Busyness 2 Business
Currently listening to the incredibly cheesy and musically laxative-like UK Blogger’s Disco Megamix which I’m now regretting not contributing to. Mike Troubled Diva put it together and I’m hosting part one. If you can help with parts two and three I’m sure he’d be happy to hear from you.
I appear to be really busy, though I can’t quite identify where the busyness is. All I know is my usual distractions and procrastination devices are sitting there all unclicked at the end of the evening. It took me a whole week to watch the last torrented Alias episode and I only managed that in three chunks, which was quite odd as Alias is something you don’t want to be trying to analyse too much, especially as sharks are being jumped left, right and centre this season. Not a problem - Alias is supposed to jump the shark on a regular basis - but you don’t want to be thinking “what are they doing in Budapest?”, “who is he trying to kill?” or just generally “what the hell is going on?” You just need to let the absurdity wash over you. When you start trying to figure it out it all just falls apart, I find.
The busyness seems, I think, to be the start of some kind of web design business, in that I’ve been getting a few emails asking questions about designing websites, some of which are even for cash. A couple of projects look to be really interesting, one being a portal that drags in various blogs, guestbooks and a Flickr account with the other being more a traditional business site with potentially long term development. Around these have been questions about how I did certain things on the site, which are fun to answer but do take up a surprising amount of time and I have to stop myself at a certain point with the line “More than that, I charge”, which is a novelty. Unfortunately my initial explanations seem to be comprehensive enough that I don’t need to charge. Must obfuscate more.
Today held the wonderfully odd experience of doing tech support from work. Step-bro Alastair, whose site I set up and look after (though thanks to the way I set it up I never actually have to look after it), was having problems with email and, since he retains me as his IT department, called me, resulting in 15 minutes standing in the corridor outside the warehouse trying to a) understand what was going on and when it dawned that I wasn’t going to understand what was going on, b) log him into the webmail service, trying to remember passwords I’d set up a year ago and c) generally figure out how Outlook on Windows works, having never really used it. Once we’d concluded I couldn’t really help without a computer in front of me I went back to checking coils for solder errors.
There’s other little things, like the reseller hosting service I seem to have developed for cartoonists, musicians and film makers which doesn’t take up much time at all but it’s a thing, and word seems to be spreading that I can get an absurdly good deal on basic hosting (seasoned web-types will assume correctly I’m using 34sp but you’d be amazed at how many people are amazed at £35 for a domain + hosting. There are some real rip-off merchants out there…). Once I get to twelve domains I get a discount which will net me, um, not much at all as it happens, but it’s good to be able to help folk, and it means I get free comics and the odd meal. And of course the potential that some of them might want to pay me to do their actual site.
The good news is I should soon have time to really address all of this stuff and start to get it sorted into some kind of, well, business I suppose. You can earn a fair chunk of cash delivering 10,000 leaflets to all of Moseley in a week. Fresh air, exercise, many photo opportunities and no need to temp for a little while. My solder checking days will soon be over!
[Report(s) from the Comix Thing are forthcoming, don't fret]
This is the personal blog and main internet hub-thing for Pete Ashton. What you'll find here is a seemingly random collection of stuff I want to talk about and share. 
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