fine fabric; amongst their products were fine tapestries showing detailed pictures of landscapes and portraits. These were very laborious to produce and hence expensive. Jacquard determined to design and manufacture a better loom that would produce as good a quality product but with much less effort. The result of his efforts was the Jacquard loom controlled by punched cards; cards that could be re-used and transferred from one loom to another – in other words, the first program.

Jacquard’s work was greatly appreciated by an English mathematician, Charles Babbage, who was working on a project of his own to automate repetitive tasks. In Babbage’s case it was the production of mathematical tables, a far cry from woven portraits but with the underlying similarity of predictable, repetitive actions. Babbage was sufficiently impressed by Jacquard that he visited Lyons and bought a woven portrait of Jacquard produced on a Jacquard loom at a cost in today’s money of £2500.

This book explores the chain of links that led from Jacquard, through Babbage, to the first programmer – Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada Lovelace. It goes on to Herman Hollerith who produced the punch card machine for data analysis. Hollerith found that the US census was taking so long to analyse that the next census was being made before the data from the previous one was available so developed the machine initially to analyse the census data. It was later further developed to extraordinary levels and was a mainstay of business until it was superseded by the next link in the chain, the digital computer. The final links in the chain are Howard Aiken who was largely responsible for the Harvard Mk 1 and subsequently Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web.

The main focus of the book is the early days with Jacquard having 70 pages out of a total of 280; Babbage gets 45 pages and Berners-Lee a short paragraph. This is probably quite reasonable as there are many books currently in print about the birth of the web but very few about Jacquard and how his loom works.

Overall the book is a fascinating run through the very early history of IT with much background detail of the individuals who had such an impact on our lives today. It is obviously well researched leading to a very readable book without too much technical detail in the main body; there is an appendix with the technical detail of how a Jacquard loom works. Highly recommended for anyone who has an interest in the origins of computing.

John Weller is a Fellow of the Institution of Analysts and Programmers and a long established IAP Council member. You can contact John through the Institution, and purchase books at substantial discounts through the IAP Bookstore

Jacquard’s Web is available through Amazon in Paberback and Hardback

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Work in Progress by John Weller

January 22nd, 2009 by bgt, Filed under - History

Almost everyone who has been involved with computers will have heard of Charles Babbage, ‘the father of computing’, and his Difference Engine but how many of us know what the Difference Engine was and why it was so important? I hope to give a brief answer to these questions in this article.

The Difference Engine was a very specialised mechanical calculator. It is reported that Babbage spent about £17,000 of government grants and a similar sum of his own money on the project – an enormous sum of money in the early 1820s! It is impossible to give a direct comparison but using the per capita GDP it would equate to about £25 million at today’s values – not the AEW Nimrod of its time perhaps but in the same league as some of the more spectacular government IT failures of recent times.

Why was it so important? For that we have to look at the background. Britain had an extensive empire and was a major maritime trading power with one of the largest merchant fleets and the most powerful navy in the world at that time. One of the major issues facing maritime navigators was finding their position when out of sight of land. The only method available was to use the sun and stars. For accurate navigation several items are needed – an almanac showing the positions of the sun and stars, an accurate chronometer, an instrument for accurately measuring the angle between the star and the horizon and mathematical tables for carrying out the complex calculations. All of these were available to the 19th century navigator but the tables were of an indifferent quality for reasons that will become apparent. It was said that if a French ship was captured during the Napoleonic wars, the first item the British officers attempted to capture was not the code books, as might be expected, but the navigation tables because they were of better quality than those in use in the Royal Navy!

The values of logarithms and trigonometric ratios can be calculated by means of formulae. However, the computations required are difficult and tedious with purely human brainpower. But there was a mathematical shortcut that made these calculations much simpler. This shortcut is known as the method of finite differences.

If we look at a simple function, say
f(x) = 3×2 + 2x + 1
and evaluate it for x = 1 to 5 we get a series of values. We then take the difference between each result and the preceding result (the first difference) and tabulate it. Then we take the difference between the first difference for a value and the first difference for the preceding value (the second difference) and we will find that they are the same, as shown in Table 1. This is a consequence of the function being a second order function, i.e. the highest power of x is 2; if it had been, say, 5 we would have had to go to the fifth difference before we hit a constant.

We can now stop evaluating the function directly and use our table of differences, which will only require addition. If we add the first and second difference for a value to that value we will derive the next value in the series; adding the first and second differences will also provide the first difference for the next calculation with the second difference being the constant. So, in table 1, if we know the values shown bold, we can deduce the first ‘unknown’ 1st difference as 17 + 6 = 23 and hence the value of
f(4) as 23 + 34 = 57.

