sageworld.co.uk

Today I did the normal work stuff. Then I went home. That’s about it really aside from visiting my ladyfriend who really enjoyed the bean chili I made in my crockpot.

I bought a calculator a while back in a sale. It was OK for basic maths where huge columns of figures weren’t being added. When it came to that, it failed spectacularly. The keys needed to be very firmly thumped in order for them to register while checking the display to see they were registering. While that was fine for small operations, for adding columns of account, it was useless. It went in the bin and I’m now looking for something reliable. In the meantime, I’m considering all options including spreadsheets and old-fashioned pen and paper calculations. Actually, the latter is much more promising!

Meanwhile, sales of my book seem to be progressing well. I’m quite happy about that, particularly because scorn was heaped upon my efforts by various people. It’s no so much that I doubted my abilities after being told a whole load of rubbish about my abilities but that it demonstrably proves what a load of rubbish they were talking. I just hope they’re all jolly well ashamed of themselves now. As my dad says so often: “there’s a book inside everybody”. This was one of mine.

Petrol has just hit another high. $3.45 a gallon. I can see this is going to continue and that people are just getting used to the relentless rise in the price. I remember seeing prices of $1.35 a gallon when I was in the US in 1995. Whe I returned, 7 years ago it was $2.25 and now it has hit $3.45. That’s not too bad actually when you think about it. 10 years between 1995 and 2005 merely added 65% to the price, The past 7 years added 60% to the price. It all seems in line with 6.5% annual inflation.

The rise in the price of petrol has led partly to an increase in sales of electric cars. Personally I feel electric cars are a dead end. Those on the market today have a range of 100 miles and that’s it. How would that work out for me? I drive 12 miles to work and 12 miles back then 15 miles to see my ladyfriend and 15 miles back then I might also do some shopping – add another 3 miles out and back. Then add in something for road closures and detours. Add in also for sitting in traffic jams. I know the motor’s not using power but the lights, heat, air conditioning and electronic systems are. That 100 mile range gets cut quite fast by all that. When the manufacturer says 100 miles, he means 100 miles on absolutely flat terrain with no use of lights, heat, radio, air conditioning or power steering. Bring that lot in and 100 miles rapidly becomes a worry about whether you’ll get home at the end of the day. Much talk is made of charging points conveniently located. I have yet to see a single charging point other than the one I stumbled across in my local Nissan dealership. Electric cars are still in my opinion an impractical flight of fancy limited to a very few very specific applications.

Twitter seems to be working out well so far. I’m not that keen on the idea of paying for somebody to get me more followers as I feel that while it would be a tax deduction, I don’t want to get involved in that kind of thing yet. Whether I will remains to be seen. What I have seen so far has been encouraging. It’s a ton of work but it is encouraging.

On one Twitter account I have 2,200 followers approximately. I started Twitter a few weeks ago but only started automated Tweets on February 1st. 20 Tweets sent per day around every 45 minutes doubled the number of hits on my website. On Feb 17th I put my website and phone number into each tweet. The number of daily hits blossomed. This gave rise to another issue entirely which is that the front page of my site needs work. It has to grab people firmly by the scruff of the neck or they will pass on. I’ll work on that when I have the portraits page sorted out. That shouldn’t be too much longer either. I have even had some ideas for a further page entitled just for fun in which I could put things like rotating images. On the whole I do see an improvement on hits with Twitter. Having said that, they’re coming from all over the world rather than from the local area. Clearly I need more followers. Is it worth paying a service designed to get more followers? Not really. Twitter is somebody else’s service and I don’t really want to get into paying somebody else to get followers on a different somebody else’s service. Seems to me like there are too many links in the chain and a chain is only as good as its weakest link. Twitter could vanish and that’d leave me high and dry. Twitter is only one small part of social media advertising.

By the close of the day, my daily hits had risen to six times background rumble. I am quite well impressed by this. I need to spread my base further than Twitter though as I know Twitter is a scattergun approach where one pellet out of a hundred might get to the right area.

Today I had another spam phonecall from 866 849 0921 about some kind of search engine optimisation. I quite honestly don’t believe any of this SEO crap. To get to the top of the search list, you have to be popular. I’m working on that right now. I also checked up on the phone spammer by typing the number into Google. What a load of negative comments came up. I’m not surprised.

