Washed out – taking a step back
Wednesday, July 15th, 2009Over the last three months, I’ve been really involved in lots of stuff:
- I bought a waterproof video camera
- I organised DFEY to visit 2morro
- I videoed myself sailing my sailing dinghy
- My (ex-)girlfriend and I split up
- DFEY now has a logo
- I ran my first session as an RYA Sailing instructor for GSC’s first OnBoard day
- I went to several friend’s birthday parties including that of a large web agency
- I filmed an anti-fascism rally
- I went to (and filmed) a multitude of talks at various North West technology related usergroups
- I finished my A levels and left college forever
- I contacted speakers for Manchester Free Software group
- I videoed lots of sessions from Barcamp Sheffield
- I started full time work at DMC
- I filmed Tomorrow’s Yesterday and Buried from Above at the Ruby Lounge
- I do contract system administration for the BBC
- I went to the pub to catch up with old friends
- I filmed the Big Chip awards
- I gave a talk at Liverpool LUG
What’s on the cards?
More time spent looking after myself.
In the past few months, since I’ve left college and hardly stopped to breathe, think or relax. This needs to change. Doing stuff 100% is awesome if you have the energy, but you need to have the stamina. 90% of the energy 90% of the time would probably be enough… if the remaining 10%’s were leisure and sleep.
Going to bed earlier
I currently work 10am until 6pm, this means I get home late, go to bed late, wake up late am late leaving for the train and start every morning with a five minute jog to the station.
This needs to change. I have a lot of control over what hours I want to work so I need to start going to bed earlier whatever..
More Exercise
Not necessarily to get me fit or to lose weight, but I’m going to start swimming again every week.
My sailing has also been suffering – I need to battle it out with the elements on a regular basis. It’s only wind and water!
Projects into the future…
Open Source Schools Unconference
On Monday, I’m speaking at Becta’s Open Source Schools Unconference in Nottingham, I need to write a fully prepare a talk for that. Public speaking when I feel properly prepared is something I’m confident about, I’m not great at busking it yet.
A Holiday
I’m looking for ideas for a holiday of a kind I would really enjoy; I’m thinking of perhaps chartering a Sunseeker yacht offseason, going on one of the big ships adventure kind of things…
Not everyone’s cup of tea but I’m not everyone.
The best days of my holiday in Madeira were spent doing quite dicey things involving water, steep cliffs and gorges in a beautiful place!
If I’m not exhausted by the end of each day of my holiday, I might as well simply go and work from a “nice” location for a week; that’s a beautiful thing about the internet.
Chaos Communications Congress
I’m aiming to go to Chaos Communications Congress (3C), a big German hacker conference (read: festival) in Berlin next Decemeber. I had wanted to go to Hacking at Random this summer but my passport expired and I’ve not been quick getting it renewed.
Open University?
I’m not going to University in September and will be working full time. I need to work out what Open University Degree I want to do and apply.
Life
People sometimes say taking charge of one’s own life is scary.
I know I just need to ask myself:
- What I’m doing
- Where I’m going
- Why I’m going there
- How I can get there quickest with the minimum effort
Shooglenifty
Monday, June 11th, 2007Shooglenifty are a rocking Edinburgh based celtic fusion/hypnofolkadelia/acid croft band. Last year at Towersey folk festival I saw them live – they were awesome; people were crowd surfing; you just couldn’t stop dancing. This band is probably the most energetic band I have ever seen as well as the one who can make the most people in the room dance (everybody – including the sound and light people).
By the sound of it that wasn’t a fluke either according to some guy on youtube who filmed them doing a show:
It was jam packed and dangerous to be there. These guys know how to put on a show.
This is the video of them which he filmed:
So I was amazed and delighted when I found out Shooglenifty were going to be playing a gig in Glossop as part of the Lift Global Music Festival 2007. I was vaguely aware of the festival but it had never really before booked artists I would have wanted to see.
Anyway so now I havemy ticket to see them play at Glossop Town Hall, and I would strongly encourage you,to go and buy a ticket if there are any left (there were only 200 to start with). It will be one hell of a party….
See you there – hopefully….
Why I wrote this Site
Friday, March 30th, 2007Many people I know, now have piczo sites which, despite the fact that some find them wonderful, with millions of animated flashing “graphix”, I hate them because:
- The “graphix” slow my computer down (look at you CPU % on task manger when you are on one) so I can’t do anything else at the same time
- They are badly designed with useless pages… pages without text.. badly alligned pictures, etc
- Most are full of “iz waz n innit yo” ie. to anyone other than the teenagers we are, they are unintelligble(fair enough but…).
- About 70% use 101% too many “X”s on any one page.
- And there are an endless supply of other reasons why Piczo irritates me.
Many more people(including myself) have accounts have accounts on bebo, myspace, facebook, Hi5, ringo, Windows Live Spaces, tickle… and the hundred and one other sites… which let you meet your friends’ friends, let you create a profile, let you setup quizzes, let you tell everyone in your address book on hotmail exactly how much you really want to “join me on XYZ”.
But as far as I know, no site allows for allows for a mixture of all the features these sites offer, without all their weaknesses, at least anyone that claims to…
- won’t
- will have a catch
- will suck
- will have 50,000 popups and 80 banner ads on each page
- virtually none will be highly customisable
- those that are will not guard against irritating animated backgrounds aka “graphix”
“Anything you can do, I can do better.”
I wanted a site that did all of those things so I opted for this… basically the sandbox… from here I could build anything. A bit of free webspace. Using NVU (www.nvu.com) the free, open-source WYIWYG HTML editor (to most of you “using a special program very like a word processor to create this special sort of file”)
This site was as easy to write as writing a word processing document. Virtually no prior knowledge was necessary.
I then used WordPress, a dead simple CMS to string it all together into this slick site.
CMS upgraded!
Saturday, March 3rd, 2007Fantastic!
This website has been online what? less than four days and already I’m learning how to upgrade it – in theory the security has been compromised
From Slashdot: “The recent 2.1.1 release of the popular blog software WordPress was compromised by a cracker who made it easier for to execute code remotely.”
This meant that I had to update to the current version of WordPress – the lightweight blogging-centric CMS, I am proud to be currently using.
First Post!
Thursday, March 1st, 2007Hello there, welcome to my personal website!
Please feel free to leave a comment
My blog is not about money
Tuesday, May 8th, 2012Recently, I scored an ‘SEO hit’ – a blog post explaining simply and easily how to access the Pirate Bay.
Unique visits to my blog by month
My traffic graph exploded. Suddenly I had to take note of the skills I’ve built up at scaling websites rapidly which fortunately, wasn’t very difficult for me.
As the initial sense of “wow, I just increased my traffic logarithmically” faded, the business side of my brain started thinking
Obviously, the answer is yes. 10,000 page views = ~£10 via adsense. ’Yay’.
What I have realised is that for me, the real benefit of this blog – the really powerful part – is how fast and how far, with very little effort, I can share ideas and knowledge.
Tags: advertising. SEO, Blog, business, new media, page views, revenue
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