It’s literally the fuel behind what we do everyday, a great screen-breaker and soother of stresses, but determining who makes the tea is quite another story…

Lacking an official tea boy (or girl for that matter) or an on tap supply/drip, we have to take turns making the tea for everyone, and this can lead to what amounts to all out war in the office, usually resulting in something like this (with varying levels of ‘language‘):

Who did it last?
I made it last!
No you didn’t, I made it last!
Yes I Did!
No You Didn’t!
It’s YOUR turn!
Just Do It!

And then silence until someone actually decides they need a cuppa and does it for everyone

Thankfully though, this should no longer be the case thanks to good ol‘ web 2.0 and makethetea.com

We now have an independent way of logging the tea making, fairly deciding who should make it and publicly naming and shaming the slackers via our group’s stats page: http://www.makethetea.com/#/group/1179/statistics/

Not only that, but it works like a league table and as of the time of writing we’re 600th in the Global Brew Rankings!

So no more arguments, no more indecision, just make a brew request and let the web do its magic!

We’ll be at No. 1 in no time

Thanks very much to Hamish and his team at Fasttrack for a great evening - and hope some of the contacts we made there help us to continue with the success we have experienced before.

$out = number_format($val,0);
$out = (int) @floor($val);

Interestingly, we ran a real-world test case of 10 million iterations of doing each of these, and it turns out that method #2 is approximately 0.5 seconds quicker. So there you have it, if you want to be 0.5 seconds quicker when removing decimal places from a number 10 million times.. then use the second method.

• F for Freddy
• U for Uncle
• N for November
• T for T

I personally think this should replace the NATO phonetic alphabet. Bravo, Kelvin.

Today was the day of my latest scan, and at 20 weeks, I’m half way through. It seems to have flown by - James and I are still waiting for it to actually sink in properly - we are going to be parents in 4 months!

And, with the latest revelation that our baby has no evidence of a winky - and therefore may in fact be a girl, despite being told it was a boy a few weeks ago - it looks like we need to think of some girl’s names that we can actually agree on, else she may be called Baby Girl for the rest of her days. Either way, we are not far away from being very proud parents. Can’t wait!

For anyone that doesn’t know, Naomi House is a charity that supports kids who have got life-limiting illnesses, helping their families during the hard times too.  As their website says, they’re there for “the good days, difficult days and last days” and taking a trip to a place like this really does make you appreciate how lucky you are. It’s an unbelievable place and Netbasic donate a considerable amount of money to the cause every year, so we figured it was about time to go along and see how it all helps. 

Before the visit, I thought Naomi House sounded like a good cause but actually going there, meeting some of the children and seeing what a great job the charity does, I think a few of us realised that Naomi House is more than just a good cause.  It’s amazing, truly amazing, and I for one am incredibly proud that I work for a company that gives something back to an enormously deserving and worthy place like Naomi House.

You can find out more about Naomi House by visiting their website.

As a warm-up before the seafood starter, a variation of the Higher/Lower game was played, with Jon making it into the final few onstage. He made it to the semi-finals, but unfortunately he didn’t know the exchange rate for the Zimbabwean dollar well enough. A nice fishy meal, an uplifting performance from the ACM Gospel Choir, and rich dessert with a star-shaped chocolate morsel followed, accompanied by a number of glasses of wine. There was then an extremely moving video about a girl called Courtney (pictured above), who battled with cancer for some time and unfortunately passed away at the tender age of 7. After this, there was the charity auction that included a signed guitar by Sting, signed Harry Potter DVD & Book, and loads more - all in a good cause! The silent auction was presented by flamboyant interior designer Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, which was followed by the Tony Hadley band. During this, I decided to get us some cigars, but the only cigars the hotel had were nice expensive £10… so we had four of them. Unfortunately this got me into trouble as I told Hannah they were £1… oops…

New Chris was celebrating, after passing his 3 months probation, while the rest of us were drowning our sorrows at being stuck with the big man for the foreseeable future

James was blithering on about some film I should watch before The Great South Run on Sunday, and going on and on about ‘Hitting the wall’ and ‘Getting through the wall’ and ‘Being the wall’, while Jon was starting to feel more and more sleepy.

Sarah was still trying to figure out if she actually did need some new windows after all, while Jake was deciding how many times he needed to look like he was leaving, before it was actually OK to leave.

