So the next two weeks I am having some time off work and staying away from the office. Life has been quite busy for the last year and I am tired. The tiredness is partly down to work and not making time for myself and looking after myself and partly down to UC which has been giving some problems again this year.
I started doing some training courses at the start of the year and that has taken off great, I had planned on my time off starting today, but I ended up doing an SEO course today for a Dublin make up school. The reason I mention this is preconceptions, mine and most peoples.
So I was doing great, no cigs for more than three weeks. Then yesterday I was having a very bad day and had two cigars. I threw the rest in the bin and today I have been feeling almost like the first day off the dam things again.
So playing on the computer instaed of working on the computer. I have decided that I have not added enough photos here, I have about 17,000 taken over the last couple of years, so I am going to share a few more a bit more often.
I do get amazed that anyone would turn out and vote for Martin, he never answers a question – he will talk over the top of other and continues to act lie a spoilt teenager. It is a real shame that this is the quality of leadership we have in Ireland today.
There was a time only a few years ago that I would be able to write or talk about any subject, almost. Now I am too stressed to write poetry.
Its not that I want to sit down and write poetry every day, or that I am much good at it – but it was something that I derived pleasure from.
What I am doing is using it as a baseline on how much fun is going on in life – the more stress I get day to day the less I can write anything…
There are steps afoot to change this a little by the end of March. By feck, so dam grown up of me, in the past the toys would be out of the pram and change would be well under way already.
It has felt like the country has been shut down for the last week or even more. We had, in Dublin, a few cm of snow – though it did get fairly cold – freezing in fact, so cold that my washing machine stopped and we ended up spending most our Saturday at a laundrette – took me back to living in bedsit land – Rathmines.
Anyway all is back and running again. I took the last four days off work – best thing I have done for some time. I had decided to run a training course at the start of January and I had under estimated how much time it would take for me to prepare everything for it.
That happened last week, though it feels like it was longer ago. The course went well on the day and since then I have been getting some feedback by way of emails and now by way of Survey Monkey – a great little program for surveys as the name indicates.
Almost all of the feedback was at the highest level for all the question I asked, however there was one area where it was middling to low and that was on the venue – this I though might be a problem and I have already been looking at other options – Bewleys for instance have a great offer in Ballsbridge – that might be the way forward if they will include parking for everyone in the price.
Anyway this was just a short rest getting my head away from work for 30 minutes – yes I type kinda slow – currently working on PJ Boner an Instrumentation company in Dublin – the things that I get to earn about.
I hope the snow stays away – we have a life to get on with and being snowed inhere is not so great – I would rather it happened while in Prague on holiday…
I like the idea of putting down on paper what I want for the year ahead. I usually do this in my journal, yes I even have some stuff that I don’t write about online.
I think it is a good idea to have a plan for the year ahead and for it to be written. I know that life happens and the plan goes way off the rails, but hell it is good to refer back to and see what happened in comparison.
As always I would like to be happier and for my work to continue, I am fortunate in that I like most of what I do, I would do some of it even if I wasn’t getting paid. For my self only that is about it. Is that a lack of wanting or imagination?
My main relationship is good and gets better every year, may that continue forever. I want my family to be well, I wish them all the best especially those I have not seen for some time – may life be good to you. I want my friends to be successful and enjoy their life, and of course have what they want along with bundles of happiness.
My concentration on work is becoming narrower, till now I have been building a large network of websites – I have something in the region of 100 domain names, with about 50 of those with the beginnings of sites and about 10 fully formed sites. This has been changing during the last year due to the pressure of my main work and it will deliberately change during the next year with my focus now being restricted to four websites, of course I will continue to blog here from time to time.
Of the four Cube is the main one, business has been tough and busy during the last year. Considering the company was formed just as we were heading into this financial meltdown, I am happy to have made it through the last year and continued to grow. I will continue to market the company and grow during 2010. I have learned a lot about business and myself in this area. It has been interesting to see how naive I was at the start, how much harder I have become with clients that don’t pay on time, (really I don’t want to be a credit controller). The not paying on time, or anywhere near on time, has been a major bug for me. The way that I work on the web means that I pay for services as I consume them, this works well for me and for the people that supply me. Whereas I send out invoices to some clients and they think it can be left for three months before paying me – really? And this is really only a bug, if I have a bug in a web site it has to be sorted in order for it to run properly, this is the same.
In order of importance and time allocation my new site in the UK, only bones just now, will be the next largest project for 2010. This will be a long term service company and I hold out very high hopes for it. It is strange to see me dipping my toes back into the financial world – I thought I had left it behind back in 2002, but hell it is an area that I a quite familiar with and I already went there with another UK business site.
Third on the list is my new directory web site. It just needs a regular amount of blog posting every week and lots of links. It has a particular value apart from the purely money aspect, but more of that on my SEO blog.
And last in time value is my Camino site which continues to thrive. This was my first web site back at the start of 2006. If it had not been as successful as it is I might not being working in this field still, but I was lucky on the web right off the bat. This year I expect somewhere between 500k and 700k visitors to the site, not too bad for a site that was started as I was bored and recovering from an operation and could not get out too much, (I have recovered completely, thanks).
So what about holidays? The whole of August has been put aside already, and hopefully I will get another week in Feb or Mar.
