Tour Of Britain Route through Chesham 12th Sept 2014

Idea 348 - sell suff on Ebay

I often have idea for opportunities or things to do, mostly I end up getting enthusiastic about them but don’t actually do them. Things like going up Ben Nevis on a Space hopper, or training for a marathon by walking 26 miles faster each day until I’m practically running it, and eventually im faster than Mo Farah, or maybe I’ll write a book of short stories all interlinked to cause some sort of global catastrophe, sort of an inspector calls meets 1984. 

Well my latest idea may not be original but I quite like it. The idea is that I find something as cheap as I can possibly find, Less than 50p, then I sell it on E-bay hopefully for a profit. So say I sell it for 60p after postage and E-bay fees, well now I have 60p to spend on something to sell.  This time I sell it for £1.24 and then £2.67, maybe then I have a setback and on sell it for £1.87 but I’m still up overall. And before you know it im buying a Fire Engine just think what I may end up with!

I probably won’t do it but the thought of it is quite appealing, Not sure where I’d buy the stuff from, probably not E-bay but charity shops and car boot sales to start with then maybe antique dealers then maybe the international boat show.

Women at work

Professional women at work

I’ve blogged about images before on this blog and so when I read Danny Golding’s post  regarding the trouble he was having finding suitable images for his new enterprise (Work Out Loud). The post got me thinking.

His post is primarily about how all of the available pictures are overly stylised pictures of young suited men. He goes on to explain there are very few photos available of working women, just lots of suits.  

Asi get most of my images from Wiki commons I thought I’d check what their selection of Working Women looked like, and it seems the view of the open media community is just as stereotypical. Here's the wiki commons page for when you search “Women at work”

The first thing I noticed was the categorisation which included

•  “Men and women at work” - Which would be ok if there were also suitable categories of “women at work”, but with the others it appears to define working women as only possible alongside men.
• Peasant women – So peasant women have to do some manual work or bake bread, but surely paid employment is not possible?
• Bikini Car Wash – Which bizarrely implies that one of the most popular jobs for women is to wash men’s cars with very little clothes on.
• Working mothers – so those that aren't defined by men, undertaking manual tasks or washing men’s cars are only working because their mothers.

The picture that come up in the first place are mostly historical black and white pictures which is not uncommon for Wiki commons but does give the impression that women used to work but that no modem women has a job worth photographing.  Filter the historical pictures we’re back to manual tasks and bikini’s. There are also a number of photos of women in uniform, police, flight attendants, nurses, ect ect, and whilst that’s all fine and dandy I can’t believe it proportional to the jobs that women actually undertake.

But now there is something you can do to redress the balance, Wiki commons is an open community so if you have more appropriate images of women at work why not upload them to commons.wikimedia.org