Are there real benefits from buying organic food? At this point, I’m sceptical of the idea.

The first claim made is that organic food tastes better. However the few tests of this that I’ve seen reported  cast doubt on it. Is it actually true? The problem with answering this sort of question is the same as that posed by testing the efficacy of drugs in treating illnesses. If the person doing the tasting knows that the food is organic, it will influence their judgement when reporting the taste. So the only valid test is a blind one, and preferably a double blind one. This is where neither the person taking the test nor the person administering it knows which food being tasted is organic and which is not. Maybe such tests have been done, but I haven’t seen them reported.

The other main claim for organic food is that it is healthier. But even more so than the claims about taste,  this needs to be rigorously tested, and for the same reasons. We can’t rely on common sense to provide accurate answers.

So at the moment, I prefer not to pay the extra cost that the supermarkets add on for organic food. Especially as most of the charge goes onto their profits and very little to the farmers.

I’m beginning to think about our summer holiday which is fast approaching. We fly out from Manchester on 16 August for two week in Crete.

Because of a small oversight on my part, it is actually just over two weeks. Earlier in the year I’d been attempting to make an exchange of my timeshare weeks in Spain for a holiday on Crete via RCI. First of all, a single week became available and the check-in day was Friday, 17 August, checking out on the following Friday, 24 August.

It was two or three weeks later before another timeshare week was offered. I booked that one before realising that it began on Saturday 25 August.

So now we have to find somewhere to stay on the night of Friday 24 August. The other complication this has brought is that of booking the flights.

None of the budget deals on offer were for a 15 day holiday. As a result I’ve paid quite a bit more than I expected to for the plane tickets. Such is life!

Habits form the bedrock of our lives. It is very difficult to imagine maintaining the level of concentration needed to plan our every action. We’d spend the whole time planning and not do anything. If habits then are so important,  why do we develop so many bad ones and why so few good ones?

We are a strange mixture of things. We have free will (or the appearance of it)  and yet we are animals. We have built into us the same mechanisms of reward and avoidance as determines their behaviour. So our intelligence tries to govern our lives but our unruly nature drags us in different directions.

If there is a battle between our conscious wishes and our animal passions, it is the passions which win, almost every time.

I’ve finally begun to tackle the jungle of my gardens, starting with the front one. I’ve been hacking away at the rampant vegetation for the past few nights for about 10 minutes at a time.

Even after a small amount of work I’m beginning to make a difference. At least now when the postman makes a delivery, he can actually find my front door. OK, I exaggerate, but not by a lot.

As to why I don’t do a concentrated assault and spend a few hours at one go on it, that is more complicated. I have a number of things on the go that I want to devote regular time to. So setting aside a whole evening or weekend afternoon to the garden just doesn’t seem practical at the moment.

I also feel that building it into a regular event (another habit, like my writing project) will have more lasting results.  Maybe ‘m making excuses but that is how it seems to me.

I’ve been playing around with creating a small program that will allow me to create many thousands of new, original articles from a base of three variations of the same piece. I’ve had some thoughts on the design and started to develop something in Perl. I’ve got SQLite providing the database function to store my information.

The problem I’ve immediately run up against is the lack in Perl of a visual environment. At least in the initial stages of my program, I want to be able to cut and paste between my application and article directories on the web, in order to submit the articles. Perl just doesn’t provide the framework I need.

Happily, I’ve found an alternative in Lazarus and the Free Pascal compiler. Together they provide a free software alternative to Delphi, which is a visual, object oriented implementation of the Pascal language.

The efficacy of simple behaviour modification techniques is shown by the continuing production of material for my blogs and other article writing projects. I’m now into my third month of writing. I’ve missed writing on only a handful of days in that time.

I’m mulling over the latest offer of cable broadband but I’m hesitating because of my previous bad experience with a cable provider.

I signed up for their telephone service shortly after I moved in to my present house, when cable was still pretty new. Things went very badly then with a delay of around a month with the switch-over and terrible service from their help desk. I swore never to use them again.

Things do change though. That original cable company is long gone and the new owners swear they’ve learned the lesson of the damage poor customer service can do to them.

The other main factor pushing me in the direction of cable, at least just for broadband, is the poor quality of my ADSL line. I’m quite a distance from the local exchange and this severely limits the speed and reliability of the ADSL line.

And, of, course, it also helps the cable case that the new offer comes in at almost half the price I’m paying now.