So, we eventually left the pub and dropped Old Chris at the station ahead of his long journey home. Then Jon and I went and bought our Winza (a pizza made of win) so that we could just shove it in the oven after our game of tennis.

Now tennis, to re-cap, Jon was 5-2 up in the 3rd set and about to win the match. Which, despite all my efforts, he did. Then we got the 4th set underway with some great rallies, some terrible serves and shots with so much time to plan, that we inevitably failed to deliver.

But then something strange happened…. it was 2 games each in the 4th, and we were playing some great tennis. This was a real competition. After being 40-love down, Jon fought his way back to deuce. He’d worked really hard to pull it back and there was no way he was going to let that winning ball land in.

At least, in his mind, there was ‘no way’.

Three things got in his way; gravity, a wall, and the undeniable fact that Jon isn’t actually Super.

1) A paramedic 2) Nasty head-wound 3) Obligatory swearing 4) Skirt.

Jon One, 26 and born 18th June 1987, was attended to by paramedics court-side at about half eight on Tuesday evening.

“Running for tennis ball. Collided into wall. Not KO’d”

Jon Two, 26 and born 18th May 1982, was attended to by a paramedic in his front room at about 10pm on Tuesday evening.

“This PM, while playing tennis, accidentally fell into a wall hitting his head and elbow. Not KO’d”

Two different Jons got to the ball.
The point still counted.
I won the game.

In not very much time from now, I’m going to be running the 10 mile Bupa Great South Run in my old town of Portsmouth. If you’d like to come and support me, I’d love to see you there (for a pint afterwards, or maybe just to help me back to my car!!)

I’ve set up a handy fundraising page. I know it’s quite late in the day - but I’ve been busy! … ahem…. training. Yes, training. Well I’ve done 3 runs and I was planning to run this evening, but it was miserable and gloomy outside and I’m a wuss - but don’t let that put you off making a donation!

Don’t forget http://www.justgiving.com/siicockerill

PS. Those 3 runs do total almost 18 miles!

UPDATE: For how I got on, read here.

We all thought that was bad, but then arrived this morning and saw this gem:

How much of a rush do you have to be in to have to park abandon your car like that?! I mean seriously, you could park 3 of those things in one spot!

Fail.

I’m not the only one who is ill though, Chris was the originator, and he’s passed it onto Sii, Jon and myself. In turn I’ve passed it onto Hannah, and its likely Jon has passed it onto Jake has he had a lift this morning. What makes this worse, in a matter of minutes, we’ll all be going into our weekly meeting and spreading the lung death throat destroying illness even further.

It appears that either Chris has a kindred spirit or he has been moo-nlighting over in America at the weekend…

From Metro.co.uk News:

“A US woman will spend the next month in prison after chasing terrified children through an Ohio town dressed as a cow.
Michele Allen was hired to wear the outfit to promote a local “haunted trail” theme park in Middletown, but got drunk at work on the Saturday evening and caused chaos, chasing kids and bringing traffic to a halt.

She also urinated in a nearby yard during her rampage, police said.

Allen refused to calm down once taken to the local police station and according to police was yelling and challenging people to ’suck her udders’.

Visit the Metro to read the full unbelievable story!

Quinny in action:

Is Netbasic really getting fit? There seems to be a lot of talk about tennis, running, gym sessions, swimming and personal training and I do believe quite a few are having a go at one or more of these sports. I have decided after 17 months of no exercise that it is certainly time to do something about my lack of fitness. Quinny and I are going to go swimming every Tuesday lunchtime. Anyone wanna join us?

On a positive note it is good to see that we aren’t getting obsessed with getting fit as there is also a lot of eating of biscuits, crisps and by the look of it, McDonalds.

Looks like we have the balance just right!

Bit odd for half nine on a Monday morning you’d be forgiven for thinking, but the silly smirks are more than justified as we’ve just discovered we’ve been placed at the dizzy heights of number three in the prestigious The Sunday Times Microsoft Tech Track 100!

This illustrious league table is published annually and ranks Britain’s fasting growing private tech companies over the last three years. And with sales that have rocketed 235% a year, from £255,000 in 2004 to £9.6 million in 2007, Netbasic definitely deserves its place in the top three.

So a big fat well done to everyone who played a part in Netbasic’s success and here’s to many more years of the same. Cheers!