I love the fact that I am busy. I remember being unemployed for a fairly long time in the 80’s – the boredom was a killer, never mind the money and self esteem issues. I hate the fact that the Irish Government, like most governments, are quite willing to have the unemployed pay the price for their mismanagement, however I rant about them and their theft elsewhere so I will leave it off here for a while.
I will be moving in the next month or so and my address will no longer be publicly available on the internet, the decision of my other half. I am looking forward to the move and having a bit more space.
Whoever you are, from wherever you are reading this I hope life throws good things at you and you are good at catching. Have a great 2010.
This essay will deal with the problems and prospects for Utilitarianism, outlining the basic tenants of its philosophy and the problems that can occur while using it as a basis for moral living. It will outline, evaluate, and dismiss three different strands; act utilitarianism, rule utilitarianism and the last which is a combination of both. The history should be illustrated putting into context why utilitarianism was initially attractive; this will also demonstrate where the modern thought originated. This essay will prove that as a basis for moral living, utilitarianism is not a viable option as it currently stands. It is also advocated that one of the greatest thinker and writers of this movement, JS Mill, was not even utilitarian, despite his assertions to the contrary.
Jeremy Bentham was the modern father of utilitarianism, but he has his antecedents in the Epicureans, and influence from the writings John Hume, as well as his contemporary, William Paley. Paley advocated a type of Utilitarianism that was influenced by Christian theology. However Bentham was the first to bring all the theory together as a cohesive whole under the heading of act utilitarianism. “[the utilitarian movement was] essentially practical in outlook, orientated towards legal, penal, and political reform.”[1] Bentham started his career following his father at the Bar. It is noted by Coplestone that this was not the career he desired and what he preferred was “the life of reflection to that of a practicing lawyer.”[2] His interest was directed towards reform of the law with regard to the utility of the law in dealing with offenders; his reflection was directed towards the most desirable consequences in the penal system. Due to the opposition and rejection of his ideas he became convinced that the whole system needed a radical overhaul; therefore political reform was required.[3] As a result of opposition to his ideas act utilitarianism was codified. This led to a calculus moral system written by Bentham based on utility. [click to continue…]
I sometime wonder if I should be let out alone with my bank cards or even cash, but anyway today was a spending day. I have been going on for a while about buying a new netbook, something small and light to carry around with me.
My current lap top is heavier than most desktops with a big screen – I was having some problems with my eyes at the time and thought this would be a good idea. One operation later and the eyes are fine, mostly.
So today I went out to by a netbook and found out that I was going to have problems with the atom processor running the programs I wanted.
So I ended up buying a mini lat top with window 7. Now I have only been using it for a few hour and I can only see one thing that might cause issue going forward. When I move the lap top to fast it locks the hard drive, so either I will be driven a little crazy, get used to it, or end up breaking the disk – glad I backup often if the last comes to pass.
I am writing this post in window 7 live writer – I love this. I can write and add phtos all on my computer and not have to log into my blogs to post. I can see so many uses for having this running in the back ground all day for different sites, since I use WordPress for most of my sites now.
The photo is from a visit to caves just outside Brno in the Czech Republic a few years ago.
The busier life is the less I write here and since coming back from holiday it feels like work has been nonstop, so I thought I would try and write a round up every week, we’ll see..
This last weekend however I started to look at cars. I hate buying a car, until I get one I think it is going to be impossible to find something I like that will be reliable and all at a reasonable price. I had already got one type of car in my mind, when yesterday at lunch someone told me that it has a terrible record for breaking down – so off I went to start checking breakdown stats on Honest John – what a great site.
So it looks like I will be trying to find myself a Ford Focus sometime in the next few months – I am hoping it will be after Christmas – could do without car shopping before Christmas
My current car which has served me great for the last 3 plus years is going to be heading to car heaven. It will be 14 years old in Feb – which in car years must be well over 100… Anyway there has been too many things going wrong with it this year and it broke down on Saturday – not great, a dead battery. So to make sure the battery would still be working the next day I decided to unhook it on Saturday night when we got home – not a great idea in the dark – I ended up shorting the battery and it blew the top off it with car battery acid going everywhere – I was lucky to be okay – the bang a battery make when it explodes is quite something. Anna came running out of the house to see if I was still alive. Ah, cars…
Meanwhile I am now back at working promoting a few different websites this week as part of my search engine optimisation work. eSpatial are a web GIS company – and now I have learned a lot more about GIS, not hard as I knew nothing about it previously. PJ Boner are an instrumentation company, once again the same thing with the exception that I did know something about their products before. Macs a walking holiday company in the UK are doing well, but still waiting on Google update after a site rebuild and redirection, fun. Another that is doing really well is an astro turf company here in Ireland, the most I know about this is it can hurt much more than grass – but it is less muddy. And lastly for this week will be Inspiration a web development company here in Dublin.
While writing this post I have my ears on listening to music and Born Slippy by Underworld came on – just to have a bit more fun I turned it up full blast and kept typing, mistakes, mistakes, mistakes. I can type away with quiet music going on, not this – so I thought I would add it for you.
I came across these videos on Youtube due to mail from DECB LINK. They are a great inturuption a to over worked Tuesday afternoon. The first video has had more than four million views on Youtube so far so it really does make Sophie Merry an Irish Youtube phenomenon.
Enjoy
Though I think this one is much better, it has fewer views. [click to continue…]
There are steps afoot to change this a little by the end of March. By feck, so dam grown up of me, in the past the toys would be out of the pram and change would be well under way already.