life

UPDATE 5 DEC 11: Having been rather robust with my criticism it’s only fair now to be as forthright about the follow up from O2.

The web team at O2 got in touch after my rather angry rant last Wednesday and asked me to email them with details, which I did on Thursday. I was pretty clear in my post about what had happened, why I was so angry, and what I wanted them to do for me, ie give me an upgrade now.

I got a call on Friday from Alistair at O2 and I have to say, the experience was night and day. Alistair was lovely – he listened to me without giving me the silent treatment, he said he understood why I was cross and agreed that I should have been given the upgrade that I was promised. We ended up talking for about 45 minutes as I explained in detail why the three people I spoke to last week simple made me more angry the more we spoke, not less. Alistair agreed that my experience of O2 customer service had not been constructive.

The end result was that they offered me an upgrade to the iPhone 4S and a choice of tariff. I chose the 12 month tariff with the slightly more expensive handset fee as, when I did the maths it was actually cheaper that way. I can, apparently, reduce the tariff after six months if it’s too much, which I may look into. Although to be honest, what I get on this tariff is more, by far, than I got on the £46 tariff I was on before August last year, so I frankly feel like it’s a decent deal.

Alistair phoned me this afternoon to finalise the deal, after I said I wanted the weekend to think about it, and I should get my new phone within the next week or two.

I think there are a few lessons here for O2:

1. Don’t break promises made during the sales process. Ever.
2. If you have to change the rules, do it for all contract renewals and sales going forward, don’t apply changes retrospectively.
3. “Listening” to the customer on a support call does not mean “falling silent whilst the customer slowly works up a rage because they feel they are being ignored.”
4. Small olive branches work wonders. If the original customer service person had said, “Oh, gosh, terribly sorry. We should honour our promises, let me go and talk to my supervisor and get back to you,” and then got back to me with some sort of compromise offer, none of this would have happened. But not one of the three people I originally spoke to gave me any hint of compromise.
5. Never, ever put the phone down on a customer, and never shout at them. If you do shout at them, expect them to shout back.

As Alistair proved, it’s not difficult to be nice, to apologise, and to find an acceptable compromise.

One last thing, though, O2: Please stop phoning people up and then asking them to prove who they are. It’s a terrible security antipattern. Alistair and I had a chat about it, and I asked him to escalate my point up the chain of command, but really, if you want me to prove who I am who I say I am to you when you call me, then you have to first prove that you are who you say you are.

So, all’s well that ends well, although it’s a shame that I had to throw a strop in order to get what I was promised. I can only suggest that, if you’ve found yourself in a similar position, that you too throw a strop and see if that works for you as well.

ORIGINAL 30 Nov POST BEGINS:

Back in August, O2 rang me up to see if I wanted to change tariff on my phone as I was paying for more minutes and texts than I was using. I expressly asked if this would damage my options for an upgrade when the iPhone 4S came out and was told that no, that wouldn’t be affected as I could just phone up at any time and upgrade. So I accepted a new contract for twelve months.

Today, when I phoned up to upgrade I was told that my upgrade had been an “offer” which had now “expired”. Well, I wasn’t very happy to put it mildly. I would not have entered into a new contract if I had realised it was going to remove the option of an upgrade, particularly as I’m on an old 3G which is so sluggish it’s almost producing its own slime.

I asked why I wasn’t told in August that the upgrade was an “offer” which would expire. Apparently, I wasn’t told because they didn’t know back then that they were going to limit their upgrade program. They clearly didn’t feel the need to tell anyone that upgrades were going to be stopped, because no one bothered to tell me.

I feel I have been lied to, deceived by O2. They promised me a free upgrade and my agreeing to the new contract was contingent on that upgrade. Then they just retroactively annulled that agreement, forcing me to wait until May for any sort of new phone. That’s unethical, not to mention terrible customer service.

