Right Guys! Here It Is, Les Sharma’s Personal Sample Collection!!!
A download of all my best drums and percussion sounds. Including my personal created collection of HOT PWL / Stock-Aitken-Waterman punchy Kicks, Snares, Claps, Hi-Hats used on many, many HIT records.
I have included a hot Juno and DX100 bass sound used on many PWL / SAW hit records.

I worked at Pete Waterman Ltd (PWL) for 10 years as a sound / mix engineer. PWL was the home of Stock – Aitken – Waterman, and this is my personal collection of HOT SAW kicks, snares, claps, hats and loads more used by them (SAW) and people like Phil Harding, Pete Hammond, Dave Ford and Ian Curnow, M&S, Big Time Charlie, Ministry of Sound, and load more…

IN TOTAL IT’S ABOUT 600 VERY HOT HIT MAKING DRUM SAMPLES. ALL IN WAV. FILE FORMAT.

I WAS ALSO ONE HALF OF BIG TIME CHARLIE ‘ON THE RUN’ AND ‘MR DEVIL’ 2 TOP 40 HIT RECORDS AND MASSIVE CLUB TUNES. THE SAMPLE CD WILL INCLUDE ALL MY NEW DANCE DRUM SOUNDS USED ON ALL MY LATEST PRODUCTIONS.

CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE AND DOWNLOAD NOW!

The ways round this? Take your own booster seat from home, but who wants to do that? Three children, suitcases, hand luggage and three booster seats is a bit too much.
Second option, find a car hire company that offers FREE baby seats and children booster seats. The first company I found for the Alicante Spain area was Javea Car Hire, but sadly they had no cars available.
The second car hire company was Lara Cars, I telephoned them in Spain, the lady spoke very good English and was very helpful. Lara Cars offered great pricing on car hire and FREE BOOSTER SEATS. So I booked with them.

Another rip off is most car hire firms charge for fuel on top of the hire charge. This is around 70 Euros for a full tank of petrol. How this works is that you pay for a full tank of fuel and bring the car back empty. But most people won’t use a full tank of fuel in a week, I never do and normally take the car back with still half a tank full (too the car companies gain). Lara Cars will let you pay for only half a tank of fuel.

Other things to watch out for, some car hire companies will charge your credit/debit card for an extra 500 euros as deposit for damages to the car unless you take out their extra insurance cover at 3 euros a day. So because most people don’t want to leave a large 500 euros deposit they are blackmailed into taking out extra insurance cover they don’t need – another con!

Another big bonus with booking a car from a smaller firm that don’t have an office in the airport terminal is that you don’t have to queue for half an hour to sort out your booking. These smaller firms will meet you at the airport, you can also pay with cash or credit card which is handy and the representative will take you to the car. A bit more personal.
How this works, book with big car hire company, arrive at airport, find their office, get in long queue and wait ages to get your car in the Spanish heat!
Book with smaller family run firm and they will meet you after your flight lands, normally the car hire representative will have a sign with your name on it, you pay them and do the paper work for insurance and they take you to the car, you drop the car off in the airport car park after – very easy!

Actinic v10 Highlights

*  Real time stock control providing improved stock management for you and up-to-date visibility of stock levels for your shoppers.
* A Streamlined Checkout improves the shopper experience by reducing the original checkout process to 4-steps.
* ‘Recently viewed products’ a new marketing feature which displays a list of products to the shopper they have previously viewed on the website.
* Customer Feedback integration (Feefo) enabling the presentation of independent customer feedback on your site.

We have used software called Actinic to manage the products online, print invoices and help with dispatching goods.
The site design is done by me and my wife, we do not use Actinic templates. We have used Actinic ecommerce software since version 6.
Actinic was recommend by Debbie from Not Just Balloons.

My first port of call was to use a very reliable web hosting company called Wired Tree who I had used in the past. Wired Tree offer great managed VPS hosting and dedicated web servers, they manage your server, back it up, secure it and take care of most updates for you. So I signed up for a new VPS with them at $49.00 per month and moved lessharma.com onto my new US VPS. Because my UK server was on a Cpanel / WHM interface and the new US server was also on Cpanel / WHM importing lessharma.com was done with only a few clicks.