Today Hannah and I decided as it is a nice day and it’s sunny, that we’d have McDonalds (other fast food brands available) for lunch. Unfortunately, everyone else cottoned on to that, and wanted a piece of the action, resulting in a car full… eep! We eat healthily normally, promise! …Actually, Chris was just very hungry and wanted a BIG lunch!!!

Lord help me.

The site contains much more search functionality across a range of loan and loan types, provides customers with their own credit score and gives an insight into the rating of their local neighbourhood.

There’s still a fair bit to do to polish the site off, with loads more functionality still to put in. But for now we’re very proud of her, and hope you like her too!

Caroline, Sarah and I also just got our full-sized WeeMees presented to us (I believe the girls have been waiting for some time for theirs!), so we feel even more at home here at Netbasic. Anyway, despite the rest of the guys being busy, it doesn’t mean that I’m not busy, so I must get on with my work!!

So, we’ve been busy busy over the last few days weeks months, working our little socks off, trying to build the next best thing, and you know what? It shows.

Read this.

How long ago was that?

Now, I’ve been in the ‘white beast’ on numerous occasions, as have many of the team here, making the daily trip to Sainsbury’s (other supermarkets are available) to purchase lovely and ‘hyper’-inducing food stuffs that help us through the hard graft of the after lunch hours…. but where’s the reveal? When will we find out what lurks beyond the ’stripy blur’ that vanishes from the car park at the end of each day?

Come on mate, sort it out.

We’re waiting.

I’m a little upset as that stuff is expensive, and there’s no water. Not only that, they did a botch job and it’s just very weak pink stuff… I think the water cooler man is going to have a fit…

We also say “Au Revoir!” to Sam, who is taking a travelling sabbatical until next March in Australia. She has worked incredibly hard for us on Accepted.co.uk, and we look forward to welcoming her back next year with even more of a sickening tan than she usually has! See you next year Sam!

The guys at Splash recently found a pork scratching that they reckon looked like a real pig! Pfft!

While you can just about make out the snout on their scratching, I think you’ll agree, however, that my crisp is an almost entirely accurate scale model of an F-117 bomber!

It’s not had it’s maiden voyage yet - I’m waiting for it to go stale so that it’ll bounce on landing rather than shatter! Stay tuned for more!

It started off with a few drinks at Walkabout to warm up. Actually no, it started off, for Jake and Jon at least, on the drive to Southampton with several cans of Cider and some abusive comments aimed at Southampton Football Club, Southampton City and anyone living in Southampton!

With a quick stop to the local chippie to fill up on chips, sausages and a rather odd looking chicken burger we were ready to face the evening.

A 3 hour wait and a dodgy rock band later, Bon Jovi came on. Most of us, suitably drunk, believed we knew the words to every song, and sang along tunefully at the top of our voices. As our pile of empty beer bottles increased so did our enthusiasm and with our air guitars at the ready we rocked out to Living on a Prayer, You give love a bad name and Always.

Bon Jovi put on a great show and even the drizzle didn’t dampen our spirits. The evening ended with more chips and us trying to dissuade Jake from pulling out his hayfever itching eyes with the wooden chip fork!

I’m already looking forward to the next Netbasic outing!!

From a design perspective, the most interesting idea I’ve read about is ‘Epicenter Design’ – Start from the core of the page and build outward – and it makes so much sense. If we were manufacturing a car, we wouldn’t craft a sexy outer shell and then try and mount the engine inside. That would force us to limit the performance of the car. Or hack a nasty hole in the bonnet and patch it up later. We’d decide which engine we were going to need, then design the sexy outer shell around it. So that means two jobs done in the right order and three jobs if not. Proof that designing the engine first is the right thing. But in a website, what is the engine?

It could be two things. To a developer, the engine could be the database or even the framework. But to a designer perhaps, the part of the page that people use the most is the engine. Not the header or navigation (though these would be used a lot), but the bit of the page that is the reason the page is there. The bit that if missing would render the page useless. The car stationary. And no-one getting anywhere fast.

Mrs Mary Cornelius-Reed, who is the lady that Naomi House rent the land from, provided a marquee on her front lawn as well as a wonderful lunch. The rent paid to Mary is quite substantial - one dozen red roses payable annually on mid-summer’s day.

The new building is to be called Jacks Place after Jack Whitham, a Southampton businessman who left £6 million to Naomi House in his will. They still need a further £6 million to complete the build, equip and run the new building which will provide hospice care for young adults.