I just spent 45 minutes on the phone with O2, getting increasingly angry as their customer service people failed to say anything other than, effectively, that I should simply suck it up because they have a clause in the contract that allows them to do whatever the hell they like. By the time that I got to the final person, in their disconnection department, I was livid, a mood that was not helped by being shouted at and having the phone put down on me. Wow that’s a great way to sooth ruffled feathers, O2. Well done.

O2 want to charge me £139 fee to cancel, but I’m going to look into the law on distance selling, because it seems to me that any promises made during the selling process should be binding. Companies should not be allowed to promise you something, no strings attached, and then simply change their mind. If you have any tips on how to progress with that, do let me know in the comments.

Regardless of what happens on that front, though, I will be leaving O2 at some point soon. It makes no sense for me to take on the 24 month contract at a higher monthly rate with an upfront fee of £99 that is their so-called “Fair Deal” upgrade to an iPhone 4S. Fair deal my arse. I’d rather swallow the disconnection penalty if that’s what I have to do than than stay with O2 one second longer than I have to. I will not reward unethical behaviour by any company.

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Hello, all the new people who’ve come here from BoingBoing or Kickstarter or Twitter. It’s nice to see you! You’ll have to excuse me for a moment, though, because this blog post contains 100% unadulterated and somewhat self-pitying me, and not much about Argleton (though I have plans… I do have plans.)

I’m writing this partly because it’s 22:33pm and although I really want to go to sleep I feel a bit bad retiring until Kevin is at least getting ready for bed, because he’s an hour ahead of me in Sarajevo and working like a slave. I’m also writing it to get back to my blogging roots, ie I want to have a good old whine.

Just before Argleton was released, I started a new gig writing for the Indian news website, FirstPost, that Kev and I helped plan and launch earlier in the year. It was a bit hard starting a new gig whilst getting Argleton out the door, but I was looking forward to a life of writing about tech in the mornings and then doing creative things in the afternoons whilst gently ambling towards Ada Lovelace Day on 7 October.

Life, of course, had other plans. Our landlord decided to bump our rent up by 11%, i.e. about £200 pcm. We tried to negotiate, having been good tenants who have looked after the place we thought he might be amenable to, say, an 8% rise, which was still a lot and way over inflation, but kinda within what we felt was reasonable. To cut a long story short, he has basically chucked us out on our ear, giving us a month’s notice to find a new place to live.

Kev, unfortunately, had only a few days left in London before a lot of travel, so we frantically ran around north London and Woking trying to find somewhere new to live. We thought we had a lovely little maisonette, but that fell through. We’re still waiting for confirmation on a two-storey duplex near Woking town centre which we applied for last week. The company doing the references, though, seems to be mostly incompetent and incapable of understanding what a ‘family business’ is or how it is that the people who run a family business do tend to be related to one another.

Ada Lovelace Day is also creeping up on me with alarming alacrity. Having had to put it off to try and ensure we had enough time to sort out the website, sorting out the website has taken more time than I had hoped, just because websites do. I’ve been so stressed first with Argleton, then the new gig, and then this housing stupidity that it’s only recently I’ve been able to give it the love that it requires. I’ve rearranged my expectations that 7 Oct really marks a new beginning for Ada Lovelace Day, but not sure anyone else has. I’m in it for the long run and I have plans, but somehow the fact of there being A Big Day feels a bit like a millstone around my neck. The damn thing can’t just evolve quietly at its own pace, it’s rushed and hurried every year by a single significant date, but I feel sort of stuck with it now.

The earliest we’re going to sign a contract on the new place is next Tuesday because the estate agent is on holiday. And then I need to go all-out on doing all the bill switching and sorting and forwarding and arranging that needs to be done when moving house. Thank fuck I’m hiring people to pack the place and move me, frankly, because if I had to do that as well I’d just lose all will to live. And guess when I have to be out of this place? Yup: 6 October. Perfect timing! Kev’s home for one night on 8th October, then away again for a week, arriving home whilst I’m in Dorset at a bash my mum’s organising. Thankfully, he’s then home for more than 12 hours.

