John Allsopp

Professionally engineered Internet solutions for humans

Accidental SEO: 29 February 2008: I just took a look at the search engine results a few months after the launch of Peter Brewer Goldsmith's website. The budget was for a website, with nothing at all for Internet marketing, so in a sense this is accidental SEO, search engine positioning that's happened purely as a result of my awareness of keywords and keyphrases (OK I did a bit of analysis at first), of building standards-led websites, of naturally writing copy with a nod to keywords, and steering well clear of anything problematical.; Despite not being one of the mainstream jewellers in town, he's beaten only by one other jeweller for "Scarborough jeweller". But Scarborough's a small town, I'd expect to get good results for anything with 'scarborough' in it.; What's really surprised me are nationwide search engine positions for things like "bespoke jewellery" (page four), and "unique jewellery design" (page one), where I imagined there would be thousands of craft jewellers who would make it their business to sell off the web.; So that was achievable in default mode. Imagine what's possible if we actually try.
Valerie: 27 February 2008: I saw this in the gym the other day. Love it.; I never really liked Valerie but this is put to a swing beat and it's a whole lot more danceable. Interesting. A drummers trick for the back pocket I think.; Loving the way the backing singer chaps move on this version too.
Earthquake?: 27 February 2008: Did we have an earthquake in Scarborough last night? We both woke up as if disturbed by the cats, but felt as if the bed was wobbling. I was momentarily scared as I woke up as if someone was rocking the bed, and fell back to sleep thinking the cats wouldn't have the strength to do that and anyway, they were all on the bed as disturbed as us. I fell straight back to sleep wondering if the ghost that's supposed to be in our house had finally made an appearance by shaking the bed. When I woke up, I'd forgotten about it.; But I have a text from a friend at 1:14 saying "earthquake?"; Let me know if you also felt something as currently there's nothing else up on the web about it. (Update: that was about 6:30 am, but I just didn't look hard enough); Update: Oh yes, there was: press association, and close to us too.; Why's it called an epicentre? Why not just the source, or the middle?; I actually saw my screen shimmer about an hour ago, which I reckon was aftershock.
Video: 25 February 2008: Video is absolutely happening on the web as a means of converting website visitors into customers. If it's reached as far as the Whitby Northern Soul weekend website, it's officially mainstream.; A friend said "that is one of the weirdest things I have ever seen." Quite so. All a bit Fatboy Slim.; Having investigated further, apparently the reason why it's so brightly lit is that Northern Soul afficionados put great store by dancing technique, so they want to be well lit in order for people to be able to see what they are doing.; And it's not about live music, apparently, it's about records.
email address change: 25 February 2008: I have clients go through this all the time and unless I catch them they just put themselves in the same position again. Basically, if you're using an email address provided by your ISP, say, well what used to be Freeserve, so you're a.somebody@fsnet.co.uk or whatever, at some point Freeserve is going to get bought and taken over or they'll rebrand it and your email address will change. So Freeserve was created in 1998, taken over by Wanadoo and rebranded in 2004. Then they were taken on by Orange in 2006.; The ntlworld addresses are now changing to virgin.net.; Either that or you'll move house or decide to change your ISP. So you were on tiscali and now you're on BT. Well, your old tiscali address isn't going to work.; So now you have to let everyone know your new email address. That's a pain. It's a pain because you will lose touch with distant friends, because you're asking all the people you like to do some admin on your behalf (change their multiple address books) which doesn't feel very polite or caring, and particularly if you're a company suddenly your stationery, website, ads and van signage are out of date.; If you find this happens to you, don't just move where they take you (because it'll happen again in a few years) take the plunge and get your own domain name. A .co.uk one is just £9.99 for the first two years. Then, just so long as you keep renewing that domain it's yours forever. No more pain.