To all my readers I would like to say - come on everyone dig deep into your pockets, wallets, purses, get out your cheque books etc and to make it easier for you I have even included a link to their online donations page .

Please also check out their website - http://www.naomihouse.org.uk/

The person we are looking for could be described by the following:

Person Specification
- IT and web literate
- Strong team player
- Excellent analytical skills
- Proficient in Excel
- Ability to learn new software packages with ease
- Ability to prioritise and multi-task
- Excellent communication skills both written and verbal
- Sense of humour

Qualifications / Experience
- 1-2 years online marketing experience
- Knowledge of the finance industry would be an advantage
- Familiarity with the principles of search engine optimisation

For more information on this role please email me at samantha@netbasic.co.uk

More congratulations go to James and Hannah, who got engaged on Saturday! It’s the first ever Netbasic engagement, so I’m feeling all lovely about it and wish them all the best for their future together.

In just 2 days, 22 hours, 47 minutes and 48 seconds I‘ll be stood at Wembley singing my heart out as my beloved Pompey take to the pitch to do battle in the FA Cup Final.

It‘s no exaggeration to say that I‘ve been waiting for this moment my entire footballing life. From my very first match as a giddy seven-year-old stood on the Fratton Park terraces on an old beer crate (I was too short to see over the crowd) way back in October ‘89, Portsmouth winning the FA Cup is the one thing that I‘ve always dreamed of.

And now, nearly 20 years on, it‘s so close that I can almost reach out and touch it. But not yet, not quite.

Of course, it could all be snatched away if Cardiff lift the trophy instead of us, and that‘s why I‘m making sure that I do everything I can to tip the odds in our favour. I‘m going to be wearing exactly the same boxer shorts that I had on for the semi-final because they‘re quite obviously lucky, I‘ll have in my pocket a paper bag of the cola cubes that Grandpa used to buy me before every Pompey game, around my neck will be wrapped Dad‘s 1986/87 promotion scarf and on my chin will be a load of trampy-looking stubble because I‘ve somehow got it into my head that if I shave then it‘s all going to end in tears.

This week I haven‘t been able to stop grinning and, as Cup Final day draws closer, it‘s getting worse. Last night I couldn‘t sleep, I‘m finding it hard to eat and not a minute goes by when I don‘t picture that perfect image of Wembley Stadium all decked out in blue and white.

I really don‘t know if I‘m going to be able to last until Saturday afternoon, I’ll be a complete mess by then…

At least that finally explains the need for an off-roader!

Like last year I took myself off skiing again, instead on Meribel I went to Les Get this time, almost with the luck of the Irish there was a 4 day blizzard which made for amazing conditions, but I’ll save the details of that for a later post.

In the past couple of years Netbasic has gone through a lot of changes, from 3 members of staff to 13, if this continues we’ll soon need more office space - which is amazing, but it’s only when you stop and look back that you truly appreciate how awesome something is.

As is the case with my RX8, I’m sure its only been a few months since I was handed the keys, but its actually almost 3 years and in several weeks it will be handed back to the dealership. Its certainly been a joy to drive, but only now have I begun to appreciate how good it really is.

Sii and Jon often jibe about how “spatially challenged” (to put it politely) the RX8 is, it’s impossible to fit a suit case into the boot and the back seats are a squeeze (they shouldn’t be so tall!), I try to argue the point but they are right, so it’s a losing battle. Still, it’s a dream car which is well built and none of the competition comes close.

What next? I considered getting another RX8, but the current model has been available since 2003/04 and it would be just my luck if a new version was released shortly after, I have decided on another car which will be revealed once it’s been delivered.

The pinnacle of the war has happened today when I went out for some “fresh air” and came back to find a message from my girlfriend on MSN claming that Jon had stolen my handset. Luckily, she saw the entire stunt on my webcam which I have set up, so he was caught red-handed. I just hope this doesn’t elevate into a full-scale phone war.

They argued with the bouncers and the manager for a bit but bot nowhere and decided to go home, so we all played an extra game in Georgia’s honour - turns out she’s pretty good - beating James and his girlfriend Hannah, and finishing just behind Sarah!

Colin aka “The Power” tried to get some revenge on the bowling alley for Georgia by attempting to break the lane in half with some spectacular “bowling”!