Which is all to say that my plans for the latter half of this year have all been well and truly screwed. So much for working on Argleton promo and the geogame (so nearly finished!). So much for working on The Books of Hay. So much for spending some time binding books. I made a beautiful leather-bound journal at a Falkiners’ course in August, and haven’t even had a chance to take decent photos of it yet.

That said, it looks like I am on course to finish that bloody round tablecloth I’m crocheting. Should be done about a day or two before I move out, leaving the table it was made to fit behind.

Still, it could be worse. I’ve had a good whine now, and I feel a bit better, though I’ll feel a lot better which this whole hideous mess is behind me. I have moments where I feel like I’m only clinging on by my fingernails. I nearly lost it on the phone to the reference agency this afternoon, and the poor chap from the movers could easily tell how stressed and frustrated I was. If you do have interactions with me over the next few weeks, do bear all this in mind and give me a big hug. I could do with one.

I know that I’m not alone – quite a few of my friends are going through similarly difficult times at the moment, especially when it comes to rent increases and house moving. The market is insane, with properties being snapped up the day they are put on the agency’s books. Rents are through the roof and it’s increasingly difficult to justify spending so much money to line someone else’s big greedy pockets.

Anyway, yes, sorry. Bear with me. Normal service will be resumed around mid-October. Aaah, only a month to go of hellaciousness. Only a month to go.

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I’m almost too tired to write this, in fact, I am too tired to write this, but I’m going to write it anyway, even if I don’t quite know where it’s going.

The last couple of months have been particularly intense and I feel like I am very much out of brain. Firstly, I finally finished the physical part of Argleton. I got all the book bound, wrapped, packaged and sent out. Phew! (And then some). I still have stuff to do for Argleton. There’s a geogame, the publicly available Creative Commons’d version, blog posts with photos, and other stuff still do to. But everyone who pledged their support now has their book and their PDF. Thank you all – without you, Argleton wouldn’t have happened in quite the same way.

I’ve also taken on a commitment to write for FirstPost.com, the Indian news site that Kevin and I helped launch earlier in the year. My title is Consulting Editor, Tech, and I’m writing daily. I will confess that it’s hard work. Unlike Kevin, who’s their Writer At Large, I’ve normally written features and taken my time in doing so. Writing substantive pieces daily is really melting my brain, but it’s good discipline and it will, in due course, fund my writing.

However, before I reach the utopia of writing tech pieces in the morning and features in the afternoon, I need to whip Ada Lovelace Day into shape. We’re working with Evectors and their Pages platform to create a new directory of women in tech, based on the women who have written for ALD or have been written about. We’re also putting together an event. More on that later, but because I’ve had my head in Argleton and then First Post for the last couple of months, I feel very much behind on ALD and have a lot of catching up to do.

I’m also doing some bookbinding courses. Did a great beginners course with Falkiners, and am doing a leather binding course on Monday/Tuesday next week. I’ve discovered that I love making books almost more than I love writing and reading them. I’m looking forward to becoming just a bit more knowledgable about bookbinding.

Add to that a few other things that are bubbling along here, and I pretty much feel like my brain has gone on vacation without me. I’m sill there though. And still hoping things ease up soon.

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My friend Terence Eden wrote a blog post at the end of November about his goals for 2011. I’ve never really been one for resolutions, knowing how easy they are to break, but goals I can get behind. My goal for 2011 is really very simple:

Finish your open projects before you start any new ones.

I’m a terror for starting things and then never quite finishing them, but where this year was a year for some pretty significant beginnings, next year will include at least one pretty significant ending, and some smaller but equally satisfying ones.

And just to keep me honest, I’m going to list my currently open projects (not including work), and then I’ll tick them off here as I complete them.