SEO tips: 24 February 2008: As a result of the blog below, a friend asked my advice. Here's the "in a nutshell" guide to SEO I sent him: "Basically write good content that's aimed at particular keywords. You've got the keyword analysis thing sorted, I assume: wordtracker, et al. Then generate meaningful links by reusing your content in Squidoo, blogs, etc. doing your social bookmarking and stumbling. Learn about PageRank and no-follow links. That's it in a nutshell, it all comes down to creating good content."; Since he's been reading up on the subject I assumed I could write such shorthand, but I thought it might be useful to put it here too. If you're not so familiar, put the words you don't understand into Google.
SEO result: 24 February 2008: With a few hours work I just raised the traffic of Granite Worktops UK Ltd by 66% almost immediately, and got them onto page one for 'granite worktops'.; Their big deal is quality, so I wrote a spoiler article about how to get a good granite worktop, or how to avoid a bad one in order to show the difference between cheap granite and good stuff (I ought to do the same for me one day). I combined that with a few fancy, special, ultra secret Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) magic tricks (like registering it with del.icio.us) and Bob's yer Auntie wotsit.
Still haven't done the washing up?: 24 February 2008: Nor has anyone else. Sick of glossy interior shots you can't afford? Visit NormalRoom.com and see views of normal people's rooms. Go mad and upload yours.
747 landing, view from cockpit: 23 February 2008: A Boeing 747 landing at St. Maarten, view and sound from cockpit. Cool :-)
Amy Winehouse: 23 February 2008: Amy/Britney, same thing. This interview is both infuriating and beguiling, there's no handling Amy, and then she does this and you can't quite believe that voice comes from there. Fabulous.
Steve Wright: 19 February 2008: My webcam was Steve Wright's webcam of the day on Friday on BBC Radio 2. They didn't let me know beforehand, nor actually mention me, but they just send viewers to their webcam page and it linked through to me. I just spotted a peak of about 1,500 new visitors. Yowser.; Steve Wright was kinda revolutionary when I first started listening to him when I was driving car spares around Nottingham wearing a blue streak in my hair that co-incidentally matched the colour my delivery van. The voices: Gervais, Mr Angry. And his apparent ownership over the programmes (rather than being an employee it seemed he was perhaps contracted to deliver a programme). Never quite saw eye to eye with him over his choice of tunes tho.; Plus, I know someone who won a trip to New York through him. She has a picture of her, her friend, and Steve Wright huddled together at the top of the Empire State Building.; So, we have a woven history.
Butterflies: 18 February 2008: I think we've established now that butterflies don't just live for a day, right? Painted Ladies come here from North Africa every summer in two waves, one lot direct, and another generation whose parents came from Africa, bred in Europe, and they ended up here to join the offspring of those that came here direct. They don't breed here, they just die off, and I was worrying why.; There was a line in The Millennium Atlas of Butterflies in Britain and Ireland that helped me understand and gave me a wow moment.; Basically, it just happens. A bit like creative thinking: there's no reason for it until after it works. But if, just once, a butterfly might make it back to Africa to breed (there's another species that does manage it, thus proving the point), it might have in it the genetics to make it happen more. And by breeding, there's an improved chance of finding a way for that species to breed in Africa where it's warm, come to Britain for food over the summer, and get back to Africa before it gets too cold.; The wow moment came in realising that it isn't just millennia that makes evolution work. It's life and death and pure chance and randomness in millions. It's the quantity thing that I hadn't realised. Butterfly fans talk of Clouded Yellow years where millions fly over together from Africa to our south coast being seen from boats on their way.; And it's that, the Clouded Yellow, that gave me that wow moment. It's possible they could overwinter if it's exceptionally mild, and southerly migration of smaller numbers has also been seen. And all those millions of butterflies come over just because they can, maybe the wind's in the right direction. There's no reasoning behind it. And if something comes of it, all the better. It's that step into nonsense, into the darkness, into unreason, that I find attractive, because there might be something truly fantastic after that that makes the first step make sense in retrospect. I don't mean that the butterflies know what they are doing, nor God for that matter. I just mean .. that's evolution, it's how all of it works.; Evolution, it's about enormous numbers as well