Table 1: Two subtractions produce a constant difference
x f(x) 1st diff. 2nd diff.
1 6    
2 17 11  
3 34 17 6
4 57 23 6
5 86 29 6
6 121 35 6

The manufacturing process used therefore was for good mathematicians to calculate the first few values manually until the constant difference was arrived at. Then the remainder of the table was derived by adding the differences as described above. This work could be left to less skilled clerks who did the addition manually and recorded their results in manuscript. (The clerks were known as ‘computers’ incidentally). The sheets containing their results were then set into type and printed to become the mathematical tables needed by the navigator. Unfortunately the opportunities for error were many and the consequences of an arithmetical error in the addition great in a cumulative system such as this. Typographical errors were also commonplace. The end result was a set of tables of dubious quality, which led to shipwrecks caused by navigation errors due to erroneous calculations. One of the most famous wrecks commonly attributed to inaccurate tables was that of Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s flagship, Association, off the Scillies in 1707.

Creating these tables without errors was the job the Difference Engine was designed for. Once the initial set of values and the constant difference had been set, the engine would mechanically calculate the subsequent values without error or fatigue. To eradicate the typographical errors, the results of each calculation were to be set as type and impressed into wet papier maché. When the papier maché sheet dried, it was to be used as a mould to create the typeface from which the tables could be printed directly. There would therefore be no human intervention between the original parameter set-up and the final printed tables.

So we can see that the need for such a device was great and the pressure to succeed high. Why, then, did it fail? There were several reasons but the main one was that the design, whilst quite ingenious, required a degree of accuracy in manufacture that was not available to Babbage’s workmen. For instance, the first standardised screw thread in the world, the Whitworth, was not invented until several years after work on the Difference Engine ceased. Another contributing factor was that Babbage lost interest when he conceived the concept of the Analytical Engine. The Difference Engine was to be a calculating machine with but a single purpose, the production of mathematical tables, but the Analytical Engine was to be a multipurpose machine capable of many more tasks. But that is another story…

Footnote: Interestingly, despite the superior quality of their existing tables, the French had embarked on an ambitious project, under de Prony, committing about 800 man-years to the same problem between 1791 and 1801. De Prony used the ‘human computer’ model and did indeed complete the task. However, he then found that it was simply too expensive to have the results printed! A partial set of tables appeared at the end of the 19th Century but they were never published in full. If we pay his workers £30,000 p.a. including on-costs (not unreasonably, since they would all have been pretty well educated for their time) we get a total cost of £24 million – very comparable to Babbage’s outlay. So Babbage and de Prony spent pretty much the same sums failing to solve the same problem by completely different means.

This article first appeared in the Visual Software Journal

John Weller is a Fellow of the Institution of Analysts and Programmers, and a Council member. You can contact John through the Institution, and purchase books at substantial discounts through the IAP Bookstore

If you are a software engineer, project manager, business analyst, process consultant, or involved in business improvement, you may be eligable for membership of the Institution of Analysts and Programmers.

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Web Bots

December 31st, 2008 by Admin, Filed under - Support

Internet bots, also known as web robots, WWW robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone. The largest use of bots is in web spidering, in which an automated script fetches, analyses and files information from web servers at many times the speed of a human.

Web bots, or spiders simply crawl the web, the same way that Google crawls it, at regular intervals to catch new and existing web sites and detect relevant keywords.

Another, more malicious use of bots is the coordination and operation of an automated attack on networked computers, such as a denial-of-service attack by a botnet. Internet bots can also be used to commit click fraud and more recently have seen usage around MMORPG games as computer game bots. A spambot is an internet bot that attempts to spam large amounts of content on the Internet, usually adding advertising links.

Three of the most common bad robots are:

  • Email harvesters: they want to spam you.
  • Corporate enforcers checking for trademark or copyright violations.
  • Scrapers trying to copy your whole site, then set it up somewhere else and put Adwords on it.

For more on the subsect search Google for Bad Web Bots

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TechCo Hosting Blog is Here!

December 30th, 2008 by Admin, Filed under - Latest News

The pages to support the TechCo Hosting service at techcohosting.com have now been moved to here, and rendered in Blog Format.

We have decided to opt for the Blog format for a number of reason, but mainly becase it:

  • is familiar to many of our users
  • runs on open source software (WordPress) to keep costs down
  • works right out of the box

We are also offering a Blog hosting service, based on the popular WordPress application. Click on the Contact link above to get your own Blog and start blogging today!

Welcome to TechCo Hosting Blog! Enjoy!

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