James Avery’s blog

November 5, 2009

A serious point about the Cowfilms joke thread on twitter

Filed under: Blogging, Internet, Politics, Social Networking, Time Management — Tags: , , , — admin @ 12:22 am

For anyone who isn’t a regular twitter user, this post will probably make little sense, so I’ll try and unravel it slowly, rather than at the 140 characters maximum speed of light that twitter operates at.

Each day, twitter lists top ‘trending topics’, which could be on any subject - some serious, some not so serious. The cowfilms thread is definetely on the silly side - basically, make any connection between a film title and a cow related theme.

Here are a few of my favourite 10 so far:

  1. Moo Cowsand and One: A Steak Udderssey - @julianyon
  2. The Cud, the Bad and the Ungulate - @ginpitwarrior
  3. Bonfire of the Vachequirits
  4. Friesian Loathing In Las Vegas - @scoop_cooper
  5. 24 Hour Patty People (featuring Happy Moodays)
  6. The Cudfather
  7. Cry Friesian - @davidschneider (of Alan Partridge fame)
  8. Methane, myself and Irene @rumdoodle
  9. There Will Brie Cud
  10. Ruminator 2 : Cudgement Day

So what’s so great about this obviously pointless and frivolous waste of time? Well, actually, if they say that laughter is the best medicine, then this thread is the best stuff in the cabinet. In some respects, it feels like the internet can turn into one big pub conversation - yet no-one has to pay a penny to get their round in, and there’s no side effects to this humour pill, apart from a little bit of procrastination.

Now I know that I’m part of the fortunate digital elite, and that I can dip in and out of twitter as I please - some workplaces have quite wisely cracked down on internet usage, and not everyone has the internet at home.

But there’s another serious side to all this - today’s big twitter topic may have been humour related (there’s another thread going about blaming everything on P Diddy), but at other times, the top trends are politically related, as we saw when the UK truly dominated the twitter charts two weeks ago when Nick Griffin appeared on Question Time. For non-British readers, Nick Griffin is the leader of the far-right, racially motivated, British National Party.

Another top trending topic today has been the elections in Iran. Now there was a lot of media attention back when the elections were first run, and a lot of people were able to get their opinions out on twitter. This time round, on the 30th anniversary of the US embassy hostage crisis, we’re hearing calls of support for the USA, rather than the usual death chants.

So, let’s say long live twitter, and long live the American dream which created it, all the way from the farms of Nebraska.

October 3, 2009

Last month I made a paltry £10 through blogging. I just want to double this each month!

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Internet, Making Money Online, Time Management — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — admin @ 1:06 pm

Forget about all these wild claims about making thousands online from signing up to someone else’s automated scripts programme!

I don’t want to earn a fortune, I just want to double this amount every month for a year! Hang on a minute, after a few months, this starts to look quite juicy:

September £10
October £20
November £40
December £80
January £160
February £320
March £640
April £1,280
May £2,560
June £5,120
July £10,240
August £20,480

Oh, the powers of compound growth! Of course, doubling for the next few months should be child’s play, but who knows what will happen after that.

To clarify - I am looking at building up Adsense and perhaps other affiliate revenue from blogging alone, and not from Flightmapping.com, which is a dedicated travel website, albeit one built using very last millenium web 1.0 Architecture! Flightblogging.com is a standalone blog related to, but getting very little traffic from, Flightmapping.com, and my own personal blog is now building up slowly too. I also expect to re-instate a couple of other long standing blog projects, whereas the World Tube Map concept may evolve into an online discussion with some revenue opportunity, but the main aim of this is to actually sell physical printed maps, which don’t count as online revenue.

You might ask why current earnings are so low. The reasons are simple - I am a relative latecomer to the social networking and blogging scene, having put so much effort into building Flightmapping.com as a content portal, and focusing purely on SEO around the quantity of text, rather than playing the link building and social networking game. I am declaring my hand as a newbie in this field - and I want to learn - FAST!

Hopefully progress will develop with some good advice from friends old and new.

As always, keep your seat backs firmly upright, Pay Attention Meticulously, and enjoy the journey!

September 6, 2009

Make Anything Possible (TM) - M.A.P. Template

Filed under: Chess Board Maps, Making Money Online, Time Management — Tags: , , — admin @ 2:33 pm

This is designed for printing out at A0 and hanging on the wall, but it still seems to look fine when printed A4. This is a continuation from the original ‘chess board map’ concept, with room for some more ‘pie in the sky’ ideas.

The aim is to have a template to plan out any creative concept - or just to plan a week’s work in a mind map format, rather than trying to fit everything in to a linear 9-5 type grid format, which just isn’t relevant for creative thinking.

