RogiLife.Com

The UK Guardian’s politics section is running a competition for financial experts in an attempt to unravel Tony Blair’s highly complicated financial arrangements.

Here’s the deal:

We’re offering a prize of an original Steve Bell cartoon for the best explanation of Tony Blair’s opaque financial structures received by 16 December. We’re making the key documents available here. Send us your remarks or annotations; we’ll publish interesting observations, and credit you if you’d like us to. If you’d like to get in touch directly then email david.leigh@guardian.co.uk

The full introduction and background to all of this is here; ‘The Mystery Of Tony Blair’s Finances’ and links to all of the relevant documents you might need are on the sidebar on that page.

Can you shed any light on the mystery? If you can, enquiring minds would love to hear from you.

An important reminder now that the holiday season is approaching; raisins and grapes can kill dogs.

‘This is not to say you need live in fear of your dog keeling over dead if he swallows a grape or two. However, if he downs a handful of grapes or even a smaller amount of raisins, get him to your veterinarian right away. Aggressive treatment with intravenous fluids and close monitoring are his best chance for survival.’

At this time of the year there are often a lot of cakes, biscuits, puddings, deserts and so on around that contain grapes and/or raisins. Do not allow your dog to eat any of these things as grapes and raisins are highly toxic to dogs and can easily kill them.

There are more details here on this old post of mine: Raisin the alarm, do not poison your dogs.

Take heed as dogs will eat foods containing these things given a chance.  Make sure that it is a chance they do not get.

I was earlier reading an article on the BBC news website regarding the shortage of hire cars at European holiday destinations;

Holidaymakers in parts of the UK and Europe are facing bigger bills for hire cars – or risk not getting one at all – due to a shortage of vehicles.

I think that it is worth pointing out that this shortage of hire cars also applies very much to the Algarve, as there are plenty of stories such as these being heard locally.

There have also been cases of people arriving at Faro airport to begin their holiday, with a hire car pre-booked, only to find on arrival that there are in fact no cars available for them regardless of the pre-booking.

Worse, there does not appear to be any solution for those affected as the shortage of cars applies to all of the hire car companies.

If you have pre-booked a hire car for your holiday in the Algarve, you should check – repeatedly if possible – by telephone that a car really will be waiting for you.

If you are planning to spend time in the Algarve and have not pre-booked your hire car, be aware that your chances of finding one available are extremely low.

Just in case I wasn’t already a big fan of the Tumblr.com service (and staff), today they have unleashed new photoset functionality that has so much potential usefulness that it is making my head spin. As they themselves say;

“If a picture is worth a thousand words, photosets are the future of books.”

Indeed, and add to the new photoset function the already existing ability to have multiple ‘Tumblelogs’, then sprinkle in some customisation tags, and, well, pretty quickly it becomes a case of wondering just what can’t be done with it all.

I have no time to experiment tonight, but sometime over the next week photosets are going to get a serious workout. Oh, yes.

Everything here at RogiLife.Com runs on my own server, as do a bunch of other sites of mine, except for just one: micro.rogilife.com.

‘Micro’, one year old today, which is what prompts this post, is hosted and essentially made possible by the excellent people over at tumblr.com.

I could attempt to write a book about the multitude of things that anyone could use tumblr.com for, but the book would never finished being written – the possibilities are absolutely endless.

If you have never heard of, or have never properly tried, the tumblr.com service then you’re missing out, really.

Great service, great reliability, and great people. Oh, and unbelievably, it’s all free.

So a happy 1st to ‘micro’, and thanks a bunch to all the staff at tumblr.com.