Writing

• Argleton – Obviously! Eta is hopefully January.
• The Prequel to the Books of Hay – I’ve been thinking a lot about this whilst I’ve been doing the more mechanical aspects of Argleton, and it’s going to be the first writing project I take on when Argleton is done. Really do need a snappier name for it though.
• The Books of Hay – I was some 30,000 words into this when  Argleton struck, so once the prequel’s done and dusted, this will be next.

Crafting

• Black crocheted cardigan – black yarn is a bit of a bugger to work with during the dark winter months, so this will probably be brought out again in spring
• Crocheted tablecloth – bit of a wonky experimental thing this, but it’s nearly done.
• Nuptial cushions – there was quite a bit of ivory dupion and red satin and velvet left over from my wedding dress, so I decided to make some cushions out of them! They are almost done – I just need to finish sewing them together, put in the zips and then buy some cushion fillers.
• Jewellery – now i’m not actively making jewellery anymore, I really need to decide what to do with the stuff I have kicking about, and all the findings and beads that I’m not using. Will have to think about that.
• Mend throw – I have a glorious chenille throw that was a wedding present. Sadly, it was very poorly hemmed when it was made, and now it needs fixing.
• Hatboxes – I couldn’t add this to the list when I was writing it, as it would have given away what Kevin’s Christmas present was! I made him a hatbox for his topper, and bought enough materials to do at least one more for his porkpie, and possible enough for one for my bowler.

Misc

• Clear out boxes – Kev and I moved 18 months ago, and still have lots of boxes that remain packed. Some of them merely have a thin layer of crud in the bottom that just needs sorting and throwing out, so it shouldn’t take long to do. Just a matter of actually doing it.
• Recycle clothes – Some are clean and ready for the charity shop, some are too worn out to reuse and need to be recycled.
• Find home for unwanted computer – says it all really. It just need preparing for its new owner.

Some of these have been going on for a while, and it’s about time they were wrapped up! I promise I will report back as I finish each one off.

UPDATE 2/1/11: Added a few more things that I just remembered, or couldn’t put on before Christmas.

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I’ve just joined Graze, a service that mails you a box of fruit, nuts and other goodies for the princely sum of £2.99 per box (P&P included). A friend of mine suggested it the other day and I was so curious I signed up there and then. My first box came yesterday, and this is my unboxing video (I fuzzed out a few bits because I forgot to hide my address. Duh!):

If you would like to try Graze, you can get your first box free and the second half price if you sign up with this code: CVDK8FP. There’s no limit to how often that code can be used, so knock yourselves out.

Overall, I was delighted with my Graze box. The fruit and nuts were very fresh and very high quality. More than once I’ve bought nuts from supermarkets only to find that they have already gone rancid and bitter, and it’s always a disappointment. My Graze box was so yummy that I forgot it was called “graze” and not, say, “hoover” or “bolt”. Ahem.

From a value point of view, yes, I probably could buy all the constituent bits cheaper, but the point is that I don’t. And if I do, I forget to eat them. Nothing like that’s going to happen with Graze because it’s just so easy: It totally ticks the ‘lazy’ box!

I’m also relying on it to replace my mid-afternoon trip to the corner shop to buy Coke and a Wispa. Whilst I’m still spending money on Graze, I am not going to spend money on empty calories that taste nice but don’t do me any good at all. As that’s a decision based on economy, health and want, I’m hoping I’ll stick to it this time.

My next box comes tomorrow. I can’t wait.

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I have been on a lengthy crusade against the evil that is sugar, but must confess to mainly being on the losing side. The summer has been quite stressful and where once I lost my appetite when stressed now I seem to feel constant hunger. Part of that hunger is down to the amount of sugary food that I was eating – for some reason sugar makes me feel hungrier, not less hungry.

Anyway, various schemes to cut down on the number of times I was popping to the corner shop for a Coke and Wispa have failed. I’m not great at willpower and have even less of the stuff when stressed (although that’s because, as I’m sure I’ve said before, you only have a limited amount of willpower, although you can increase it with practice). Going cold turkey failed. Simply trying to cut down has failed. So time for some creative thinking.