I’m looking hard this morning at shares I’ve bought in a couple of companies in the past 8 months or so. For a few years now, I’ve bought followed an investment strategy which invests in two types of shares. The first is called a value share.

Here I invest in a large, well-established company whose share price has fallen, usually on some bad news, but the company is still paying a healthy dividend. In most cases, the market has overdone the reaction to the setback and the shares will at some point bounce back. In contrast to this is what is known as a growth stock.

This second type of share is in a company which has experienced above-average growth in earnings and share price over the past year. To qualify, these companies must also be above a minimum size and have a low  share price to sales ratio.

This investment strategy has served me pretty well over the time I’ve been using it it. Right now though I’m in a bit of a dilemma over two of the stocks I’ve bought. Normally I only review my holdings once a year, in November.

But this time I’m tempted to make an exception. A couple of shares in my holdings have fallen by over 20%, at a time when the market has risen. I think I’m going to act now to dispose of them, rather than wait until November.

One thing that is in my favour is that I don’t tend to look back. Once I’ve sold shares, I don’t follow them afterwards and agonise if they then rise strongly. Once they’re gone, they’re gone.

I’m running late this morning. I switched off my alarm at 6am and then kept pressing the snooze button until 7am. And, when I got up, I felt dopey and was moving slowly. This is all a result of getting to bed late at the weekend.

At least there was a good reason for that. My girlfriend and I celebrated being together for 10 years by going out for a good (expensive!) meal at Simply Heathcotes in Manchester. That was enjoyable, we both had a good time. But I pay for late nights by being tired and lethargic the next day. And, before you comment, it is not because I’m getting older. I’ve always been this way, perhaps even more so as a teenager. And yes, that was a long, long time ago.

Never mind, I’ll pick up as the day goes on, in fact by the time I get into work I’ll be just about OK.

A quick update on my trip to London last Friday. Everything went fine and we made some progress on refining our new organisation in the meeting. As a bonus, I got to spend a little time in a bookshop. But only 10 minutes or so as our meeting overran by an hour. I did buy a book and I’ll report back on it at some point later on.

Today means a second early start for me this week. This time I’m off to London for a meeting.  I’m hoping to get some time in the afternoon to take a look around and maybe visit a couple of bookshops in London.

My meeting is scheduled for 11am to 1pm, though I may have to work a little beyond that to catch up with emails.  I’m booked on the train to return at 4pm so I should have a little time to browse around.

I’m an avid reader, have been since I was a child but I don’t bother much these days with fiction, unless it is science fiction.

I haven’t bought a novel in quite some time, though I’ve borrowed the odd one from the library. I’m much more interested in ideas in a range of areas such as psychology and science. I have a pronounced weakness for self-help, books though I’m applying a lot more scepticism to my choices in that area now.

I began my writing project in May, with the intention of forming the habit of writing for a period each day. The purpose behind that was to be able to create material for a blog and other online projects.

Although I’ve been doing things in this area for two or three years, I’ve never been very consistent or had much success. One main reason for this is that I was relying on other people’s material, mostly in the form of PLR articles. These turn out not to be effective, at least not without substantial rewriting, something I was unable to sit down and do with any consistency.

So to create original material for my own blogs, I needed  to write on a regular basis. However, I’ve had good intentions of that kind before but without lasting success. This time I decided to apply some simple behavioural modification techniques to myself

I arranged a reward, in the form of breakfast, for writing for a certain length of time each day.  Note that I started very small, at only 2 minutes a day. This was deliberate as my intention was to form a habit that lasted. Rather than commence with too difficult a target which would make it tempting to give up, I began with a small effort. I then gradually increased the time spent writing each day. I’m now, after two months,  at over 17 minutes a day and still going.

I’m writing this at the early hour of 5:40am, in an effort to get an item ready for my blog today. I recognise the importance of having something new for the blog on a regular basis. This is in order to keep the search engine spiders coming back. The more material you have published online, the more is indexed and that increases your chances of being found by readers.

As to why I’m up so early, it’s because I’m going to Bristol on the train. I’m fortunate that there is a direct link between Warrington  and Bristol so the journey shouldn’t be too bad, around three hours in total.

I don’t have a set time to be there but I want to make it at a reasonable time in order to get things done.

The visit is part of my company’s effort to dramatically improve productivity.  I’ve been seconded to the team that is implementing the changes in our group. We are being assisted in the process by a group of consultants.