I typed my number in out of curiosity and found – not unsurprisingly – that I was listed with several different “directory services” most of which had me located on the corner of Assembley and Pendleton streets in Columbia SC. I would laugh at that if they weren’t misdirecting my customers. Having said that, it does demonstrate just how crap the non-Yellow Pages directories really are. It’s not even the right town! Another “service” also claimed I have a Greenville number. Not even close!

Today I outdid myself. I made a splendid stew in my crockpot a few days ago. Today I made another – beans, tomatoes and taco sauce. It’s very spicy, very tasty and one bowl is definitely not enough. It is that delicious. I am really enjoying my cooking. It is largely vegan cooking at the moment so the raw materials, pulses, beans etc are very cheap. I use real vegetables with no pre-prepared inclusions. It has to be the cheapest ever food. Having said that, I should hit the farmer’s market and get my veggies at farmer’s prices rather than Walmart prices.

I just ate something I threw together while chatting to my ladyfriend today. All it was is stuff thrown in at random into the crockpot. I tossed in 3 kinds of beans and lentils, a bit of chopped raw ginger, a sprig of broccoli, a sweet potato and some carrots, all chopped up. I tossed in some salt and pepper then let it all stew from about 1pm until about 1am when I returned home. I just had a bowl straight from the crockpot after stirring it around a bit. It’s absolutely gorgeous. Such wonderful flavour.

Hits on my website seem to be increasing and with careful tending, Twitter followers are increasing. The hits are coming from all over the world but the key thing is – they’re coming! When I started Twitter, hits pretty well doubled. When I started the scheduled tweets with contact information in each tweet, hits doubled again. I can see many people are going to the front page and going no further. Clearly I need to add something to the front page to make them want to go further.

It’s so nice to be able to have space to think and to do things. It’s also very nice to have quiet and calm around me. The ticking of my quartz carriage clocks are the loudest noises in my house. I love quiet and calm.

Over the past few months I’ve been taking my antihistamines sporadically. I have tried various antihistamine concoctions but it seems that while they all work, Loratedine seems to work the best. While the others stop be from getting sinus pain, the loratedine stops me from getting migraines too. Good job I found them cheap in Walmart. Yes, folks, I do a lot of my shopping in Walmart. I do shop elsewhere too though. In one shop (it could have been Food Lion) I managed to buy a dozen hard-boiled, shelled eggs for less than the price of a dozen raw eggs. That was very worthwhile! I never could find them again but have instead gone over to cartons of liquid eggs. I figure that since the cost seems identical, why should I be bothered with cracking eggs and disposing of the shells?

I seem to have bought a duffer with the calculator I bought a few months ago. Half way through a column of figures i found the keys weren’t always registering. That makes it completely useless since I can’t just delete part of the calculation without erasing it all and starting from the beginning. It was a cheap pocket calculator aimed at schoolchildren in the ready-for-school sale in September. Clearly if that’s the kind of thing that is produced, there are going to be a lot of children failing maths. I do not believe in throwing things out but in the case of that calculator, the bin was the only reasonable destination. It can’t be the battery as it was solar-powered.

As I mentioned yesterday, I don’t think a whole lot of QR codes. I was asked to scan one a few days ago and with the size of it and the ambient lighting level, I couldn’t. It wouldn’t work for me. I have a fairly average Blackberry. It just seems QR codes are a solution in search of a problem. I took my QR sign off my vehicle today. I shall use the space for a worthwhile sign instead!

QR codes started in Japan and fell flat on their face. About eighteen months ago, QR codes were resurrected again.

I tried QR codes and put a QR sign on the back of my vehicle. In 4-6 months only 2 people (both using Blackberries) scanned it. Its interesting but not worth pursuing.

I don’t know how many people have QR scanners but most don’t have them on their phones. Most don’t even know what a QR code is.

Personally, I think QR codes are going to fall flat on their arse again. I don’t scan them. In fact I just deleted the QR scanning software off my phone as it was simply taking up menu space. If I see a QR code, I have no inclination to scan it. I just look at it and look for the text instead. If there isn’t any, I pass on. My feeling is QR codes are a pointless advertising gimmick as there is little incentive to scan them.