as thousands of years.; Which is kinda interesting if you think about how we are probably lessening the numbers of groovy animals like cod and bison and sparrows. It's a bit naughty, we are robbing that species not just of its numbers, but of its speed of evolution. It's a bit like us taking the good genes out of Africa during the slave trade. Unforgiveable. Mind you, we are giving jellyfish, c-dif and primordial slime a good home, so it's not all bad.; Here was another wow moment. I've always liked the idea of just letting the countryside be natural, do its thing. I think back to Britain being mostly wooded and wonder how wonderful that must have been. Obviously I'd be less in favour the minute I went to the shops to buy food and discovered there was no parking and all they had in was bark, but still. Maybe bark's not so bad. Our Chinese friend just ate a meal of jellied worms. I'd go for bark with some enthusiasm if those were my choices.; Anyway, it turns out that butterflies rather enjoyed that moment we had when farmers had chickens and sheep and cows and grain and hedgerows (rather than just big sheds) because there was a huge variety of habitats. We know they enjoyed it because we can see their smiles on old CCTV footage.; My idea of leaving a forest to itself is scuppered by Skippers, which enjoy bits of cleared woodland and 'sunny rides'. So perhaps all I really want, and perhaps all that we all want, is the world to be like we thought it was when we were about 8 years old. Full of cheery, rosy cheeked farmers and lots of fizzy pop and sherbert dib dabs.; I remember as a kid actually going out in search of a dormouse. My childhood hero lived in the forest and had a dormouse living in his pocket. I always wanted that. It's not natural.
Malcom X: 17 February 2008: There's a great piece of footage at the top of YouTube at the moment, a speech by Malcom X. Dangerous chap, I wonder whether nowadays a speech like that would be unlawful in the UK because it would be inciting an uprising.; I don't really understand 'nationalism' in the way he's using it. I love it anyway, though.; Ahhh, might as well show you this too Mohammed Ali's recipe for life. You know, this YouTube thing might catch on .. a tv that shows us what we want to see.; (YouTube is Alexa rank #2)
New case study: 17 February 2008: For some reason I never quite got around to writing up this website for a guest house case study. Again there's an emphasis on photography. Let me know if you think it works.
Running pace: 16 February 2008: When I started running I used to wear a pedometer as well as my heart rate monitor, but now I'm much more used to my pace and I reckon on 6 miles an hour and that's kinda it so I don't bother with the pedometer any more.; However, to set up that pedometer, I originally had to measure the length of my pace, which varies according to speed. My partner came up with the bright idea of using the gym running machines to work that out, so that's what I did.; It takes at least five minutes of running for your heart rate to stabilise, and I set the goal of finding the speed at which I could run with my heart rate stable at 142 bpm. I'd then run for one tenth of a mile and count how many right footfalls I made in that time. I could work out my pace length from that. I also noted my speed.; So in June of 2006 where I was well into preparing for my first half marathon, it took 70 footfalls to cover .1 mile at 6 mph. A month later I was up to 6.1mph and 69 footfalls. A month later, with a couple of months to go before the race, I inexplicably fell to 4.8 mph and 82 footfalls. I'm thinking perhaps I was fighting a cold.; A month later I was back up to 6mph and 72 footfalls. Try as I might, I don't seem to have gotten far above that 6mph thing.; Anyway, a year ago, during last year's downtime, I measured it again: 68 footfalls, 5.1mph. And yesterday: 71 footfalls and 5.6mph.; Now, I'm pretty unfit atm, I've only picked up running again this last couple of weeks, so I'm thinking 5.6mph is pretty good. I'm mentioning all this because of the Paleo diet, I'm trying to see whether I've improved or declined. I still appear to be losing weight which is good, but bad too, obviously I don't want to start dismantling my own organs for their sugar, that would be bad.; I'm also thinking, I'm about a stone lighter than I was after Christmas, so my pace should be higher for the same heart rate as I'm carrying less weight. It's certainly nice not to have that feeling when running: there are your bones, your muscles over the top, and then a layer of wobbly fat that kinda moves about after the fact. I haven't got that any more.; I've started going to the gym again, so I hope I can put some of this protein I'm eating into muscle, so I'm expecting the weight loss to end as I put on muscle, so I have to be careful not to think all's well if really I'm losing too much fat. This week's loss seems to be around 4lbs, so that can't continue. I feel great though, still.