Naturally, I’m not going to give the full game away here, but the basic template is free to use. If you are planning anything geographical, then the ‘box’ could still be simplified as a world map down to ABCD (Alaska, Beijing, Chile, Dunedin / Desert Island - or any other variation on the theme). For England, I use cArlisle, Berwick, Cornwall, Dover - there’s no room for pedants pointing out that Cornwall is a county, this is a box for outside the box thinking, so the whole point is to have rough boundaries, not anything that has to be strictly enforced.

The ‘roof’ of the house could be used for ‘big sky blue’ thinking, or for anything which might make up part of a plan, but which wouldn’t fit in the box.

Hope this makes some kind of sense, it isn’t supposed to make total sense, because it is a template, not an answer. But the basic concept remains - using simple maps, and breaking evertything down into small chunks, there’s no reason why you can’t Make Anything Possible.

MAP = Make Anything Possible

MAP = Make Anything Possible

August 25, 2009

jA 380 Instruction Manual - Coming soon

Filed under: Time Management — Tags: , , , , — admin @ 5:06 am

It’s just coming up to 5 am, and I still haven’t managed to get to sleep yet, despite feeling tired and crashing out around 10pm. Sometimes my mind and body just don’t match up, so I think I’m going to fall to sleep, only to suddenly find a whole load of ideas buzzing around my head looking for somewhere to fly to. When I sit down at a desk, I can always stack up any ideas on a quick to do list and manage them accordingly - without pen and paper to hand this isn’t so easy.

I’ve had a concept going for a couple of years to relate each day to a flight, and to include 7 principle procedures to make everything gel together, but I’m some way off from getting these firing on all cylinders - so this post is one of those public reminders to self to get it done, and to create a proper ‘jA 380 Instruction Manual’ for myself & other like minded people.

The key seven points are:

Ø Check In - focus on key priorities for the day - should be pre-planned ‘destination’.

Ø Re-fuelling - eat properly, starting with plenty of fresh fruit.

Ø Take Off - channel creative ideas into getting the most important and urgent things done first.

Ø Cruise - sit back, relax, and get on with the rest of the day.

Ø In Flight Entertainment - make sure there’s plenty of fun each and every day, ideally during aswell as after work.

Ø Landing - wind down properly - switch off.

Ø Maintenance - keep body and mind in good shape at all times - get plenty of mental and physical exercise.

 

To be continued….

In the words of Truman Burbank - good night, good morning, and incase I don’t see you - good day aswell!

May 21, 2009

More not so random thoughts

Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Blogging, Coventry, Politics, Social Networking, Time Management, Voice Recognition — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — admin @ 3:19 am

