Rob Bell's Notes from a Yorkshire Internet Megalomaniac

Another day of snow in Blighty – I woke up (hideously early at 8am!) to go to my first course today – and it was snowing away merrily outside the windows. Shivering, and seriously tempted to get back under the nice warm duvet, I forced myself to adapt to this time I’ve normally seen when going to bed lately, rather than getting up, and make my way into a rather chilly kitchen to put the kettle on.

20 minutes later I’m braving the snow covered roads to travel the couple of miles to the location of my first course today – Book Keeping and Accounts – a Business Link course I’m taking because I haven’t really used the accountancy skills I learned at university since university! I had an awful feeling that the course would either have been cancelled or no one had turned up due to the weather – but to my surprise there were 10 of us there, and the course ran as normal. I wasn’t that big a fan of accountancy in my younger days – at 16 I spent a summer on work experience in a friend of the family’s accountancy firm. This was where I discovered that, although I find working with numbers relatively straightforward, I don’t have any desire to fill my days with number-related work. After 6 weeks I knew I would never be an Accountant!

19 years later, I find myself needing to be more involved in numbers – fortunately technology has come on a long way in 20 years, and I can run all my accounting functions through some nifty software – currently I’m using Freshbooks and TAS, but I’m looking towards some accounting software that integrates more thoroughly with Freshbooks because I am quite literally in love with Freshbooks as my invoicing, time tracking, estimating and customer support tool! Unfortunately, most of the stuff I’ve come across so far is set up for US tax, and I need a UK version!

After the course I made my way over to Hospital for an appointment with my specialist, who has very nicely put me on a course of different painkillers as my current ones weren’t being as effective as they used to… Only time will tell if the new ones are any good – I hope so, I’m sick of cold-weather pain at the moment, and it reduces my ability to get around! I am 37 going on 107 some days!

Then at 6pm I went to my second course of the day – Business Planning. When I’d got home from the hospital I’d got quite comfy so going out again wasn’t the easiest job in the world… However, when you really decide to take control of your life the sofa isn’t the quicksand it once was and escape wasn’t that hard. Now don’t laugh…

I got to the venue and parked up and hobbled up to the door, buzzed and waited for a response. Nothing.
Buzzed again…. and again nothing. So I ambled round the front to the main doors – which had security gates pulled shut and the lights were all off… ‘Strange’ I thought, so I took out my booking form and rang the number. Unfortunately it was after 6 so there was only out of hours cover, but she said someone would call me straight back… 3 hours later I’m still waiting, so I’m glad I decided to drive home rather than wait there for the call!

After making a cuppa, I sat down with my diary and looked at the details again… right time – yes, right place – yes. Hmmmm, so I looked at the booking confirmation email – right time, yes – right places – yes, right month – NOOO!!! Yes, Mr Thicky here turned up a whole 28 days too early for the course, which rather explains the closed building I guess – Oops a daisy Rob! So here I sit feeling somewhat lacking in intelligence for my calendar-ical error. Stupid Stupid Rob! Gotta laugh though, eh?!?!

I’ve been out once this week already with my camera photographing wintry scenes at a Lake nearby, and think I’m going out again tomorrow. After discovering HDR imagery recently, I find myself motivated to go out in the cold to get some rather nice pics, if I do say so myself. Here’s one from Newmillerdam lake, a few miles from here. I’ve applied some HDR effects to create the effect.

Newmillerdam in the Winter

As I was snapping, I was lucky to catch this moment of madness too – I laughed for about 10 mins after it happened, and I’m so chuffed I managed to snap it – do not feed the birds, people! It nearly smacked the guy straight in the face – missed him by millimetres!

Killer Gulls Spotted in Local Beauty Spot!

Rob

Since November last year, my natural sleep pattern – always a source of great annoyance, because I don’t appear to have one – has gone downhill again. The current time zone I’m living in has the following characteristics:

Wake up mid afternoon, and go back to sleep until dark. Wake at 6pm noticed it’s dark and 6 so it must be morning time – too early to get up…. then spot the 24 hour clock and realise you’ve actually slept all the way through daylight, except for that bit you saw streaming through your window just before you went to bed.

Swear lots because that’s another day you’ve missed and most things that involve people have to be done between 9am & 5.30pm – the traditional time for work, yet not the one used by this dojo!