Why move to a US server? Simple, open up the search engine ‘search term’ world to the US market. A dot com domain hosted on a UK server will not show up on a US only web search on Google and other search engines. Eg, Someone in the US searching ‘good wordpress hosting’ on Google, if that person ticks ‘Show US only results’ they would not see my dot com site hosted on a UK IP server. So hosting on a US server opens up the search engine world to the US for my site. Of course the US is so much larger than the UK as a country and more populated.

After a day I had second thoughts on moving my site to a VPS, so I thought I would find a good US host that WordPress would run well on and a host that could take of running the shared server. Back it up and secure it. This would leave move time for me to concentrate on running my blog.

Around this time I was reading Matt Cutts blog (Head of Google spam team) and Seach Engine Land and I stated to wonder who were hosting these very popular sites. So the fastest way to find out was to do a search on Into DNS for both domains, what a surprise both were pointing to the name servers ns1.tigertech.net, ns2.tigertech.biz, ns3.tigertech.org. After a little investigation I found out those name servers belonged to Hosted by Tiger Technologies.

So lessharma.com is now hosted with Hosted by Tiger Technologies and so far so good, support and the speed of the server is excellent, pricing is around $8.95 per month.
Tiger Tech run their own web control panel and not Cpanel / WHM so getting my site over was a bit more work than the move from Cpanel to Cpanel server. I had to back up the PHP databases (one for WordPress and one for my PHPBB forum) via PHP admin and make a local copy of my site files and then upload them via FTP onto my new Tiger Tech hosting account. When I was happy all the files and databases were restored OK with Tiger Tech I logged into my Enom account (domain registar) and updated my name server for lessharma.com to point to the Tiger Tech servers.

So far so good. Tiger Tech also have support literature online to help speed up WordPress with fast CGI and PHP. So if my blog becomes more popular I may try a few of these extra tips.

So if Hosting by Tiger Technologies is good enough for Matt Cutts and Search Engine Land than it’s good enough for www.lessharma.com!

The problem is my web server is running PHP 5.2.5 and should be running PHP 5.2.9 with Libxml2 2.7.3 +.
As a quick fix instead of upgrading my PHP, I installed this WordPress plugin – Libxml2 Fix.
So as you can see by the photo below of me (taken from my iPhone and post by the Wordprees App) it’s all working well!

Sent from iPhone WordPress App!
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If this weekend was 3 or 4 years ago we may have spoken maybe twice over the whole weekend and maybe a few text messages would have been exchanged, not nowadays.

The whole ‘Social Networking’ boom over resent years has changed how we communicate with each other in a big way.

This morning, this is how I communicated with my wife, we texted each other (the old fashion way). I was on Twitter with updates, my Twitter account feeds direct to my Facebook account. I posted photos on Twitter, those photos made it to Facebook. I was texting photos of the boys to my wife along with video text; thanks to the power of the brilliant iPhone.
My wife saw the Twitter / Facebook updates and commented on them (communicating back to me).

I walked the dog, another Twitter update (feeds to Facebook). Get home the boys do a small video to say ‘we miss you mummy, we love you mummy’, this video is texted to Tamzin. My wife then sends me a photo text showing a fitness class, I then take a photo of the boys playing ‘Star Wars’ on the Wii and text back to her.

OK, this isn’t the norm, Bryn and Evan passed a swimming test this morning and as a proud dad I wanted to share this with all my Twitter / Facebook friends. Plus Tamzin is away and it’s nice for the boys to keep in touch with their mum.
OK, it’s a bit sad, every 5 minutes I’m on my iPhone doing stuff. TweetDeck and the Facebook apps make the whole social networking stuff fairly easy out and about.

My point is how communicating with friends and the whole world has changed over the last few years. The power of ‘The Net’, mobile phones and Apps and social networking sites have made the world a smaller place.

Just think about it, before Facebook came around I had school friends from over twenty years ago and I would often have thoughts like ‘what happen to them?, I wonder where they are how?, would love to meet up again…’. Nowadays all those missing friends are my Facebook friends, amazing really!

Oh by the way, I forgot we also spoke on the phone this morning, with all this twittering, texting, blogging please don’t forget to talk!