• I am definitely practising my own version of flipping – sleeping from 9-to-5, and working the rest of the day (well, night really) round that, but this week has been pretty good so far, even if I would like to have gone to the twitter discussion event which was on earlier on today in London, but I only found out about that from Murray Newlands’ blog late last night.
• My hours might be totally out of kilter, but I am trying to get into a habit of producing a minimum of 1500 words of ‘useful’ (i.e. commercially proven) content before doing anything else, or at least as soon as I switch the computer on.
• Having said that, the first thing I did when I got ‘up’ today was go for a bike ride, and this was a nice reminder of the joys of cycling along canal tow paths (see upcoming Bling My City post for more about this).
• I haven’t got round to reading or hearing any news today, but the last breaking story which came through last night as I was shutting my computer down was that there had been a military plane crash in Indonesia. No doubt by now we’ve had the usual messages of condolence from the Foreign Office, saying how deeply saddened Mr Miliband is to hear such a tragedy. You always know when they trot out the deeply saddened line that they don’t give a monkey’s, because if they did, they’d say something original.
• Speaking of news, much as though I was glad to finally see the back of speaker Michael Martin, has this not buried a far more significant story about the missing link being found in the evolutionary chain? Surely when we look back at 2009 in 20 years time, this will be one of the most important scientific discoveries of our time, although how it had been kept under wraps for 20 years is another story.
• I was having a good MSN chat with the ever-busy Nadeem from Azam Marketing  last night, and we were both agreed that quick lists like this are quite a useful way of dividing up thoughts, ideas and useful links, but I also wonder if there is a twitter application which could compile up a day’s posts, filter out the idle chit-chat and then integrate the decent ones with WordPress? I guess not, that would require a computer to do some thinking.
• So what useful links could I add today? Michael Dunlop (Income Diary) has an interesting list and discussion of 30 dyslexic entrepreneurs — there’s a few well-known and well documented characters on the list like Richard Branson (Virgin) and David Neeleman (Jet Blue), but I didn’t know about Ingvar Kamprad (IKEA), but can’t exactly say I’m surprised. In certain respects, I’d have asked the question the other way — which entrepreneurs (or major achievers in any field) haven’t had to deal with some form of learning disability, serious emotional challenge or mental illness at some stage in their lives? If you go through the list of the top 10 greatest Britons, I don’t think you’ll find any. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Greatest_Britons
• Speaking of IKEA, it’s about time I went to get some more bowls for the kitchen, and this has to be a lot easier when you have a flashy new city centre IKEA store within walking distance. How many people have bragging rights to that? Seriously though, IKEA has to be one of my most respected brands, and I’m really glad they actually put a bit of thought into designing it.
• Lee McCoy (the Get Visible legend) had an excellent interview with Martin ‘purple’, where he gives a very interesting tip about using social networking sites like twitter to ask questions, rather than just talk about your lunch.
• I also need to look up ZiiTrend, a website about ’social predictions’.
• Meanwhile, Lee himself made some excellent points about blogging being far from dead (I think this particular Internet party is only just getting going), and I certainly concur when he says ‘I agree that Twitter is a much better conversation tool, and when you think that open conversation is the best route to expanding your mind, I still prefer blogging as the nature of my thoughts are essentially verbose. I dislike quick one-liners, it simply isn’t me’.
• Going over some reading from last night, Nadeem also gave a very interesting interview to Murray Newlands, but I think I’ll have to take him up on his comments about Margaret Thatcher later.
• See Flightblogging.com for my upcoming post about Log maps, potentially the next major development in Flightmapping.com.
• Whenever I come up with new ideas, I’m always slightly wary of sticking them straight up on the Internet, because a lot of people say that somebody else might steal them. However, I just don’t think there is much you can really do to copyright protect an idea, so my general feeling on this is to just stick stuff up anyway. I’ve never been short of ideas, so if somebody takes one, well, you know what they say about imitation and flattery.
• Yesterday, Chris Clarkson pointed me to a very interesting article about the Google user experience, and their 10 principles to create a so-called ‘Googley’ website. I think we have a lot to learn, and a lot to do, so that’s enough for now.
• Well, not quite — last night, Nadeem kindly suggested that I should update my blog more often, and I’m glad to say that even though I’ve been doing a couple of posts each day this week, this hasn’t distracted attention from the ongoing text updates for Flightmapping — these will always be like painting the Forth Bridge, but if you really do want to know anything about finding cheap flights to Copenhagen, Stockholm or Oslo, that’s my focus this week. As far as the maths goes, this blog post, like almost all of the content I write, has been created using voice recognition, so it has just taken 20 minutes so far, and maybe another 5 to check. Regardless of whether anyone else reads it or not, I always think it is good to review what you’ve read yourself, especially as there is so much other random information out there. I reckon that between blog posts, twitter updates and news articles, you could quite easily scan through 100 pages in a couple of hours, so spending 15 to 20 minutes summarising the key points has to be time well spent.

Enough for now!

December 9, 2008

Thankyou Vistaprint

Filed under: Chess Board Maps, Time Management — admin @ 12:24 am

Once in a while, I stumble on a business which offers such good service that I want to become an instant affiliate of theirs - whether they have a programme or not. Vistaprint are one such company. I placed an order for business cards with them back in early October, and it arrived within a couple of days. My order for Christmas Cards placed a couple of weeks ago also took only a day or two longer - even though this is a busy time of year.

My only regret was getting them sent to our office, which we are now vacating. Even though the intention is to use the office for a postal address (they are another company I’d give a hearty recommendation to, but that’s for another post) - I was too busy last week to go there, so the cards sat for a week before I finally got them today. Print quality was excellent, and I got 100 uniquely designed cards with envelopes and express delivery for just over £30.

  • It turns out that they do have an affiliate programme on Tradedoubler - reminder to self: log in to Tradedoubler tomorrow morning (or if anyone reads this give me a call and yank my lazy ass out of bed) - and sign up to their programme.

October 10, 2008

So is the internet really a Cesspool?

Filed under: Internet, Time Management — admin @ 3:36 pm

So, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has just called the internet a ‘cesspool‘ - where ‘false information thrives.’ Sure, there is a lot of junk out there, but isn’t it Google’s job to work out how to filter the spamalotters from the quality content? Sorry, I should have just said spam, spam and more bloody spam! Cesspool, cess, pool, Google, whatever - any sensible reader knows the difference between internet junk and quality content, just as a diner at the Savoy Grill wouldn’t expect to be fed with luncheon meat.

