For Organic Matters July /August 2002

Charged Up

For a long time now, my laptop battery, a Lithium-ion type thing, has been developing a life, or non-life of its own.

I am mostly to blame of course. I do not understand electricity and especially when it is cooked up in these plastic boxes.

Because I didn’t observe the basic rules of charging or discharging, as per the rather snotty original manual - I hate computer manuals! - it now ambushes its technophobic owner at the most critical times.

The supposedly helpful, Battery Management function tells me nothing but lies – 98% Full, for example, when in reality it is more like 98% Empty!

This has sometimes resulted in instant cut-off and loss of work-in-progress – a disheartening, at times even an apoplectic, experience.

The solution offered by my local friendly (?) computer shop is to buy a couple of €150.00 computer batteries and a special charger/discharger – the price of the latter, I dared not ask. This is the same guy, that, whilst taking my recent cheque for €150.00 – he’s suspiciously into round figures - for a year’s site-hosting said; "I’m making a fortune, Jim, out of hosting – it’s the easiest money I ever made."(Keep this quiet - I’m not confident enough yet to flee his clutches – but I’m looking for a new host-server).

Trying to avoid the stand-by generator, (I don’t have a mains supply, you see), I tried various vehicle power-packs including my tractor battery. This, despite its hernia-inducing weight and its fully-charged status, only powers me up for a few hours at most. Why?

Then I re-discovered these Sonnenschein "gel" batteries that came with a small caravan I bought last year. I had ignored them ‘ till now because they had this intimidating, grey, sinister, sealed look about them - like a spanking new U-boat about to embark on its sea-water trials.

They needed some coaxing to resurrect from being flat for two years - this esoteric art was performed courtesy of a local mains-wired friend - but now they give more than 20 hours use each.

In consequence, the job of maintaining a website has been made easier, quieter and more enjoyable. But I maybe already doing damage to my newly-revived friends, as I see in a cursory search "charging gel batteries", in Google, that there are special chargers and procedures to be followed with these this kind of battery.

I would now like to go the final furlong and employ total alternative energy, solar, wind and wave – well, perhaps not the last: despite my proximity to the deep blue stuff, I don’t thing there are any sub-million, small-scale solutions.

A solar panel might be the appropriate thing to charge my Sonnenscheins. And perhaps I should contemplate restoring my seized-up wind-charger, that once-upon-a time charged the odd, tired car battery to power my bed-side light.

Any OM readers out there able to help on these electric problems?

Gold Diggers

Those of you using email must now have received appeals from a West African source to help recover salted-away millions and make yourself rich in the process. In exchange for your "small investment" you are promised a share in the tainted treasure.

The emails are often headed URGENT ASSISTANCE, BUSINESS PROPOSAL, and similar, badly written, usually in block capitals throughout and signed by someone with an unpronounceable or colourful moniker, such as: Dr.Nkem Oge, Prince Diallo, Ayuba Mahmed, Justice Mugate etc. The most recent, after describing the undeserved (of course) murder of her husband, tells us that: "...two large trunks containing the sum of £ 20 million and some quantities of solid gold, which he kept in underground vault in his bedroom..."(sic) can be shipped out with your help.

ALL THESE EMAILS ARE FRAUDULENT SCAMS and are blatantly so, but, apart from the nuisance value of clogging up your incoming mail – I get two a day on average out of 100 emails– they unbelievably continue to rake in billions from gullible net-folk.

I am trying to find ways of stopping them but, in the meantime, I reply sending them a nice big juicy file attachment on organics. I recommend you do also.

A good one to send is the Adobe file of the recent Organic Committee Report – that’ll soften their cough for a bit and, sure you never know, they might take some of its better points on board and get inspired.

One of these days you could be getting spam from the same Dark Continent source, flogging organic ground-nuts or yams and the like.

Gold from the sea.

A contact in Teagasc has told me that he finds it frustrating to recommend sources of advice to prospective organic farmers. He told me of a recent approach he made to an Irish certifying body asking about organic ways to get his phosphorous up (I think). They, the body, which shall be nameless, recommended a particular kind of seaweed as the fertiliser for the arable crops in question.