Kev and I have joined a new gym which is larger and closer to our new flat than the old one was. It’s a 10 min walk through the park each morning, which is a most pleasant way to bookend one’s work-out. This new gym has machines that weren’t available to us in the old gym, including a crunchie machine (for your abdominals) and a lower back resistance machine.

My new scheme combines and reinforces gym and a reduction in sugar intake and it’s really very simple.

I can only buy treats at the shop when I have burnt off their calorific equivalent at the gym.

It’s very simple and so far it seems to be working. It encourages me to work harder at the gym and gives me some idea of how many calories you actually work off. It turns out that I have been burning relatively few calories at the gym, which would explain why I’m fitter but still getting fatter. In our morning workouts, which are only half an hour long, I spend half my time doing resistance work and the rest on the recumbent bike, treadmill or cross-trainer. In that latter 15 mins, I tend to burn only about 75 kcal.

If you’ve ever tried to find a sugary treat that comes in at under 75 calories you’ll know that it’s basically impossible. A can of Coke is 139 kcal and a Wispa is 210 kcal. People have advised me to go for dark chocolate because it’s less sugary. That might be so, but a large bar of Green & Black’s 70% Cocoa is over 500 kcal.

This means that it takes me two workouts during the week to earn enough kcal to have a Coke, and three to earn a Wispa. Erk! I don’t think I’d ever really realised how much effort I need to expend in order to work off one of my favourite treats but now I know it really has changed the way that I think about them. I always knew that these were empty calories – there’s no nutritional value in them at all. They’re stupid calories. But, well, a kcal is bigger than I thought it was!

The nice thing about this is that I can still have my treats, but only when I’ve earnt them. So I don’t need to go cold turkey and I don’t really need willpower. I just need to make sure that I get up early enough to go to the gym and that I work hard whilst I’m there.

I really do hope that this will result in the loss of a few *cough* pounds because I’m heavier now than I’ve ever been. Trousers that were really loose on me once now fit snugly. I really can’t let that go on otherwise I’ll be a blimp before you know it.

So wish me luck and here’s hoping this tactic really does work.

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I’ve been meaning to write this blog post for a while, but I’ve been a bit busy lately and have barely had time to pause for breath.

Several months ago I started working on strengthening my shoulders at the gym – lots of machine work to try and improve the strength of my whole upper back. I’d noticed that some nights, I’d wake up with pins and needles in my hand and find my shoulders had sorts of ‘collapsed’ in on themselves, and I suspected that maybe that wasn’t helping things. I’ve always had weak shoulders, so figured it couldn’t hurt to do some work on them.

When we moved into our new flat I finally had space to set up a proper office, so I now have my old desk and chair, brought up from Dorset and no longer have to work from the sofa. That, in itself, is a joy. It’s so good to have a door to close at the end of the evening! I’m again pretty sure that my lack of a proper desk and chair have contributed significantly to my RSI. Sitting on the sofa didn’t so much encourage bad posture as force it upon me.

On the advice of my friend Sydney, I bought a Wacom Bamboo Fun graphics tablet and pen, which I now use instead of a mouse/trackpad. Although at the lower end of the graphics tablet market (Sydney has the Cintiq, which is gorgeous but way too expensive for me!), it does me very well. It took me a while to get used to using it instead of the trackpad, but now that I am used to it, I’d never go back. It’s much, much easier for editing long documents because you have much better control of the cursor, plus it encourages larger movements than the tiny, fine motor control movements required on a trackpad. It is, in short, fabulous. And sometimes I even use it for drawing!