Some mad skillz were on display from Jake and James - check out some clips.

Jake flukes a strike with a limp-wristed, bouncing ball:

James is made of skill:

We left the alley and headed off to Jongleurs to get seen off by the bouncers. It’s quite a nice little scam they have going there - you pay a fiver on the Bar Risa door to get into Jongleurs, but once your in the bar, you have to queue again to get through into the club. By the time we got there, the queue had at least 100 people in it, and it was a one-in-one-out type of place. So actually, we’d paid a fiver to stand in a queue in a filthy bar. Awesome.

Also congrats to Chris, who has now been promoted to Projects Manager. How on earth he’s going to plan out everything we want to do I have no idea, but I’m glad I’m not the one that has to do it. Good luck Chris!

http://www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/thebigknit/

Fantastic!

For way too long Jon has been king of the skittles dispenser (it is his after all), and taking all our hard earned change for just 4 miserly skittles at the every turn of the handle - but now we can strike back!

Yes Jon, I can get get skittles out of the machine without cash and without undoing the top! A slight turn of the handle, a short sharp shake at the right angle and out they come, one by one.

Winner!

So what does this mean for office politics from this point forwards? Well, Jon’s power has certainly been undermined as the Sultan of sweets, but beyond that I don’t really know. I’d like to think this is somewhat akin to the demolition of the Berlin wall, and the ensuing freedom that resulted, just with me in the Hasslehoff role!

So there you are, one in the eye for the design - tech triumphs again! Now where’s my Baywatch outfit…?

She already has a good knowledge of us here, so I doubt it will take her long to get up to speed. I am reliably informed that her weemee is designed, so - in what seems like standard form for the company now - she should have her own web page to allow her a proper inroduction within days of joining. Welcome Caroline!

We all met up at the Mountbatten Centre about 12pm where the first lot of runners were finishing their miles. At 1pm we had to line up on the track and do a group warm up – this was not good as I was worn out by the time this had finished. The start gun fired and we were off… Jon and I ran a mile, Jake ran three miles and Sii went all out and ran the whole six miles.

We all managed our target miles and Jon and I even managed a “sprint” run to the finish line on the last section – check out the video below, Good race Jon!!

All in all it was a fun morning and to top it all off we managed to raise just over £1000 for the charity! We did well!!!!

Another reminder… The Netbasic team consisting of Colin, Sam, Jake, Jon and Sii will be running for Sport Relief on Sunday morning at the Mountbatten Centre in Portsmouth. If you can lend any support at all it starts at 1pm.

I’m rather more concerned about their plans to organise a night out the night before - these days with old age setting in it’s rare for me to have a night out where I’ve been able to run the next week, let alone the next day!

They are very close now to their sponsorship goal of £1000, so don’t put it off - sponsor them now!

Anyway, I hadn’t seen my dad for a while so we decided to have a long weekend on the slopes in Switzerland, as it’s not all that far from where he lives.

Well, we arrived on Friday in the early afternoon and hired me some boots, but the weather was not looking all that great, so we just skied around on the secondary slopes for a couple of hours. On the second day, the weather got even worse - so much so that all but one of the lifts in the area were closed down!

We hopped on the bus which took us to the only place that was left open - Engstligenalp - and tried to ski in the blizzards there for the day! I don’t speak Swiss, but I do speak German, and I’m pretty sure “Engstligenalp” must translate roughly as “Scary as hell Alps”! The “slightly windy” conditions meant that by the time we got to the top of the lifts the snow was hitting us in the face like hail stones! We somehow got stuck in the middle of a blue run/road with visibility of about 3 yards and I, of course, managed to stack it again and land on the same shoulder I crippled on the last skiing trip! Go Jon!

When we woke up on Sunday and looked out off our balconies, the tops of the mountains were entirely shrouded in dense fog. We ate our breakfast and got on the gondola preparing for more of what the previous days were like. An hour after we got off the lift, the sun appeared out of nowhere and burnt all the fog away, followed by my face. I really wish I’d worn more suncream!!

What with the sun and all the rain from the previous days, the snow rapidly turned to slush and became almost impossible to ski on in my BigFeet and my dad’s Snow Blades, so we decided to hire us some Carver skis on the last day! After skiing exclusively on BigFeet for the last 10 years or so, it was well strange getting back on normal skis, so guess where I landed when I fell over again!!