"Is mySpace the best place to set up a website for a new online business?": 16 February 2008: Someone asked me if mySpace is the best place to set up a website for a new business. Here's how I answered:; Time was, every business needed a website of their own, but nowadays as a professional web developer, I'm starting to wonder whether a website is absolutely necessary at all.; For a long while, eBay has offered the facility to set up a shop and sell to people who, basically, are on the web to buy. No special skills required.; Yahoo! Stores have been very popular too, particularly among e-marketeers.; When mySpace arrived, it offered something else, the ability for everyone to create a personal page. Something that reflected their interests and through which they could keep in touch with their friends. Possibly its biggest draw, though, is its ability to provide streamed music. Consequently, it's a big deal among music lovers and musicians.; Facebook, however, is becoming more popular and provides a rather more ordered, less 'MTV' environment. Once you've set yourself up in Facebook, you can set up a Facebook page for your business.; Think of these sites like opening up a shop in a town. If you set yourself up in Facebook, you may miss people who spend their time on eBay, and those in mySpace, as if they were in different towns. If you're a small business, you could do well in one. But as you grow, you'll need to be present in all of them, like opening up new branches in different towns.; There are three elements to online business success. The first is that you have to have a presence online. Whether that's an eBay shop, a Facebook Page, a mySpace page, or your own site, there has to be something somewhere for people to find out what you do and buy something.; The second element is traffic. You need people to visit whatever presence you create, and how you generate that traffic is partly determined by what you choose. For instance, with Facebook you might embark on a strategy of gathering lots of friends and giving them stuff of value. With eBay you'll have listing strategies. With your own page, you'll need to get into search engine optimisation and linking strategies.; The third element is conversion. Do your pages convert people into buyers, and if not, can you do something about that? Can you test one thing against another, a button design, for instance, or a headline?; Websites can be expensive to set up (think in hundreds or thousands), and a Facebook Page is free. However you don't really 'own' what you put up in anything other than your own site.; So my advice is this. Use something like eBay or Facebook to test your business online. If you make some money, invest that in a website, then get your presence onto the other sites too. You can pass traffic around .. from your site request that people friend and fan you in Facebook, and when they've done that you can announce to your Facebook fans some sort of promotion to get them back to your website.; As you can see, online business is no longer just about having a website, it's much more about developing a presence in all sorts of popular places around the web, all feeding into pages that convert visitors into paying customers. You have to go where the fish are biting.; It's a glorious thing. Welcome to my world.
One Night Only: 16 February 2008: One Night Only, a band from Helmsley, Yorkshire (about twenty miles from here maybe), who came to the attention of the music industry after they made a video about their home village, were kind enough to make their latest video, Just for Tonight, entirely in Scarborough. Go location spotting.; Not a bad tune either. (The Helmsley video is on there too); It comes to something when I'm getting my news about up and coming new bands from the local 6:30 news. Arctic Monkeys was a bit like that.