So does Google really no longer trust itself to fulfil its role as the sewage works of the internet? If not, then it must be time for someone else to come along and do a better job.

Correct information v Useful Information

Whatever Google says or does, we shouldn’t forget the original founding purpose of its search engine - to categorise the world’s information — Google was a popular mis-spelling of the word “googol”, which means 1 followed by 100 zeros. Whenever I think of this, I think of General Gogol from the Bond movies - but I guess he might well have had to remember 100 digit long secret codes!

There’s no doubt that the information is out there on Google - even if some of the highest ranking sites are not exactly of the quality Google likes to say they should be. Sometimes though, I’m not sure if it really matters whether the information is there or not - how much of it do we really need. The internet may or may not be a cesspool, but the amount of information it contains is certainly infinite. So if Google could just give the right answer without all the other junk, then they really would be able to clean up.

PS - I thought I’d test that out by asking the old politicians’ question of “What is 2 + 2″? Amazingly, Google does just come back with the result of 2 + 2 = 4 - and no other clutter. Then I tried finding a reference to David Blunkett thinking 7 x 8 = 54. No wonder I couldn’t find it - that was Stephen Byers!

Infinet Distractions

Anyway, as I was saying, there’s just too much information out there on the internet - some of it useful, some of it less so. Back to work!

 

October 3, 2008

The four hour working week — something to check back later

Filed under: Time Management, Uncategorized — admin @ 10:01 pm

A fellow colleague in the travel affiliate world has just reminded me about “The 4 Hour Working Week“, a book and blog by serial entrepreneur Tim Ferriss.  I say reminded me — he mentioned it before, and I really should have taken a look then.  Much of what he says is based on the good old Pareto rule, which basically states that you can get 80% of your results from 20% of effort, as long as you know how to concentrate on the right 20%.

I can’t really comment on this much further, because I have been so out of practice lately with all of these techniques, but I hope that at least by making a bookmark to this website, and scratching out a few thoughts here to come back to, I can make sure that I go back and do a lot more of this into practice.  However, there is something about this guy that really separates him from all the traditional self-improvement manuals which are out there, and that’s at he is able to use such wonderful jargon and acronyms. I’ve never met the guy, and only even spent about five minutes on his website, but I’m liking him already!

Here’s a few of my favourites:

  • “Everything popular is wrong” (sounds like a little bit of a rewind back to Zoo TV)
  • MBA = Management by absence
  • Geoarbitrage
  • “Protecting” time (after all, we all go to such great lengths to protect our money)
  • Remote Control CEOs
  • “Ultravagabond”

Now, what was that I was thinking about whether or not I really need an office?

Back to work….

Memory Techniques - How to Remember Telephone Numbers

Filed under: Time Management — admin @ 7:17 pm

I was out cycling earlier on today, when I got a call from my brother, who had been called by a friend who had forgotten that I am no longer using my old mobile phone number.  As I didn’t have any pen and paper handy, I asked him to read out the friend’s phone number, and see if I could remember it.  I have been trying to practise a few memory techniques, as espoused by people like Tony Buzan, but this was the first time I had put them to practise without any notes.

Some numbers are much easier to remember than others, regardless of their length — for example, the Beverly Hills ZIP code 90210 is used in the TV series of the same name, we all know the significance of 999 or its 180 degree rotation, and I think we have been irritated enough by the two 118 men to know exactly what happens when we call that number.  So what about other sequences?  Single numbers are quite easy to remember, but to try and think of a memory chain for 11 numbers can be quite cumbersome, so it is usually easier to break a phone number up into chunks of two and three digits, depending on where this yields and easier block to remember.

Naturally, as someone who’s very geographically minded, I are more likely to associate numbers with places, especially motorway numbers or country / city dialling codes, but there really are no hard and fast rules — just thinking up the first association that comes into your head will do fine.

All UK mobile numbers start 07, and many start with 077 — there is no real need to remember the zero, as virtually all phone numbers start with a zero, so that can be taken for granted.  As I said, I’m a geography nerd, so I would start many mobile phone number chains with Prestwick airport, as this is reached from Glasgow by the M77 motorway.  However, football fans might just prefer to remember David Beckham and his number seven shirt.  To remember to two sevens, either think of David Beckham indulging in one of the seven deadly sins, or as David Beckham played for Manchester United, and Seven is one of the best-selling albums by the Manchester group James, you can also think of David Beckham sitting down. Number 7 is also associated with luck, days of the week etc, but once we get to three sevens, we get back to travel geekery again courtesy of Boeing.