Anyway, it was an awesome weekend, and now I can’t wait until next year to go again! In the mean time, check out a 360 degree panorama from half way down a red run at Adelboden:

It’s a 5mb file, so don’t click unless you have broadband!

 My first run was a route I’ve run many times before, but using handy Google Maps I was able to calculate that the route covered 2.8 miles and it took me just less than 25 minutes to complete. That’s pretty poor when I compare it to the me of half my current age, who could run 3.5 miles in 23 minutes during a school lunchtime as part of the cross-country team. Well, gone are those days of youth… anyway, I did the first run a week last Sunday and I was aching Monday morning through Tuesday night, so I feel last nights effort has been an improvement (as I’m not hurting right now).

 The second run took me 3.3 miles and took about 35 mins, and I’ve got one final training run planned for next week for a big 4.5 miles, leaving the main challenge well and truly for the day of the event. I’m going to be knackered - thankfully, my trusty iPod will keep me going through the hard bits! I wish they did the Nike+ sport kit for the Shuffle, but it doesn’t sound like they ever will - it would be quite cool to simply upload the runs I’ve done straight through iTunes - I bet a lot of people are using Nike+ for their Sport Relief training right now.

So you can see, I’m putting in the work and (irrespective of the weather) it promises to be an eventful day on the 16th. So please, pop down and give us all some support!

You can sponsor me at my sport relief web page and help us reach our fundraising goal.

Fresh back from the skiing trip and obviously in the mood for a bit more exercise, everybody here (well, almost everybody) has signed up to do their bit for charity by taking part in this year’s BBC Sport Relief Mile.

Swapping the jaw-dropping Alpine scenery for the equally jaw-dropping Pompey landscape, we’ll be pounding the pavements on March 16th to try and raise a few pennies for those less fortunate.

Too many doughnuts, crippled bodies and a pure inability to run mean we won’t all be tackling the six-mile course, so Netbasic will be represented in the one-mile and three-mile events too.

If you fancy a laugh, come on down to Portsmouth’s Mountbatten Centre on March 16th, or why not sponsor the Netbasic team by checking out our very own Sport Relief webpage?

It’s all for a fantastic cause and, being the uber generous chap that he is, boss Luke has promised that the Netbasic coffers will double whatever we raise.

So, if you can, sponsor us a quid or two and make a real difference to somebody’s life. If not, come along and watch anyway; it’s sure to be a sight to remember…

We have missed you in the office, Chris - if only you were here: you might have stopped this from happening…

That was easy!

The tone for the holiday was set on the Friday night when Glyn accused Sii of “touching his cider up” instead of drinking it - 4 hours of pool and about 20 “cheeky nightcap” cans later the minibus picked us up at Luke’s and dropped us off at the airport bar - just in time for a safety pint at 5am!

We stayed in the same place we did last year. Ome and Regan had moved on to one of the other Ski Cuisine chalets in the area, but we were very well looked after by Dom and Simon!

The skiing was going really well on the first day until we missed the last chair-lift and had to make our way up a bunny slope using perhaps the worst drag-lift in the world. The lift was basically just a rope that you had to hold on to as it pulled you up the slope! The rope was quite taught, and for some reason I thought it would be a reasonable idea to just sit on it rather than hold on. Stack #1. Upon standing up I found myself on the wrong side of the rope with the top fast approaching, so I tried to limbo under it while still being pulled up the hill. Stack #2 and a sore shoulder. 10 minutes and a dizzy spell later we were almost back at the chalet and I was already thinking of afternoon tea and a nice hot bubble-bath. Stack #3 and out!

Unlike my last Superman attempt, no-one was there to film it, and Luke was the only witness, but apparently it was pretty spectacular! I got up and ran it off initially, but I obviously did more damage than I thought as I still well hurt now! My Big Feet got caught up in some slushy snow that I didn’t see and I just took off, landing a few yards further down the hill on my face and [other] shoulder! Everything seemed ok until 2 days later when I could hardly move my right arm at all and a massive lump had appeared on my forehead. I could live with that, but what really worried me was when my eye swelled up like I’d been punched just after I blew my nose one evening [check out the gallery for a rather comical picture of my eyes!]

Face-planting in the snow apparently isn’t all that good for your sinuses!