What my website needs is portraits. I’m on the way toward getting some. The other thing it needs is something that smacks the viewer in the eye or grabs them by the balls and doesn’t let go, on the first page. That’s going to be fairly easy, I should imagine. Meanwhile I added Google Analytics to my site so now I will know where my viewers are coming from. Since I moved into my own little house, my creativity is returning. I also love the fact that I don’t make much mess all on my own and when I do, I clean my own mess up.

So, portraits are coming sometime and meanwhile I was looking again at my web hits. I changed my tweets to include the website and immediately hits rocketed. Clearly people cannot be arsed to look up the poster to see their website when they see an interesting tweet. Interestingly I’m getting more hits on the photography website than on the other though I have 3,000 followers versus 2,000 on the other. I did exactly the same thing which makes me suspect that people follow the one account because of the name.

I’ve been looking at Twitter follower generators. I’m not really quite ready for that yet though. I need to work on website content first. Viewers are all well and good but they don’t mean much if they don’t buy. The best way to get them to buy is to go viral with the website. The best way to go viral is to put something provocative on the site that won’t offend potential customers. That is the hard part!

Today was a very busy day. I got my tax refund after I returned home from my day’s missions. Today I ordered some new polo shirts for my business. I had tee-shirts which were nice but to be honest, they do look a little informal. A polo shirt looks a bit more businesslike. I even managed to close my storage unit since I don’t now have any need for it. That’s a small monthly saving. My house is quite big enough to just have everything around me. Right now I’m waiting for the washer and dryer to finish as I’m currently washing my clothes. I figured they might need it. Today definitely had a happy start to it and that’s verified by the ton of stuff I have managed to do.

At this dismal looking place, most of my stuff was hiding for my year of wandering. I returned and rescued it so it’s now with me once more. I missed my stuff.

Sales of my book, both the e-version and the print version are roaring away. I am very impressed by the quantity that have sold this month and the month is not yet over!

Just before bed, the site with 3,000 Twitter followers only racked up 2/3rds of the hits that the photography site with just 2,000 Twitter followers reached. This is most interesting and is probably driven by the mystique of the name for the other account. People follow it because of the mystique but take little interest in what that account posts or whatever. The account with its feet planted firmly on the ground gets less but more active followers. That’s my thought anyway.

Further interesting news came my way today. One of the old forums I used to use seems set to close. I feel sorry for the fellow that’s run it for the past 15 years as he started it in college and made it a career. Now it seems that he is complaining of lack of traffic. Clearly people have become tired of forums since they usually end up as screaming matches. That site concentrated on the digital compact market which has largely been replaced by smartphones with built-in cameras. That doesn’t really surprise me as digital compacts were horrendously expensive and out of date in 9 months or less. Smartphones are at least psuedo subsidised. The manufacturers killed their own market by making their compacts to be so expensive and with such a short life. People look on them now as replacement items and go for smartphones instead. Most people don’t really care how bad a photo is as long as it jogs memories. Looks to me like the fellow running that site should have had a backup plan. I don’t see digital compacts continuing for much longer. People that want SLRs aren’t going to read a “forum” to find out about the camera. They’re going to research from the manufacturer’s websites and ask friends. I note the fellow is complaining his Google ranking has slipped to page 6. I’m not surprised. I think the days of “forums” are over. When I used to hunt for something up would come a ton of forums instead of the item. That really didn’t interest me. I didn’t need to know what some spotty teen yobbo had to say about it. I wanted to read about the item. I think Google figured that one out too.

I just don’t know why some stores put things on display when they can get as vandalised as this poor little Acer laptop. Sure, at under $300 its cheap but that doesn’t give people the right to beat the crap out of it! Where has the respect for other people and their property gone?

Out of interest I tried a new online service to build Twitter followers. First off it told me I have 79% female followers on one account and 91% female followers on the other. Two days later with hardly any changes in Twitter following it’s now claiming much different percentages. I think something smells very fishy there – especially since I’m not entirely sure that Twitter actually records gender. I certainly cannot find a gender listed on my Twitter accounts. Indeed, I just set up a new Twitter account and nowhere was gender ever requested. I can’t say that Sprout Social is fraudulent but I am glad it’s a free trial as I see absolutely no benefit whatsoever to being a member. It’s something my Twitter account can do without so I just removed it.