For my friend’s number, the memory chain involved George Orwell, a German referee and David Beckham, playing with a dice on Airbus about to take off — I won’t give the full game away, as his number is his business, but as my mobile number is public elsewhere, I don’t mind giving it out here:

0 77 9000 14 94.

If I ever give that number to someone, I always read it out in that sequence — i.e. spacing out the 9000, as that is a very obvious chunk of the kind that I was talking about above.  I said I wouldn’t give away my friends number, but perhaps here’s a little clue to some of it — he has three numbers which are in a descending sequence, and this relates to the Airbus being about to take off.

There are two obvious ways for remembering 9000, which can also be linked to each other — the ISO 9000 quality system, and the Saab 9000.  To create a memory reference talking about the Saab could easily refer to other models, but to talk about a well built Saab (not to suggest that the Swedes would build anything different) would pin the association down to 9000.  The number 14 is easiest associated with a fortnight, the best referred to as two weeks, as a fortnight is a little bit close to the number itself, so it could easily be forgotten.  Alternatively, the number 14 is the shirt always worn by the right-winger in Rugby.

Mathematicians might know that 94 is a Smith number (9 + 4 = 13 = 3 + 3 + 3+ 2 + 2), but so are numerous others, so that only serves as an additional boost to any memory chain.  94 is also the atomic number of plutonium, but I prefer the fact that the observation deck of the John Hancock Centre in Chicago is on the 94th floor — and if you feel up to it, you can take part in the annual “Hustle up the Hancock” benefit stair climb race in February.  Also, if you’re going to visit the USA, you will need to fill out form I94 to get into the country - but that probably isn’t much use to any Americans reading this, as they would never have to use it.

So, for British geeks, the easiest way to remember this number is to think of driving to Prestwick airport in a well built Saab to go away for a fortnight in Chicago.  For something a little bit more amusing, might I suggest Sarah Palin (a right-winger who might be able to get her hands on the nuclear button if we’re not careful), indulging in some extramarital activities with David Beckham in the back seat of a Saab.

Well, that works for me, I hope it works for you.  If you do happen think that this is just nonsensical verbiage, then bear in mind that Private Eye also likes to use the number 94 to refer to any drivel which could be continued ad infinitum elsewhere.

September 18, 2008

What is PC speak for killing time?

Filed under: Internet, Time Management, Travel — admin @ 7:16 pm

Well, mainly due to my own lack of planning, I have a couple of hours to spend here on some worn out keyboard in a corner internet cafe in Granada, before trying to get into Alhambra for an evening visit (all day tickets were sold out). For any pedants reading this, I am talking about Granada´s Alhambra fort ‘ yes, “the” Alhambra, except that this is technically a misnomer, as Alhambra means “The Red One”, and I´m not going to visit “The The Red One”. Anyway, I digress - what was I saying about needing to kill some time?

Unsurprisingly, Wikipedia doesn´t have much to say on the matter. That great bastion of PC speak is probably quite happy with the concept of killing time, as so much of said activity is done on their own website! Well, at least you should learn something from each visit to Wikipedia, although if your name is Vernon Kay, then perhaps Wikipedia is one website you could do without!

A quick scan of Google for the phrase “killing time” (well, this is Spanish Google, so there might be better results in the UK) comes up with a hardcore band from New York, “Murder Consultants” (of the gaming variety, not hitmen - Dixon Jones of Receptional can sort anyone out in the UK looking for this kind of event in & around London), a Youtube spinoff and a book about Death Row in the USA.

No-one out there is giving much by way of definition or origin of the phrase (although according to Wikipedia, it has been used in the New York Times as far back as 1893), beyond the obvious. So in our 21st century society of re-branding and doublespeak, how should the phrase “killing time” be re-packaged to suggest a more productive use of such temporal luxuries?

Or would the PC brigade baulk at the suggestion that all time should be used constructively? After all, if exam failure in schools, sorry, learning communities, is now called “deferred success”, then sitting idle for a couple of hours is surely just “deferred activity”? Next time I´m sitting on the sofa watching another pointless squabble on Fox, I´ll think of that as my “deferred gym session” - but at least there are supposed to be a few feel good benefits from having a bit of a chuckle at some of the morons they get on that programme - everything in moderation as they say!

Well, that´s about 30 minutes so far of doing stuff which is mildly productive, and which has certainly managed to keep my attention going - so I certainly don´t think I need to go and turn myself in to the Time Police just yet! And if it means I´ve made my first non-political blog post in over 3 months, that can´t be too bad either.

But I´m still no closer to that definition. Answers on a PC please (that´s postcard, or comment sent from your Personal Computer - not reporting me to the Politically Correct Brigade or the local Police Constable).

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