The holiday was generally a lot more relaxed than it was last year - we discovered that if we didn’t go out and get really drunk every night that we’d enjoy the following morning’s skiing [and the following lunch time’s beer] a lot more! That still didn’t completely stop us going out though - on Monday night, Colin “The Power” Simmonds practically dragged us out for a pint or two, and then left early! What was that about winners and not coming 2nd, Colin??

Then on the Tuesday night there was a Silent Disco in one of the bars that Dom and Simon managed to scrounge up some extra tickets for.

Knowing full well we’d be bundled when the guys got back in, Sii set up some motion sensing software on his mac to record the bundle as soon as our door was barged open. The resulting video is pretty hilarious and showed us that Georgia doesn’t need a snowboard or even any snow to stack it! 20 mins later, Sam strolled back into our room, woke us up and quite unfairly blamed the theft of her jacket that night on The Power: “I put my jacket where everyone else did; even Power got his jacket back” and “The Power is a fieth!”

Wednesday was our host’s day off, so we hit the Rond Point for a spot of apres ski, got in and realised that no-one had the energy to go to the reseraunt Ski Cuisine had booked for us, so instead found the phonebook and ordered a mountain of pizza from Pizza Express and just chilled while watching the footy!

Thursday was the only time we had the entire group on the same slopes all week - we headed over to one of the other valleys to do a really nice red/blue run in the sunshine where Ad “The Turtle” twice stood at one side of the slope and completely accidentally, although seemingly intentionally, picked out a target on the other side [first Glyn then the Power] and set off making a beeline for them! We somehow happened to catch the chaos on camera in the background when he took the Power down - skiis and poles everywhere - brilliant!

Well anyway, we’ll get round to uploading some photos and videos of the trip at some point, but right now we’ve got plenty of proper work to be doing to ensure that we get to go back next year as well! In the mean time, here’s a rather cool panorama we put together from 6 photos using “photomerge” in Photoshop CS3! Best. Software. Ever.

With yet another cracking 5-1 win over Wandsworth at the weekend, the Netbasic sponsored Fareham 1st XI are storming ahead this season.

They have performed so well this season, they’re now a full eight points ahead of their nearest rivals with a cracking goal difference of 55 - keep it up lads!

Check out the latest league table here.

I’m however going through a big recruitment drive at the moment - we’re looking for another Online Marketing Executive, an SEO and Copywriting Manager, an Online Marketing Assistant, another Techie and a Financial Controller.

This now poses a number of problems, one of which is how will we now get everyone’s weemee in at the top of our website pages - you see the kind of problems we’re faced with daily here?!

I’m still absolutely convinced that - just like the dinosaurs - the human race will be wiped out with a virus. I swear these bugs are getting more and more evil each year, but my wife reminded me at the weekend that maybe it was just my old age. “You are 30 this year honey”, she says lovingly. Isn’t love honest eh?

But we’ve got a company to build before the virus wipes us out or old age finally gets us - so let’s get cracking with 2008!

PS I can’t take credit for the lateral humour of the blog title. Yes. Who else? Who else but Sii!

That’s not to say that Anne is the only one embracing the festive spirit.

I got back to the office on Wednesday to find the office had received some new arrivals. Chris and Jon had found a ‘job lot’ of ‘paint your own reindeer trees’ at a ‘bargain price’ and decided to treat the upstairs office to a little sprucing. So of course, I obliged and added my own painted reindeer to the flock. Is it a flock or a herd? Who knows…

We’ve got Dave the Deer:

And Saddle Back:

Now young children beware…

We’ve also got Hot Stuff:

And last but not least, Oh My God - Run for your Life!

And that’s about it. Well apart from Chris decided to make an uber straw out of many many other ‘less-uber’ straws. I’m sure we can find a video of that somewhere.

In the meantime, have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

I have though enjoyed my first few weeks and had a great introduction into the world of online marketing and am also pleased to have joined a fun and ambitous company - though it does scare me a little to be the only guy on the middle floor!

Also, a big welcome to Colin who has just started with us yesterday. He was greeted at first by a fire alarm and evacuation caused by builders next door. He must be the first person here to do the fire drill without going through it first in induction!

We have experienced extreme turbulence in both the loans and IVA markets throughout 2007. But everyone here has done a tremendous job through umpteen battles - what a warzone - and we’re still here fighting so well done everyone! We still continue in our drive to provide the best quality service to our customers in a range of financial areas.