Oh yes and apologies to RoadRunner customers. I had to restrict access to my blog from certain RoadRunner servers due to the iniquitous nature of some of their customers. I won’t go into further details.

Today I found I had two absolutely huge flies in my house. I have no idea how on earth they got in. I did find though that my Raid cockroach spray seems to kill flies just as well as spiders and roaches. They might as well take the specialist spider and fly sprays off the market! It’s not great as an airbourne spray but when they’ve landed, they can be sprayed safely. Today it’s 61F inside the house and 60% humidity. Needless to say it’s raining. I don’t bother too much with heat in South Carolina, It rarely actually gets cold enough to need heat. Needless to say, it gets hot in summer but again… I just don’t find air-conditioners are all that great. I much prefer just to use a fan. They’re also so much cheaper to run.

One of the major problems in the US is houses are thrown up as cheap shanties. They don’t deserve the name “house” as they are just cheap shanties. There is no foundation – just some concrete blocks dumped on the ground and timbers placed across. The house is then built on a wooden balloon frame. The outer walls of some houses are brick but that brick is built against the wooden frame and has a very shallow foundation that goes down maybe 6 inches. The brick wall has no real supports. There’s hardly any insulation – they just figure build it quick and cheap and pay for heat and air conditioning. What a shoddy way of doing things. It’s like the wiring. Instead of connecting wires inside insulated terminal blocks, they just twist them and either wrap tape or put a plastic cap over the twisted ends. It’s extremely amateurish! I’d love to send the electricians and architects to Britain to learn how to build properly. Where there are homes built from concrete blocks, there are no damp-proof membranes and the walls are single leaf. Similarly foundations – I’ve knocked a foundation or two away, clearing stuff and it’s just cheap concrete poured over the ground inside a wooden frame. It’s not even a uniform thickness! And as for US concrete – it’s a complete joke. It’s like the concrete used in bricklaying schools in Britain – designed to disintegrate after only a short time. I suspect government stuff is built better but I wouldn’t guarantee it.

Returning to the Twitter question, I did something very interesting or rather had an interesting result. I changed my tweets because I thought that I should be appealing to the emotions rather than waving a product. That didn’t seem to do much. Then I decided to dump the clever bits with different tweets on different days. I can do that some other time. I instead made sure that I could add my web address and contact number to my tweets. That has resulted in the number of website hits more than doubling in just a few hours. This is very interesting though I stop short of saying encouraging. Having done that, I changed the tweets on my other account also but planned them a little differently. Those are more stringently scheduled while these are fairly roughly scheduled. I’m still not going to sink money into it though until it has proven it can pay off. Both the twitter-user adder and the twitter tweet-scheduler both have paid options that allow far more flexibility. Twitter has to produce the goods though before I will sink any money into online stuff. Website hits are fine but they need to equate to increasing income. The signs though are interesting.

Twitter seems hard to penetrate. I seem to be amassing followers by the ton. I have absolutely no idea who these followers are or what they do. I notice that hits on my website really rocketed and now they have plummeted again. Perversely hits on my non-Twitter advertised site have rocketed also. Interestingly this was just after I gave the rednecks in the beat-up truck a business card. Since then I have found more hits on my blog site from sc.rr.com which is now banned – especially since I started getting hits using my name (which is on my business card). Maybe I should give myself a pseudonym on my business card and on my books? It’s hard to draw the line between getting out there and staying safe. As ever, vigilance is the keyword. I do wonder what the guy in front of me yesterday pretending not to take a photo of me with his black Apple iPhone was up to though.

