The Weather Outside...

Is frightful! And I mean that in the strongest sense of the word. Sure, the snow looks all sparkly and pretty now, but in reality it's just made everything cold and wet.

Better yet last night I think it caused a power cut. The power was coming and going for an hour before it cut out completely at 9:30. It came back again around 12:30, which I was accutely aware of because I'd left the light on my bedroom on without realising it and when the power came back it woke me up. True, in the grand scheme of things that isn't too bad, but it does give me yet another reason to not lke snow.

At least the trains were running into London this morning. I was half expecting them not to be. But I'm glad that I was able to get in to work at Re-Evolve today, I don't like it when the weather stops me from doing things.

This time every year...

I think I have cold coming on, and as my title suggests it's become something of an annual tradition. Then again half of the rest of the world seems to agree with me so it's not quite like I'm in bad company.

It's also the time of year when I remember that it does get quite cold again. During the summer months I usually magage to forget how much I dislike winter and as a result I'm always unpleasantly surprised.

The upside is that during autumn and winter there are always lots of events on during the run up to Christmas. I can rely on those to improve my day! Right now The London Games Fringe is coming up, and November holds a special place in my heart as NaNoWriMo. In truth it isn't National Novel Writing Month so much as International Novella Writing Month, but I do look foward to it. The goal of writing 50000 words in a month is quite doable (I have managed it twice before) and if nothing else it is a great excuse to stay nice and warm inside with my laptop. Even my annual cold can't stop me from doing that!

Giant Database?

Does this sound slightly scary to anyone else? I really don't like the idea of the government keeping tabs on everything I do. I mean emails and telephones calls would be bad enough, but keeping track of all the Internet sites I visit? It isn't even as if I go on any that I'd mind people knowing about, I just don't want the government to know exactly how many Disney and cute animal websites I visit everyday!
The personal information they could amass is much more terrifying, and not just because it could focus on me. It may be because I'm a lit student but a Big Brother state isn't something I think we should be aiming for. Of course I'm not the first person to say it, but it does make things all the more alarming that I feel the need to repeat it. Admittedly the government spying on us is nothing new, but it used to be a little bit funny when you could trigger having a phone call recorded by repeating the word bomb. I had some friends who used to take it as a challenge to see if they could set it off. "Yeah, that party was a BOMB last night!" *click* "Hey it worked!" Maybe the answer would be to fill all our communications with rubbish so that no one would bother reading it.
Oh well, I'm sure the government allegedly has our best interests in mind, they just come over really creepy with their suggestions sometimes.

Forum3

I went to Forum3 this weekend, which is sort of like a careers fair for charities looking to find people to volunteer or work for them. Actually it was much nicer than most of the careers fairs I've been to in the past because there were far more companies exhibiting and everyone there was really keen to talk to the visitors. At careers fairs I often get the feeling that the people running the stalls are there under duress (or maybe I just felt alienated by the fact that all of the careers fairs at my university seemed to focus on careers in law and finance).

Anyway Forum3 was a nice experience and I met a lot of charities which sounded like they would like people with my skills to volunteer. Given the huge variety of charities exhibiting there if you were interested in volunteering anywhere it would be a great place to go, and from the large crowds there was obviously a lot of that interest present. If nothing else it was a great way for the charities to raise awareness about their work.

Market Crash?

Yeah, that's not a good thing, right? I mean from an economic point of view it's bad enough, but I can't help but think about it in terms of how it relate to me personally.

I suppose that isn't all that unusual, let's face it everyone is most concerned about themselves. The problem is I look at all these layoff and think "Well, that ups the competition for me considerably." Frankly it isn't a good scenario for young people trying to enter the work place, and we can feel slightly justified that the situation isn't our fault because we haven't had a chance to mess up the economy yet. I'm sure my generation will do something stupid en mass eventually, but the point is we haven't yet.

In a way I suppose this means that trying to find out how to break into the world of work is more important than ever. Any advice we can provide will definitely be needed.

Oh well, on the plus side being worried about jobs is better than my other first thought on hearing about the recession was "At least we'll get some cheerful films out of this." Seriously, whenever there is a depressing period in history Hollywood will make a larger number of happy films. It's like they're saying "Life sucks? Don't worry, here's a musical." And that is why we have The Wizard of Oz and Footlight Parade.

Useful Marketing Blog

This blog looks like it will have a lot of useful information for me to learn from. To be honest I've yet to read it all yet, but what I have is pretty thought provoking.

Even better you can subscribe to a set of email marketing lessons. I've had a look through the first one and the advice seems really good. All of it is based around internet marketing so it's relevant to the things I'm interested in as well

More on Blogging

http://simonworld.mu.nu/archives/037779.php

This blog entry amused me, and made me realise that getting a blog noticed will be an uphill struggle! Oh well, I've got to start somewhere and I've never been adverse to free advice.

Internet Marketing

So I've been looking into Internet Marketing recently to try and figure out how to get that big old bundle of interwebs working in my favour. Considering how much time I spend surfing on there you'd have thought I'd have picked something up by now, but wouldn't you know it there's more to it than knowing how google works.

All of this is why I spent a good portion of yesterday reading Internet Marketing, Strategy Implementation and Practice by Dave Chaffey, Fiona Ellis-Chadwick, Kevin Johnston and Richard Mayer. With all those names you know there has to be some good ideas in the book! And there were, but more importantly it was well written. That's not to say that every page held me gripped, it's probably not possible for any reference book to do that, but the ideas and concepts were clearly explained and the writing style was easy to read. You can find out more about the books at www.pearson.co.uk/chaffey. I was reading the third edition, but there's a later one now too. Either way there are some good links on that site.

Most importantly the book gave me some ideas for things that Vital Re-Evolve could do to raise their profile. I love information that I can use (for good, not evil).