The Paleo diet and drumming: 14 February 2008: I think the Paleo diet has seriously improved my drumming.; One thing my partner read and told me is that the modern diet is full of things that upset our homeostasis, the balance of chemicals in our body. So our body is constantly battling to keep control. One thing that's stuck with me from my youth reading Adelle Davis is the insulin, sugar, diabetes thing.; How I remember it is this: if you eat piles of fast sugars (sweets, pop) on their own they all get digested at the same time, producing a blood sugar peak and corresponding high. There's an upper limit to that, obviously, otherwise we could make ourselves taste of syrup, and so our body produces insulin to convert the excess into; When there's enough insulin in our blood to convert the sugar to fat, all the sugar turns to fat, but there's still insulin around, the system doesn't switch off quickly. So now (half an hour later), you're in a sugar/energy dip. And what sugar you do eat (crave) is turned to fat by the remaining insulin in your blood, pretty much for the rest of the day.; Do that often enough, and your pancreas (the organ that produces insulin), gives up, and then you have diabetes.; Now, imagine that process happening with, say, a thousand different chemicals in your blood that all have to be regulated.; So, eating the diet we have evolved to eat is in harmony with our bodies. No more chemical panics.; And that's how I feel. Calmer. I'm not funnier or happier. I'm not more energetic. I'm calmer, I'm Zenned.; Sometimes I'd sit down to eat my tea and lift up my fork with the first mouthful and realise my hand's were shaking. Why? Nervous energy, I thought. Day after day spent constantly doing. I'm not complaining, I like doing. But now I think maybe that wasn't the whole story. I don't shake so much nowadays.; So, drumming. I've had two practices since starting the diet, and both times I've felt much more able, confident to try something new mid-song, and more aware of what I'm doing and how that relates to what the rest of the band are doing. It's real, the other band members commented on it. I think that's because my body's not distracted by chemical buzzing. It's better able to concentrate. So, that's good.; And, just for the record, I appear to be running OK now. I've made sure I load with a banana or two and some dried apricots an hour before I go out. I've not done more than 50 minutes recently, but it seems to work for now. And carting 10lbs less weight around seems to have made me faster .. I'm having to run what feels like much faster to get my heart into the heart rate zone. I can check that when I next go to the gym.
Pottering along: 12 February 2008: You know when you're just pottering along surfing the technology wave, drinking it all in and then, whoosh, you're arse over elbow, taken by surprise by the next big thing that 300,000 people are already into and no-one told you. Well, Cap'n Antz is ahead, he's using this to deliver live streaming video over the net of the gigs he's playing. Oh yes. It's live right now here. So now, anyone can deliver their own live tv over the net. If that doesn't separate your molecules I'm not sure what will. Wow. Just wow. (Carbon logic was his link too, and I wouldn't have known about either without Facebook).
Carbon Logic: 12 February 2008: This looks pretty cool. Musicians submit their music, people vote, winners win studio time and a gig.
I'm famous: 12 February 2008: Well. I'm in the local paper for my webcam, anyway.
Seasick Steve: 10 February 2008: Did you see The Culture Show last night? Seasick Steve. Seems like his guitar's built from driftwood, it's only got three strings on it, but boy. Here he is on YouTube at a different time.
t-shirt design: 10 February 2008: This looks very cool, very Web 2.0, very big. Not sure if I could actually really buy something today but it looks like it's going to be great. A place where you can submit t-shirt designs that get voted on, the winners become 'official' designs and you get paid. Be more like this: Artevist.
Facebook dates: 9 February 2008: The education dates in Facebook profile, I had no clue whether you're supposed to put the year you joined an educational establishment, or the year you left. Help was no help, and nor was Google, so I asked. Facebook said: "This year indicates when you left the education institution". So that answers that.
Castle Cam: 8 February 2008: I am Castle Cam. There's a link to 'Castle Cam' on the Scarborough Evening News' website (in the column of graphics in the middle of the page after the text headlines). Basically, it's my webcam. Yip.; And while we're on their site, this video of a fishing boat coming to port under lifeboat escort in a raging sea is worth seeing, but you need Windows to run it.; Your RNLI donations please.