Kevin bought me a laptop stand, so now I have my office exactly as I want it: Laptop on stand, Wacom tablet to the left (I’m left-handed), and my lovely Apple bluetooth keyboard in front of the laptop. It works incredibly well as a set up and I’d highly recommend anyone who’s working with a laptop as their main machine to experiment with it as a set-up. I also no longer feel the need to get myself a new screen, as having the laptop screen at a decent height also makes it feel somehow like the screen’s not so small! Not quite sure why…

I’ve been following the exercises in Robin McKenzie’s 7 Steps to a Pain-Free Life, which has really helped me to sort out my own back pain – particularly when I put my back out three weeks ago and could barely move. I usually would have gone to a chiro but I rather lost faith in my chiro in London and didn’t feel I had time to find a new one. As it turns out, McKenzie’s exercises are incredibly helpful and have really given my back a new lease of life.

About a month ago, I went to see a consultant physiotherapist at the University College London Hospital. She did a variety of tests – including a nerve induction test which confirmed that I had mild carpal tunnel syndrome. I explained what I’d been doing and she was very pleased with the changes that I’ve made. Indeed, she said that I’ve done pretty much everything she would have advised me to do.

She also told me to expect all my RSI symptoms to vanish within three months. As they had already subsided considerably, I was ready to believe her. In actual fact, I’ve barely had any problems at all over the last month and have trouble the last time remembering when I had a serious attack overnight.

I still have a way to go in terms of improving my shoulder and back strength, and retraining my posture, but I feel pretty confident now that my RSI is under control.

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Dear me, it’s been ages since I last wrote a blog post here. How things have changed since I first started Chocolate and Vodka seven years ago!

Mainly, the problem has been one of time and energy. The last few years seem to have been an almost constant sequence of events and projects that have taken all my attention and left me little time to blog, and even less inclination. I think being on Twitter has rather decreased the desire to write here too – if I have something on my mind I can tell everyone via Twitter and get pretty much instant feedback. In the years BT (Before Twitter), if I got myself some sort of brainworm, it would just wriggle round in my head until I finally found time to get it out into a blog post. Now that happens a lot less often. Mostly, I think to myself “I must blog that some time” and then promptly forget it.

Back then I also had a life that I really wanted to escape from. When I started this blog, I was living on my own in Reading, knew no one there, rarely socialised, and was stressed beyond belief trying to get my business to work. When it failed, I used my blog and my online network of friend to keep me sane. The blog then wasn’t a luxury, it was a necessity. Without it I would have felt intolerably isolated and unhappy.

Then I started consulting, moved to London, started the Open Rights Group, met my husband, got married, moved house twice, and generally got myself so busy that half the time I barely knew which way to turn. My underemployed days were over. And when business wasn’t doing great, I busied myself trying to plump up my client list, and blogging then felt like the ultimate indulgence.

I wonder too if I shouldn’t have kept all my writing here, on Chocolate and Vodka. My other blogs, notably Kits and Mortar, Lost Yod, and Finding Ada could, I suppose, all have lived as categories here, but for some reason that didn’t quite feel right. I wonder if perhaps I shouldn’t amalgamate them, bring them all in under Chocolate and Vodka’s roof and at least then there’d be a bit more blogging going on.

I’m not sure why I create a new site every time I have a new idea. I think part of it is because I worry that those of you who come here to find out about me, or my writing, or whatever it is that draws you here, would be put off by an influx of posts about cats or self-build, or women in tech, or jewellery-making. But even having created, say, Kits and Mortar to be home to my thoughts on moggies and house building, even there I worry that the balance is wrong, and that those who go there for building ideas would be pissed off if I write too much about cats.

To be fair, I did think that Kits and Mortar might become more commercial than it is. Yes, ok, it’s got advertising on it, but I don’t have the time or the wherewithal to really make it work as a pro-blog. I think in the year and a bit it’s been live I’ve earnt probably about 20 quid from the ads, so it’s hardly worth it. And although lots of people told me when I launched it that it was a great niche idea and that I could make a killing, the only thing it killed was time.

Part of the fear of being as much of an intellectual magpie – ooh! shiny! – as I am is that people will view me as a generalist and will think less of me because of it. This is a theme that both Stephanie Troeth and Stephanie Booth have discussed in recent days, and I feel that both of them have hit the nail on the head.