Advertising seems a tough nut to crack. I can spend tons of money on advertising and get nowhere or I can simply not spend the money and still get nowhere. At the moment I’m spread over Linked-in (which seems to be singularly useless) and Twitter (which shows promise but seems to be failing to come up with the goods) as well as with a website, yellow pages and vehicle advertising. This time around, the websites are better optimized than before. I gather what’s needed is link exchanges. The problem there is that while it’s easy to plaster myself all over forums (which is why I wasted so much time on the things before), that does not seem to help much. In fact I read conflicting opinions. Some authors say get out there on forums. Others say not to waste one’s time on them. I tend to agree with the latter, having experienced forums. The trick is to find the right advertising before old age sets in. Clearly what I’ve been doing so far isn’t working. Having said that, I’ve only just started with Twitter this time around and to be fair, am doing a ton better with it.

With my following on Twitter being largely female, I have to appeal to the emotions rather than to the wallet or to the practical side. With a man, I can sell a gun by stopping power, simple mechanics, ruggedness and lack of required maintenance. That appeals to a man’s imagination that he can survive the barbarian onslaught single-handed and that what he buys is the ultimate in value. With a woman, it has to be sold because it’s pink, purse sized, light and an essential aid to protection. That appeals to women’s needs for beauty, practicality, femininity and security.

It seems that most of my Twitter followers on both Twitter accounts are female. This has led to a change in my approach to Twitter marketing. I had assumed that both accounts were being followed by men but realise now that as 91% on one account report as being female and 79% on the other report as female, that my assumption was wrong. I have been trying to sell to men instead of to women.

It’s nice to have the freedom to be able to do things without fear or repression, domination or subjugation. I pity those that live in countries/partnerships/groups that are bullying, repressive, dominative or subjugative.

At the moment there’s a film on about Margaret Thatcher – the bitch that brought misery to millions in Britain during her reign of terror during the 1980s. The IRA disliked her authoritarianism so much that they attempted to blow her up. As the joke at the time went: “Thatcher wept when some of her cabinet were killed in the explosion; everybody else wept that she wasn’t”. Thatcher destroyed whole swathes of British industry and now we have to suffer the misery of seeing her ugly face on the covers of magazines and books while the film about her is on in the cinemas. Apparently she was in South Carolina recently. I thought she had gone down with Alzheimers and didn’t know any more who she was or why she was hated by millions (which seems like sweet justice to me). The only person I felt sorry for was her husband who was a man of great virtue. Sadly her son seems to be lacking any kind of virtue having been implemented in various plots around the world. I think the whole country sighed with relief when her own party kicked her out and installed John Major instead. Now that was a fellow that inherited an unholy mess and tried to save something from the disaster though little ever filtered down to the people. I do recall somebody trying to sue Thatcher for mis-government but I believe they disappeared mysteriously. As far as the film goes, that is most definitely NOT a film I will ever be watching.

Yes… I was at work again today. Such a hard life! To be honest, my life has improved dramatically and these days bears no relation to the way it was. Heck, I’ve even felt free and happy enough to sit an entrance exam to do a postgraduate course that could lead to a doctorate. I don’t know how I did but even if I didn’t do badly, it’s probably worth my sampling the waters with a test prep course just in case I have to resit and to prepare me for 3 years of post-graduate school, if I decide to continue to follow that route.

Twitter doesn’t seem to be doing much of anything. No surprise there! I seem to have 3,000 followers on one account and 2,000 on the other. My book is selling quite well still – both in e-book and physical formats. I still don’t really feel that e-books are a path I would wish to follow for myself though. The eventual aim with Twitter is to get hits on my website because hits on my website will be people viewing it and people viewing it means bookings and sales.

Today I modified my Twitter follower generator system so that instead of adding people immediately, it adds them after 2 days if they’re still following me. I anticipate a drop in followers for the first two days then a slower rise. Meanwhile somebody mentioned that my auto tweets were ineffective. That’s pretty interesting so I will have to see about modifying them. I’m beginning to get a better idea of what kinds of things people like to read on Twitter though why people should want to read 140 character snippets on Twitter, God alone knows. It seems to get plenty politicians and other people in the media into plenty of hot water though. I bet if they sprayed what they wanted to say on the back of the bike sheds, nobody would notice!

After two nights of negligible sleep, I finally got a good 8 hours in. Today being the day of rest (and also pretty chilly) I am not planning on doing much of anything.

I noted with disgust on my journey yesterday that somebody had burnt down a piece of US history. This poor little filling station is now just charred embers but then that’s what Americans seem to think of their history so its not surprising.