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Day: 13 April 2003

Work: Exchange of Offices

Aerial photograph of the Beaumont Enterprise CentreSince I started my new job on the 15th of January as a search engine optimiser, we had been residing in an office suite around 30 minutes walk away from me and a bit closer to Leicester city centre. However, since it was beginning to get a bit crowded – there’s my boss, MSSC (my sweet shy co-worker), BRCW (bike riding co-worker) and myself in an office around 15ft by 10ft – add into the fact there’s desks, computers and whatnots: then it’s pretty crowded – plus the business centre we had our suite in was, to put it politely, not too well maintained and cleaned.

Anyway, my boss managed to find us this much larger office (around 25minutes walk away from my house – but in the opposite direction) and we booked the move for the 1st of April. It had been nice and sunny the past few days – but, wouldn’t you guess it, on April Fools Day it decided to rain like anybodies business! The move still went ahead (after all, we had a moving van and everything booked), and we managed to be back up and running by 1pm: not too bad (that includes moving all the furniture, reconnecting the computers and getting the internet connection up and running). The new offices are extremely nice, spacious, warm and quiet and I think we all like it there.

Personal: Daring Date Decision

Johnny EnglishOn Thursday, I finally plucked up the courage to ask my sweet shy co-worker (MSSC) out on a sort of date… Yep, it’s been hard for me to pluck up the courage to do so (a couple of months at least!) and then once we had talked for a bit via email (I was actually off Thursday afternoon for a surveyor to come round to my house to tell me it has doubled in value in 2 years), I somehow suggested that we go to the movies together. We managed to work something out and come Friday afternoon, at the end of work – off to the cinema we went.

We did originally think of asking my other co-worker “BRCW” if she wanted to come with us (as we were just going as friends), but she’s busy doing other things. So it was just me and MSSC…

I had purchased the tickets in advance (£5.60 each with a 50p per ticket booking fee!) to save a bit of time, and since the movie we were going to see – Johnny English – wasn’t due to start until 7.15pm, we decided to pop to a pub near the cinema for a quick drink.

Personal: Cute Cuddly Cat

SmokeyYep, that there’s a picture of my new pussy cat Smokey (or Smoky: I dunno what spelling it is). She’s around 3 years old and comes to me care of my parents (they had 4 cats: the grandmother Gizmo, her son Tigger and daughter Smokey and then then little tom cat Damien whose mother had to be put down after breaking her back trying to get through a window).

The reasons why I got Smokey are numerous. She’s been picked on by the other cats a bit recently (especially by her mother – Gizmo), she’s allergic to fleas and, whilst she has been treated for them, as soon as she gets rid of the fleas the other cats give her some more, plus I’ve been a bit lonely and just wanted some company.

She’s downstairs at the moment and I’m hoping she’ll get some sleep. I’ve had her now for around 6 hours (since my parents brought her round in a cat basket that she wasn’t too happy about being put into), but she’s still very nervous and frightened. At one point when I came through the living room door (which I had left purposely open for her to be able to investigate if she wanted), she did a little snarl/hiss at me until she recognised me.

Snippet: Blogging Marathon

*snippet* Just a word of warning: There’s a few things I’ve been meaning to blog about recently and I’ve only just got the time now. Therefore, expect a bit of a blogging marathon from me for the next few hours!

If you are here for just the games or the growing in popularity Guess That Movie competition, well, if you wait a couple of hours you’ll have something to entertain you.

Blog: Advertising Policy

The ITV Digital Advertising MonkeyYes, some of you may have noticed the new “sponsored link” at the top of most of the blog pages. I didn’t really want to have to increase the advertising on the site – but considering only a few people have taken up the sidebar advertising offer (500 impressions for just $1, or a minimum of 20 clicks for $0.25 per click), I’ve had to start running the premium adverts (1000 impressions for $3 or a minimum of 50 clicks at $0.50per click: but adverts are cached for 30minutes per time!).

Why the need for adverts at all? Well, whilst I’ve got plenty of disc space, it’s bandwidth that’s causing a few costs – I’m transferring around 2Gb of data per month and that’s quite a lot for a “personal site”. Combined with the other sites I host, it means that I consume too much bandwidth for most hosts and therefore I’ve got to have a dedicated server for myself and they cost lots of money 🙁

Add that to the fact that I’m having to fork out money for the prizes in the Guess That Movie competitions and I’m not getting a lot of returns via the Amazon links (just 4 purchases so far of Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix [Order from Amazon.co.uk] amazoncom:043935806X and that’s it!), means that the blogs costing me quite a bit of cash at the moment… I don’t mind too much, but I don’t want to constantly support it out of my own pocket (along with my time).

Hopefully, the adverts will be unobtrusive and hopefully bring in a few necessary dollar pounds every month, but comments on the adverts would be appreciated (or just buy some ads yourself: they’re really cheap and you’ll get your ad seen by around 660 daily visitors: plus they has been only two purchases for the premium adverts so far, meaning that there aren’t too many sites in rotation at the moment!)

All adverts are handled by TextAds (who accept payment via PayPal) and are included in the source code of the page (so no Javascript includes are required) – go on: help support the blog by buying an advert or making a donation via Pay Pal.

Of course, if somebody makes a generous donation of around £1,000 (which will cover the web hosting for the blog for a year by my reckoning), the adverts will disappear overnight…