Britney: 8 February 2008: I'm a Britney fan and I do have a problem with what's going on right now. I feel very sorry for her. Imagine being in her situation, what a nightmare. So yes, I know I sound like an old pervy bloke, but it's genuinely not that, and clearly I know next to nothing about her and all I see is what's in the press, so yes .. I'm providing a Daily Mail style reaction .. but still. I'm just not sure, when the pack smells blood like this, who she can trust. So I imagine being in that situation and it feels very lonely indeed. If she comes through this period, I'll mark her up as a heroine. If I were in that place, I'd do more than shave my head, I'd be gibbering.; I think I started feeling this way for Britney when Michael Moore arrived with his Fahrenheit 9/11 camera and got her to blurt about supporting Bush, 'her president'. I felt dirty, as if we were mathematicians asking artists what the square root of 8 is and then laughing at them. They could just as easily have asked us to draw a picture and then laughed at us, but we had the camera, so it's a power thing.; I can't do what Britney does, and on the rare occasion that I see one of her videos I am in awe of what I'm seeing .. I mean, remember the heyday? Brilliant, buoyant pop. I think I started noticing this on the tv at the gym.; In among all that, there's a new album, Blackout (iTunes link), which appears to have received a critical thumbs up so she's certainly not as entirely useless atm as the press would have us believe. And Piece of Me is mature and does good. So maybe I'm wrong. You can't produce a product like that without having support.; The upside is she can use this to move from teen babe to mature artist which is, I assume, the plan. Go Britney :-); Anyway I reckon we should support the poor lass. We've got a spare room, she can have a Scarborough break if she likes. The entourage can kip on the sofa.; Either that or she knows exactly what she's doing and is keeping all this going in order to remain hot property. Who knows.; Just in case you have now got the strong impression I reserve a small room of the house as a Britney shrine, I don't. Just thought I'd mention that.
Obama on mySpace: 8 February 2008: I'm thinking that friending Barack Obama on mySpace might be a good way to understand mySpace better. Although it's becoming fairly clear that Facebook's where it's at, he seems to be concentrating on mySpace.
Some pics: 6 February 2008: Sometimes, there's nothing to say. Sunrise, the view from our top floor. Pure, no filters.; Saturday morning stroll out for the papers. Check out the surfer dude specs in the last one.; Don't go thinking I think these are any good. They are crap. Snaps, nothing more. But better than average snaps.; Here's something I'm working on though. I'm sick of seeing water shots taken on a long shutter, "so you get the sense of the water moving". Yes yes .. chrissakes. We know water's bendy. I'm trying to work out how to take a decent wave shot where the motion is completely stilled, so it turns into sculpture, something you feel you could walk into. It's a big problem, because the movement is very fast, and the higher ISO, the lower the quality, so I need crashing waves and a nice sunny day, but then the surf whites out. So, I'm working on that. Here's the idea, anyway. I think it will only be solved by a professional telephoto with a huge aperture. Is that what a mirror lens is? Anyway, I'm certainly not close to buying one of those so I'll carry on. Maybe I just need to stick the flash on. (That was what passes for a joke in photography circles). I don't know if these give a sense of (unrealised) possibility.
Paleo issue: 6 February 2008: Yes, I think I've confirmed, there's definitely an issue to address with running on this diet. I've just done my normal 45 minutes, and again, light on my feet to start, but at the end, could hardly manage it. So stamina's all but disappeared.; The top suspect has to be blood sugars, so I'll take an energy paste thing before the next run just to confirm. If that fixes it, then I believe there's a Paleo book for athletes, so I'll have to check that out.; Another possibility is dehydration. If I've lost 6lbs in weight due to fluid loss, and I'm drinking a lot now, then that has to be considered.