But the truth is that I have always had what might these days be diagnosed as ADD. I don’t think that it’s a disorder – I think it’s just curiosity. I am curious about everything, from what makes cats tick to how to have large windows without wasting huge amounts of energy through them to the jewellery styles favoured by the Elizabethans.

So I find myself seriously considering migrating all the content from all my other blogs to here, and shutting them down. I’m paying quite a bit, yearly, on hosting fees that perhaps I don’t need to. Certainly I’ve given up on the idea that I’m ever going to have time to focus fully on Kits and Mortar or Lost Yod, or even the ill-fated Fruitful Seminars. Finding Ada I’ll probably keep as a separate entity as it may one day grow up to be a bigger organisation than it currently is, but the rest of it really is just me exploring whatever takes my fancy. And what is Chocolate and Vodka for if not for me to take my fancy wherever it wants to go?

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I’ve just 40 minutes of battery life left on my MacBook, and nowhere to plug it in. I might well be sitting in United’s “Economy Plus”, but they haven’t seen fit to install plugs for anyone wanting to, y’know, do work on an 11 hour flight.

Things have been utterly insane of late. It’s hard to know where to begin. Ada Lovelace Day was a smash hit, but I’ve barely had time to even think about how amazing it was, because Kevin and I have been house hunting. Kev took two weeks off work to find us somewhere new to live, and he did a damn fine job. We now have a spare room, more space and more of a sense that we’re going to enjoy the flat, rather than feel like we’re invading our landlady’s personal space. We boxed everything up, with much needed help from friends, and moved over the Easter weekend. We haven’t gone far, just to the Arsenal side of the train tracks, but our new neighbourhood is much nicer. We might be further away from the supermarkets and the gym, which is a bit of a pain, but we’re near two parks and there are a lot more nice restaurants and pubs nearby.

The move has also taken us away from the scene of Ahmet Paytak’s murder. He worked at our corner shop, and I must have seen him nearly every day for the few months that he’d been working there. Then one night, as he and his son were closing up, a couple of chaps on a motorbike decided to shoot him and his son, for reasons that remain unclear. Ahmet died, his son Husseyin was shot in the thigh. I felt such sadness for Ahmet’s family. He was a lovely chap, quite quiet and shy but always friendly. Then one day he went to work and never came home.

More positively, I have been insanely busy with work. Last year was an almost total wash-out where work was concerned. I was busy up until the wedding, but summer and autumn were dreadful. Partly it was because I tried to expand my business, instead of focusing down on what I’m good at; partly because I was utterly rubbish at marketing myself (I’m not a natural when it comes to sales and marketing); and partly because I think businesses were waiting for the economic shoe to drop. Now everyone knows how bad the situation is and the truth is that you can’t just put business off forever. Some stuff just has to be done, and thankfully that includes the sort of stuff I do.

This year is shaping up to be much better. Not only am I having a whale of a time with Book Oven, who have to get the award for Most Fun I’ve Ever Had With A Client, but I’m now working on a research project for Carnegie UK Trust on the role of social (and ‘new’) media in civil society. I’m going to be blogging more about that on Strange Attractor. That sees me busy through til mid-July, then off to Prague before collapsing in a heap.

I’ve been writing a lot more. Not the fiction recently, but over the last few months I’ve done long piece for .Net magazine, and more for The Guardian’s tech section. I’m doing better at researching and writing quickly: it’s taking about 2 days for me to research and write 800 words now, and I’m learning not to over-report which helps a lot. But I want to get much, much better at writing effectively this year, so expect more from me.

Now I’m on a plane to San Francisco, primarily to attend O’Reilly’s Social Web Foo Camp, but also to do a bit of research for the Carnegie project. When I get back, I’m looking forward to focusing on my main two projects and to spending more time relaxing with my husband. We’ve barely had a chance to catch our breath the last few months, but hopefully, now the move is over, we can chill out a little. Hopefully!!

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