After an evening meal as breakfast, sit at the computer and start the day’s business… continue until 2.30am then contemplate going to bed to start getting bodyclock back to normal times. Then sit back down at PC, end up really getting into something that could wait until morning, and end up staying up until 9-10am (it was 9.23 this morning!) before going to bed and struggling to sleep before mask is applied that keeps light from your eyes. Sleep very heavily, with phone unable to wake me up – doorbell has a better chance, but it’s still not guaranteed!

Wake up at 3, but feel it’s cold so sleep again until 6 – go through exactly the same as yesterday!

That routine is fine when you don’t need to be to do anything, but this week I’m attending 5 lectures and an employment discussion – all starting at 9.30 in the morning – which has been my bedtime for some weeks… It’s really snowy so that could be a great excuse if I miss it, but it’s only 1/2 mile on foot, which may take some time and be a little painful thanks to my cripple’s hip, but at least I’d be there…

If I get off the computer now and go to bed I could get 7 and be up at 8…. although lets face it I have only been up for 5-7 hours today so I’m not exactly tired. Solution – popped a sleeping tablet, and will be sleeping after all!

So I have to attend lots of daytime events this week for which I must become a daywalker once again! This means I won’t be around as late on the US conferences and seminars I tend to follow – most don’t even start until 1 or 2 am here.

Working online can be great fun, but once you adjust to the later nights (due to our being 5 hours ahead of
Easstern Time) it’s hard to get back without pulling at least one all-nighter-and-next-day-too, where you stay up until 10 pm then go catch up on 2 days of sleep. Unfortunately, that night’s sleep oftens lasts 14-16 hours so you lose the next day and are still on nightwalker duty!!!

Last week was increasingly frantic as we finished all the server moves to their new all-singing, all dancing and full-featured new home at RobBellHosting

Just a few problems with transferring the .co.uk domains away fron Lycos and onto 123-reg – Lycos have promised me twice to update the data that’s stopping the transfer, and they STILL haven’t done it having had over a month and 9 letters requesting they get a move on. Lycos have ruined their relationship with me over this – they were always a good company, with an, albeit limited, grip on customer service. Now I won’t use any of their products henceforth – the profitable ones they haven’t closed down, that is.

At least the data’s all moved though – and everyone’s running off the new ips. Yay, glad that’s over – too many all-nighters pulled in 1 week, IMO!

Can’t believe the snow outside – good few inches on the ground everywhere, it looks great – might take my camera out in it if I get the chance tomorrow… between the 2 courses I’m taking. I’ll show you some of the sights in Wintery Wakefield, many of which are truly beautiful – the city always looks lots better with snow covering it!!!

I’ve been using a lot of Traffic Exchanges this week to build subscribers up for my mailing list – go to Rob-Bell.com’s About Rob page to subscribe if you’d like to get my fifty favourite free sites and tools for making money online too. I don’t generally finding TE work to be the most exciting, but it’s fine if there’s something on TV – yes I do both at once! Seen considerable increase to the subscriber numbers – it’s doubled, then that doubled, now we have a nice number!

My first Traffic Exchange recommendations are:
Traffic Splash
Royal Surf
Dragon Surf
I Love Hits
Start XChange and
Advertising KnowHow

I use all these regular and see great results. They’re all free to join, but you can upgrade to increase the rate you generate credits and the number of sites you advertise. I’m going to write more on Traffic Exchanges in the near future, but those 6 are great to get you started. 5 of them offer what is called “SuperSurfing” – if you surf all 5 exchanges at once (using a tabbed internet browser) you get extra credits for each site you view.

I an upgraded member in all of the above exchanges – over a year 1/2 in some of them.

Traffic Exchanges are a very cheap(free) alternative to expensive advertising yet the targeted users on there make them perfect when your product needs the Internet Marketer marketplace. Find out the things they need, and offer them – use sales to pay for exchange monthly upgrades so you get more credits to spend getting your site seen.

Eeek it’s 2.15 am, I haven’t actually had an early night after all – bugger!

To Your Success,

Rob Bell

Tomorrow I’ll be telling you all about the 2 Business Link courses I’m going on – exciting stuff eh?!?!