Wear Yellow

Lance Armstrong Foundation launched Yellow Bands with the words LIVE STRONG on them in America. Nike made them (for free) and they are sold all over America for $1. Some premiership footballers and celebrities started wearing them in the UK and they became very popular and sought after... You can read the Observer article here.

Ebay sellers started selling them on for upto £10 each. OK, they original cost of $1 went to the LAF foundation, but the other £9 ??

Shocked at people making profit from what was supposed to be about charity and cancer awareness I order 2 boxes of them from America. I have been selling them on ebay myself for a fixed £3.28. ALL the profit will go to Childrens Brain Tumour Research in the UK. Once the sales have finished I'll post here how much we've raised.

Lottery Syndicates

I've been running the site www.yourlotteryresults.co.uk for a year now. The most popular section is the syndicate reports which show a syndicates winnings, etc, since the National Lottery began over 10 years ago.

The site has always been free but I've just written a system to charge automatically for a years subscription. Its only £3 a year, but most of that (after the processing fees) is going to Children's Brain Tumour Research and Paediatric Neurosurgery Wards in Nottingham.

Sky Sports Soccer AM

Sam was granted a wish by the childrens charity Wishes 4 Kids and Sam spent the day at Sky Sports London studios and lived his dream to see the show Soccer AM being filmed. The show featured Ralph Ineson who we all know as Finchy in the hit series "The Office". Sam had a fantastic day there (thanks guys!) and came away with a bag of goodies including a Wheatsheaf T Shirt.

Here's the official post show article on the office Sky Sports website, and the weeks soccerette is here.

0870 Telephone Numbers

If you have a telephone package with inclusive calls, chances are that calls to 0870 numbers are not included and will be charged at normal rates. Companies pretend that they are offering us a "national" service but really they are making money from us all. Companies get revenue from even national rate numbers. For a call centre this could make plenty of money.

Monst the 0870 numbers simply route through to a normal telephone line. Here's the "Say No to 0870" website which will help you find the "normal" telephone number for most companies, stores and helplines. http://www.saynoto0870.com/

My Own Wayback Machine

The original www.markcherry.com from years gone by are here:

1999 2000 2002 2003

And the original wayback machine provides us with some great historical sites

1997 Oracle : www.oracle.com
1997 BBC : www.bbc.co.uk

Have a sense of Tumour

Sam was diagnosed with a Brain Tumour today.

Sam went for a scan which we thought was going to be fairly routine, more of an excercise than something to worry about.

Life stopped still and has changed ever since.

Derby FM Text Messages

The people of Derby seem to be getting confused with a Derby Radio Stations telephone number and mine. I have been getting texts for requests of songs, competetion entries and simple hellos for a few months now.

I've decided to list them all here and have our own competition. The competition here then is to guess the question on this radio station based on the answers I get.

2/11/04 15:27:46 ILOVE christmas
2/11/04 14:37:23 Love Derby
1/11/04 13:22:09 Love Christmas
1/11/04 10:34:54 Love christmas

The Kodak Factor

Some years ago me and a friend saw a gap in the market for Photo CDs from old printed photographs, slides or negatives. We created Picture It! Quite a nice site was created for back then, credit card payments, a PO Box number and we ran adverts in Amatuer Photographer.

We never got any orders! We had a few e-mail questions, which our made up customer service advisor Suzi answered (we figured a femail customer service adviser would always be able to diffuse any problems easiest and wow the potential customers?).

Still, we didn't loose a lot. We didnt acutally buy the kit to do the service. We'd be running off to Boots The Chemist and doing the first few at a loss before investing heavily in the kit. Remember back then CD writers cost hundreds of pounds.

6 Months later, Kodak dropped their prices to around the £5 price point and Picture It! was over. We fondly refer to this as the "Kodak Factor".

For the records, here's an archive of Picture It!
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/mark.cherry/other/www.pictureit.co.uk