Ticket day

Today is the day I renew my yearly tickets for travel. Flipping heck is it expensive!

Travel in London alone costs over £1000
Travel to London is nearly £3500!
Car parking is £130 every 6 months.

That's a lot! No, really, that's a huge amount of cash that it costs me just so I can go to work!

Ok, work give me the amount in a pre-tax loan, so I don't pay income tax or NI on it, but that doesn't really offset how much it costs me to come to work.

More family trips into London needed; allow me to capitalise on the expenditure.

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Anyway, enough monitary shocks. Busy weekend. I cleaned and tidied. Pretty much all weekend. Carpet cleaning friday night. House top to bottom on Saturday. Finish up, garage, and garden on Sunday.

It was fun though. The house looks a lot better. Small bits of paperwork all over the place have been consolidated and sorted. All the shredding of receipts has been done. The kitchen benches have had all the hard water stains removed. Hopefully it should allow us to keep it ticking over for a while.

I did manage, on Friday night, to watch a movie. The latest Rambo one. Not bad. Very short though. Only about 78 minutes. Plenty of room for more plot expansion. The whole thing, obviously, is just a vehicle to get to the end fight, but it's an enjoyable enough romp.

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I tweaked my twitter account last week. I went from following 300 people to 91. Suddenly I can cope with the data input again.

Trimming was easy enough. Anyone who constantly retweets stuff, or twits links on how to monetise twitter (for only $200 outlay!), or, basically, spams, was out. Add to that the people who never said anything and we were down.

I'm playing around again with numbers. I'm up in the 130s again which I think is a little too high. It's that signal to noise ratio. The key bit is the morning sweep. I get up and there are a large number of tweets waiting. If I can scan them, pick out a few links, and basically, process them, then that's fine. This morning I got half way and gave up. Too much noise. I have to remove the american bias. They tweet too much whilst I'm asleep!

I think the whole thing has hit critical mass anyway. Oprah joined, live on TV, on friday, and Mr Demi Moore achieved over 1,000,000 followers in a high publicity battle with CNN. This, combined with all the press coverage here, the constant stories about twitter breaking news, or causing companies to change decisions, has reached the point where it's hitting mainstream. It would be interesting to look at the demographic now joining.

Interesting times. My interest in facebook is now practically 0. RSS feeds are beginning to back up. It's now this blog, and twitter that take up my online time. Just need to get that signal to noise ratio right. There's a metaphor for life if ever there was one!