If all you eat is rabbits ..: 5 February 2008: If all you eat is rabbits, you die. That's what my friends said. Apparently some people somewhere on an island full of rabbits ate them exclusively and they all died. The people I mean. The rabbits obviously also died of being eaten. Rabbits don't have everything we need. Cue surprised look around the room. Then on the way home afterwards I started to think: well, if all you eat is cheese you die. If all you eat is lettuce, you die. If all you eat is almost any single food, you die. I heard a rumour though, bound to be true, that if all you eat is potato, you don't die. I tried it once as a student in Leeds, and I didn't die, so that's proof.; So that's the kind of entertainment you can get from going on the Paleolithic diet. Eat like a stone-age person. Fresh vegetables (but not starchy ones like potato), meat and fish (except we don't eat meat), fruit, eggs, oils, seeds. I think that's it. No grains (so no bread), nothing processed at all, no legumes (peas/beans), no dairy, no sugar/salt/vinegar/dressings .. and it's fantastic.; Let's talk about fat vegetarians for a minute. I knew one at school and I was always surprised because .. well, if you go vegetarian it's often for health reasons and often brings with it an improved appreciation of diet, so how do you get to be really fat if you're veggie? And the answer is, you just slip into bad chocolate eating habits.; So you start off thinking "hey, healthy eating". We were vegan for a while, then veggie, and then started eating fish too (but we haven't eaten meat for over a decade). And my staple turned out to be, for lunch, two huge slabs of home-baked wholemeal toast, one with grilled cheese on top, the other topped with a model of an ancient Inca city made from butter, covered in jam. Very nice, but ultimately a killer I imagine. Butter has always been my thing. Where smokers try for years to give up smoking, I've tried many times to cut down on my butter consumption, and failed. I find the easiest point to break the cycle is simply not to buy it, so this 'diet' works well for that.; So the Paleolithic diet really shows us for the bad eaters we were. The food is stunningly beautiful. Not, necessarily because of the recipes, but just because we're incredibly lucky to be able to get fresh organic vegetables and to be able to wander down to the harbour where there's a fabulous wet fish shop. Most towns and even cities have lost their wet fish shops but being a fishing town I can bring to mind three in Scarborough without trying.; So, meals are plain as can be. A piece of fish, some vegetables. A mushroom omelette for breakfast. Tomato soup.; I used to like salt in my food. Now I'm really not missing it. And 'recipes' seem overblown. Just good, basic ingredients, job done. And .. how to cook a piece of fish. Remove packaging, put it in the oven on an oiled tray at 190C until it's done (about 25 minutes). I mean, that's convenience food isn't it? Actually I use a meat thermometer to check the inside temperature (saves you dismembering it to check it's cooked, works well for meat too (but different temperature and technique required, ask if you want to know)). It's done to perfection at 150°F (65C).; As for the effect: besides me just not wanting chocolate, cake, et al, and feeling perfectly full, I'm proper pucker. I feel more alive. OK, I did have a day of feeling a bit off, but I've been for a run and that was fine, I felt light on my feet but maybe felt like I ran out of steam towards the end, although it was a short run (40 minutes or so). Normally it works the other way around, can't be bothered at first and then fine by the end.; Also at drumming practice last night, I felt like I was working in parallel rather than serial. I could drum well (some nights are usually good, others not so hot), I could think clearly about what I was doing while also taking on board what else was happening in the song.; I feel, in short, like I'm actually here, able to experience the moment more and get more out of it. That's a great feeling.; The book does say you'll lose weight quickly at first, basically because (it says) carbohydrate holds water in your body, and this diet doesn't really have any. Cue contentious cries (answered by, I think, 'but there are loads of sugars in the fruit and veg'). So I lost 6lbs in the first two days of the diet. In fact, we had a slow start to the diet as we used the last piece of bread we didn't buy any more, etc. so overall in the last week I've come down more like 9lbs. Which would be dangerous if it were fat but if it's just water that sounds OK. I imagine it'll stabilise.; Anyway, so there you go. Oh, almost forgot, the inspiration for this was someone telling us they had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and their doctor recommended they went on this diet. They weren't sure if it was this or yoga that had cured them, but they now hold down a properly responsible job. And it sounded to me like they had a serious case, the one with the aching muscles and so on.; For the record, here's the book: The Paleo Diet. The guy sounds like a nutcase, frankly (particularly considering the strength of his feelings toward legumes), but it seems to work, so far at least.