This article (Guardian) shows that you don’t have to be doing anything suspicious to be arrested under the Terrorism Act.

Do you do any of the following?

• Play with your mobile phone
• Keep your rucksack with you at all times
• Avoid eye contact with uniformed police
• Read a paper
• Wear inappropriate clothing for the season
• Look at other passengers

Careful! You are at risk!

So I suggest you do the following (humour):

• Make direct and obvious eye contact with every police officer, and explain that you don’t want to appear suspicious. Say that you won’t be looking at any other people except police officers.
• Don’t use your mobile phone, or read anything
• In the summer, wear as little as possible. In the winter, wear as much as possible. Carry a thermometer and a printout of a recent weather forecast with you to prove that you are wearing appropriate clothing for the day and the season.
• Abandon your bag at every opportunity (even though this is in direct contravention of police/transport advice, because then your pack becomes suspicious)

Nothing abnormal about any of that behaviour, eh?

C’mon, Met, stop messing about with innocent people doing normal things.

In AdSense optimisation discussions, a lot is said about ad placement, colours, etc., and of course the content itself, but I’ve not seen anything mentioned about the fonts used.

On several of my blogs I’ve switched to using a serif font for paragraph text, and I’m wondering if it has had an effect on clickthrough rates.

I’ve now changed the font back to a sans-serif font on a couple. It does look neater on screen.

Does anyone know if it has an effect? Are people (in general) turned off the whole web page if it’s in serif text? Is it because AdSense text ads always use a sans-serif font?

Any experiences? Data? Let me know in the comments section below.

I know my blog comments aren’t always the best, but I tried to post two intelligent, relevant comments on (My) Blog World and after the second one, got told by the spam filter, in no uncertain terms, that I’d been Crap Flooding the blog.

Excuse me?

Here’s a free tip:

If your main business is selling toast, make sure you have a spare toaster… or two.

Because if your toaster breaks, so does your business.

Of course, if you diversify, it will hurt only a portion of your business.

But there’s a lot of hungry customers wanting toast.

The cost of an extra toaster may seem extravagent, but just work out how many rounds of toast you would have sold in the morning commuter rush had your toaster not been broken.

You’ll pay for repairs regardless - why lose out on sales, too.

Yes, Benjy’s, I’m pointing at you…

But I think we can all learn a lesson today.

I’ve visited our local corner shop three times in as many days this weekend, because we’ve been too disorganised / ill to go to the supermarket and stock up on the essentials (milk, bread, chocolate, biscuits…)

It was quite refreshing to engage in conversation, albeit brief, with the shopkeeper. In fact, it took me a little by surprise to begin with. No longer a stranger in a sea of faces at the bank of checkouts, but a neighbour, a local.

Of course it’s not always like this, but it did make me think again how important it is to support the local economy.

Large supermarkets are often accused of taking away business from local retailers, allowing you to buy greater quantities and varieties of every product for less money, all under one roof.

Yes, you often pay more at local stores, and the choice is not always as wide, but there can be a saving in time and effort, reduction in the use of fuel, and a certain ‘feelgood factor’ that you’ve done your bit for your own community.

There’s a rise in Internet grocery shopping, and I’m not against that. In our time-poor lives, anything that makes the mundane easier is welcome.

Even so, there’s much to be said for helping out the businesses around us. Where will the Internet and the supermarket five miles away be when you run out of an essential ingredient and need it now?

It’s fairly obvious who the driving force behind b5media is - even the header design is the same.

(Banner art cut from Blogherald.com and The Unofficial Microsoft Weblog blatantly without permission… ahem)

Darren at ProBlogger is running Blog Crush after all the heavy stuff that’s been flying around recently. Well, it is spring in the southern hemisphere.

My blog crushes are quite difficult because I don’t read a large number of blogs regularly. Then, narrowing even this small list down to just one is tough.

Then I saw that Angie has spread her love between 13 bloggers, so I figured it wasn’t so bad to be polygamous (at least as far as blog crushes go)

Here’s my list of ‘blog crushes’:

• DanielBowen.com: Diary of an Average Australian: I’ve been reading Daniel’s work since the ’90s and his Toxic Custard Workshop Files. He’s been blogging since before the word was invented, and he’s always worth reading. He covers work, home, films, transport, gadgets, family, sport… and he has a witty, friendly writing style. Though I’ve never met him, I feel like I know him in some small way through his site.
• Geekrant.org was set up by Daniel and friends, and is an informal place for geeks to share important things, like ranting about broken websites, embedding Word documents, hardware destruction, C++ pointers, video games nostalgia, and so on. It’s generally unpretentious; geeks talking about geek things without a schedule or a set list.
• Adrian Trenholm provides a good mix of business knowledge, communications advice, and personal topics. I have only started reading this recently after a mini-controversy started on his site and I heard about it from his wife, who I work with! It’s also a gateway to his group 173 Drury Lane blog all about Sainsbury’s.
• ProBlogger almost goes without saying. It’s an essential read, as most people taking part in this will testify. Problogger is well-written, honest, wide-ranging in subject matter, and Darren’s personality is neither overwhelming nor ignored.

There you go - my Blog Crushes.

The Blue Fish Network is giving a current or new blogger the chance to win use of the domain refreshing.org.uk, with complete web hosting and Wordpress installation.

Simply come up with the best use for the domain (bear in mind it’s a UK domain name so your theme will probably want to be UK focused)

Closing date for entries is 12pm (GMT) on 31st October 2005, so get your thinking caps on.

Full competition rules can be found here or here.

Simon, you may think it’s cool to joke about WeightWatchers, but some of the people you’re insulting have far more depth of character than you’ll ever have.

Try commenting purely on the music rather than looking for cheap digs based on people’s weight.