The product, when sourced, proved to be 50 times more expensive than the one the farmer had been using – FIVE O TIMES!

Of course he now has a raft of suggestions from me, and of course my website address, which hopefully will make life easier for him from now on. Where would you, dear reader, recommend that the first-time-enquirer get his, preferably, free advice about organic farming?

Gold from the net

I decided a few weeks ago that I needed to attract paid-for advertising on my site if I wanted to continue developing and spending more time at it. It’s hard work and I’m out of practice (and humour, sometimes – one potential customer involved me in a virtual blizzard of emails, only to demand a free trial in the end) at selling but, against the nay-sayers, I have some good clients now and several more in the pipeline.

Some of the very business-like queries I got sharply questioned my Hits figures and other statistics. Apparently, surprise, surprise, there’s a few chancers out there on the Web. But, at least, my host server – the same €150.00 a year merchant, mentioned above– seems to be reputable, and a copy of the Usage page emailed to them seemed to satisfy most questions (Shhhh! Keep this to yourselves again. I’m trying a very big corporate client at the moment for advertising – got a quality contact within the heart of the Marketing Dept. – little hope I’d say, but I’ll try hard and let you know the result next time).

There was a time when I thought/hoped a hit was a visitor but, not so, it would appear. Although a visitor might be only one hit, usually, a multiple of up to five or more represent a visit depending on the site.

I still don’t know how many visitors my 75,000 hits per month represent but it’s a lot, and more importantly, enough to entice demanding, paying clients.

Golden words

It’s hard to make a living from being a word/web smith, especially when you’re a late starter like me, so I have to keep my eyes open. Apart from advertising and a few other gestating ideas about sources of revenue, I have recently turned my skills(?) to literature.

I was amazed to see that an Irish poetry prize was worth € 6,500.00. So the creeping thought came into my head that, just for a 50-line poem (the max), I could make about four months income – if I won of course (that’s a tad more per line than Organic Matters pays!).

But sure, there’s only going to be 10,000 entries or so.

In the end I submitted three poems – there are three cash prizes you see – and I’ll leave it to them to sort out the embarrassing situation of having to award them all to the same guy. I must do some more of these competitions. It could beat hacking.

Websites

I do not apologise for mentioning the search engine Google again – it is simply the best free resource on the Web. It’s better than any library the world has ever seen. It searches through over two billion pages and gives invariably relevant results within seconds.

Don’t bother with Yahoo and the rest – a lot of them now use licensed Google technology anyhow - and still remain far down the field!

Google employs 150 people – 60 of them PhDs - at their base in California, but you might find the local one, www.google.co.uk more useful.

Google handles over 150 million searches a day – it boggles the mind.

Its PageRank search technology is what makes it so different. This tracks the web of links between sites and, together with text-matching techniques, ranks sites democratically according to their true value and usefulness.

I am pleasantly surprised to find Planorganic.com ranked first world-wide, out of nearly half a million sites, when you search for "organic food industry".

And then I’m puzzled when I find that under "organic food Ireland" and other such local categories, I’m not nearly so well ranked.

But that’s the web for you – dazzling technology, offering almost limitless information and opportunities but almost always with a quirk.

The best advice I can give to the budding organic, wannabee farmer would be: first, get access to a computer and go on the Web. Type in www.google.co.uk and in the Search box type "organic farming first principles". Read – choose – download – print – read again.

This is the new Way.

Hallelujah!

If the above suggestion is followed you will find the fourth entry on the page, an Australian gov. site, www.agric.nsw.gov.au/reader/4859 an excellent introduction to organic farming. But there’s more, much, much more out there.

The Organic Committee report file to read and send to the

African spammers is www.irlgov.ie/daff/Publicat/Organic%20Development%

I have a review of the report on my site at www.planorganic.com/news&comment.htm. Scroll down to 12^th May, article "The Elephant has laboured".