Today has been one of those days. I woke at 12.45am with this amazingly loud ringing in my left ear, as if a tuning fork had suddenly materialised in my Eustachian tube. Two hours of laying there trying to back to sleep later and I figured out that I may as well get up and do something useful. So I spent a happy hour or so typesetting until my eyelids were resting on the keyboard. I got back to bed about 3.45am ish.
Hence today has been a vacant day. Mondays are bad at the best of times, just because of the way my week works. Mondays I write the Welsh language worksheet that’s to go out the following week to Get Fluent! subscribers. Sometimes they come out easily, sometimes I find that I would rather be retching my guts up into toilet bowl than be sat in front of this computer writing grammar exercises and reading comprehensions.
Today, I would rather have gnawed my own leg off than try to tackle writing a worksheet. I think I actually spent more time reading Neil Gaiman’s blog and playing on Sweet Addy than I did doing any actual work. I think I got maybe a third of the worksheet done, which pisses me off mightily, because I spent a considerable amount of time yesterday working in order that today I might gain some ground and therefore be able to take tomorrow off. Well, I shouldn’t have bothered because any time I made up yesterday I lost today.
Which means tomorrow morning, the first thing I have to do, after I’ve opened the alluringly mysterious CD-sized packages that have lit upon my doormat over the last few days, is finish that damn worksheet.
Arse.
/rant
Paul Carr on the demise of Salon.com, from The Guardian Online:
“I feel really sorry for anyone trying to raise funds to launch a subscription-based website in the current climate – it would be easier to get funding for a new pan-European fashion retail brand led by two Swedish ex-models.”
Hah. Don't I know it. I'm small (make that 'microscopic') fry compared to Salon, but what I could do with a tiny, weeny fraction of the 50 million quid they've pissed up the wall… it makes me spit feathers. Trying to raise money for an internet business, even with a proven business model and a solid business plan, in the current climate is like trying to teach Bush Jr to read – a slow painful process with no guarantee of success no matter how much hard work you put in. The words 'Internet' and 'start-up' are dirty, dirty words still, and bank managers everywhere hide under their desks in terror the minute they hear them.
Thing is, not every internet-based business haemorrhages money out of every orifice. Some of us manage to keep our costs down by working our arses off every hour of the day, and (as was the case at 3am this morning) several hours of the night too. We don't have big offices, lots of staff and long lunches. In fact, we're lucky if we get lunch at all. Any business that involves the web gets tarred with the Boo brush, and I fear it's gonna be a long time before that changes, but I do take heart from the likes of Pyra, whose long term hard work seems to be finally paying dividends.
Meantime, I'll soon either be another internet bankrupt, or (and this is my preferred route) I'll find someone somewhere who's interested in stumping up a measley £10k to allow me to expand my business. Either way, I don't anticipate an easy ride.
