http://www.jamesavery.co.uk Transport stuff, general political rants, and a bit of music Sat, 26 Dec 2009 01:13:02 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Have re-discovered my love for Scrabble, but avoided playing rude 4 letter J word as it might have offended other players. Settled for jam instead and saved the S for a better turn - a win all round :) Thanks Alan Yentob for reminding me what a great game it is ... http://www.jamesavery.co.uk/2009/12/26/re-discovered-my-love-for-scrabble/ University Education might not quite be my specialist subject, but if I could get a dual-geared time machine and wind it back so I could be in the Teviot bar at Edinburgh University discussing politics with a certain 'future' prime minister of ours, I would tell him exactly what I ... http://www.jamesavery.co.uk/2009/12/24/too-many-university-students-i-hate-to-say-i-told-you-so/ Can't find anything about this in the support forums, so maybe I can get help via twitter and a blog. If this works, it will show that there is more to twitter than just wading through the spam (but I am slowly getting the hang of it, that's another story). I ... http://www.jamesavery.co.uk/2009/12/02/can-anyone-help-me-with-a-flash-export-image-problem/ 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 ... http://www.jamesavery.co.uk/2009/11/05/a-serious-point-about-the-cowfilms-joke-thread-on-twitter/ OK, I'll admit it - my vanity has the better of me, and over the last couple of days, I've been trying to grow my twitter following as rapidly as possible. I know that twitter sets an initial 'ceiling' of following 2,000 people, and my two main accounts (one in my own ... http://www.jamesavery.co.uk/2009/11/02/pushing-the-balance-limits-on-twitter/ OK, let's take a break from any posts about making money online. How long could you live without the stuff for? I'm just skimming through a blog written by Mark Boyle, who is approaching the end of living for a year without money - a concept he terms as the 'freeconomy'. ... http://www.jamesavery.co.uk/2009/11/01/how-long-could-you-live-without-money/ OK, I'll start with a caveat - of course, I do want as many twitter followers as possible. Who doesn't? But assuming the main way of getting twitter followers is to follow other people and get followed back, why should I place my trust in people who promise upto 400 new ... http://www.jamesavery.co.uk/2009/10/07/why-i-dont-want-400-new-twitter-followers-each-day/ So, I've fed my ego and gone out to get my first 1,000 twitter followers, both on my personal account, and on the account we use for Flightmapping.com. So what? Well, to be honest, so not very much. My vanity, and my desire for traffic, and hence revenue, want as ... http://www.jamesavery.co.uk/2009/10/07/ive-got-my-first-1000-twitter-followers-so-what/ [caption id="" align="alignright" width="450" caption="Compound Growth of an Online Business"][/caption] On Sunday, I posted about how little I was actually earning from my blogs, and how I hoped to enter a steep learning curve in order to improve this. I've never been shy of writing content, but the social media arena ... http://www.jamesavery.co.uk/2009/10/07/thoughts-on-compound-growth-possibilities-and-dangers/ 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 ... http://www.jamesavery.co.uk/2009/10/03/last-month-i-made-a-paltry-10-through-blogging-i-just-want-to-double-this-each-month/