Pyjamanating

Happy New Year for 2010 from Pyjamanating!

What happened here in 2009 ? Not a lot.

What’s going to happen in 2010? No idea!

I’ve been following some of Michelle MacPhearson’s 31 Day Internet Marketing Makeover course which began in early December and is tagged #31DIMM on twitter. The first day’s task was to copy a spreadsheet from Google Docs and put in loads of information about each niche or blog, and that could take 31 days in itself if you have accumulated a fair few. Then you had to evaluate which ones are worth keeping and make a plan for the rest, so far so good.
Most of the tasks since then have been reasonable and practical, such that the course as a whole is to be recommended but as of writing no new editions have been published for a few days so I’m wondering if the Makeover has run out of steam or hit some problems.

31 Day Internet Marketing Makeover

west sands Blue

Originally uploaded by duncaninfife

No Dogs Please Thankyou

Cabo de Gata

Originally uploaded by AndyRob

By working from home during the year it should be possible to escape the worst of the dark winter and go somewhere quiet and sunny like the Cabo de Gata

Working from home can be a bit isolating for obvious reasons and one of the purposes of the Social Media Cafe and Tuttle club enterprises is to provide a space where self employed freelancers and suchlikes can meet up, enjoy a coffee, do a bit of work using the free wifi and generally netowrk as well.

London Tuttle club has had to move venues more than oncem, and last week came to Spitalfields, which is nice and local for me being within an easy walk of Liverpool Street station. The venue was cafe Leon, pleasant enough.

I hope the East London branch of the Tuttle club meets up again from time to time.

Blog Action Day comes around again, and in 2009 the topic is climate change.

Something like 7532 blogs from 139 countries with a combined readership of 11480067 readers and rising are coordinated on one day to write about a common topic in the hope of building sufficient critical mass to make an impact on overall awareness of the issue.

Here is a sample to start off with, I’ll be adding more as Blog Action Day progresses:

• When The Waters Rise – A Song for Blog Action Day
• Gordon Brown’s blog on climate change
• Blog Action Day Havering Folk Club
• Classroom Displays – Climate Change
• Linda Hartley – Blog Action Day
• Blog Action Day on Twitter
• Blog Action Day – from internet to live

or follow tag #BAD09

photo credit: Rob Enslin

Forth Road Bridge Scotland

Originally uploaded by Andyrob

An immense structure is the Forth Road Bridge in Scotland near Edinburgh.

I tried using a broadband dongle down in Cornwall for a week without much success due the location of the house really, but now I’m back on the dongles because I’m on the move – not physically myself, but between landline broadband suppliers.  I’ve done a lot of research again and decided that if you are lucky enough to be in an area covered by the BE Broadband up to 24Mb service then this is by far the best broadband deal available.  I can’t apply for the new BE Broadband until my phone line has been taken over by BT so there are at least two delays built in to the transition. With a T-Mobile 3G pay-as-you-go broadband dongle I can activate it for one month and get up to 3 gigabits of transfer, and then a bit more. There’s no contract, so as soon as the home broadband is up and running again I can stop using the dongle, and keep it handy for future travels, simply activating it for any month it becomes necessary or even for one day at a time on day trips to work away from home perhaps.

One of the advantages of being employer independent if not location independent is the opportunity to shift around the hours and days to suit myself rather than somebody else.

Day Shifting

Saturdays and Sundays are not really the best days to take a weekend break. There are too many other people off work, school and life and the transport is always worse with less trains and busier roads. So we’ve taken to having Wednesdays and Thursdays off instead, and that seems to be working out OK. We don’t have to stick to it if something else comes up, but at least it’s a routine that gets us out and about once a week, roughly. Fr example, last week I did some work on Wednesday afternoon because that’s when it needed to be done and then in the evening we went out to Havering Folk Club as usual. On Thursday we had a nice day out at Kew Gardens although it started to get a bit too hot in the afternoon which brings me to my next point:

Time Shifting

I’m a bit of a morning person these days and at 6.30am or 7.30am it’s nice and cool and quiet – my brain is active so that’s the best time for me to start work. Then by about 1.00pm or  or 2.30  it’s getting too hot and I’m tired so it’s time to stop. This is a good time for an afternoon nap after a light lunch and then in the evening I might do a bit more work, especially if I feel like it between around 9.00pm and midnight.

photo credit: BY-YOUR-?

If I was at work today I’d go home sick but since I work from home I’ll just carry on working. If I was at home sick I’d probablt be bored out of my mind by now, so I’m glad of the computer and communication to distract me from my aches and pains. This would be good practice for everybody when the swine flu pandemic re-emerges in the autumn and we all have to stay at home for a month or so.