sageworld.co.uk

I gathered together all my tax information today and headed to the tax preparer’s office. The tax person was a load cheaper than the accountant I had the previous year and we got it all done and dusted electronically. Apparently I even get a small refund this year! I celebrated by cooking myself some real food.

While I was shopping earlier, looking for a new folder for my 2012 taxes and two journals – one for mileage and one for expenses, I discovered the strange creation shown below. It’s called a “Cherry Fritter” and has a very slight and chemically cherry taste while being crunchy because it seems to have been soaked in sugar. I can see exactly why it was going cheap!

Meanwhile, on the taxes front, it took most of the day to get the taxes sorted out. I am determined that this year my taxes will be done in a journal and thus it will only be necessary to check the journal. I can afford a new journal for next year or even a second journal. The trick is to keep entering stuff as I go.

One last bit of good news before bed. The vitriolic and spiteful reviews somebody clearly with a personal issue had put against my book (both in e-form and the printed form) have now been reviewed by Amazon and deleted (as Amazon has a policy of allowing constructive reviews only). This makes a lot more sense. Who wants to read somebody venting their spleen over a personal issue instead of a constructive review of the book. This spleen-venting is largely why internet forums and so on resemble the unrulier letters columns of newspapers.

And finally… My Twitter follower count for one Twitter account is now on 1,900 and on the other on 2,700. I was pretty much dead set against Twitter and the internet. It seems to be working for me now that I don’t have any stress in the background. Hits on my new website which is so far only Twitter advertised have rocketed by at least ten times. I looked at the graph and the day I started advertising on Twitter, that’s when the count leapt upward. The lady I met at work said I needed 2,500 – 3,000 followers before Twitter advertising began to be worthwhile. I can definitely see results in terms of website hits. I suspect it might be a while longer before I get calls as a result but the signs are currently quite encouraging.

Since I had my tax deduction from my existing vehicle signs, I might re-invest in bigger vehicle signs or perhaps a trailer with signs on it. That might be the next step in advertising.

According to media reports Mr Barrak Obama has stated that he thinks he deserves a second term in office. If this is indeed true then I can pretty much guarantee that such a statement will tick his remaining supporters off to such an extent that he will not be re-elected. What the fellow thinks he deserves is completely irrelevant. Its as bad a faux pas as when Gerald Ratner destroyed his jewelery chain by calling his chain’s cheaper jewelery “complete crap”. It would be far better to replace “I deserve a second term” with something far more beneficial sounding such as “I believe I can serve the country further; that I have more still to give and that my continual service would benefit the country; make it stronger and better than ever”. Its much more altruistic than “I deserve”. The electorate doesn’t give a rat’s arse what the guy wants. Its what he can do that interests them.

I don’t know whether other US Presidents are as contentious as President Obama appears to be. I have heard so many disparaging comments and veiled threats against him that I just find it farcical. The race issue has been raised repeatedly with some of the weirder section of the population claiming to be prepared for a race war. As I always tell these whackos: he has to be re-elected after 4 years and cannot serve more than 2 terms. He’s not there long enough to cause the chaos and catastrophe people claim. I reckon people need to get a grip on reality! Obama is just a mediocre lawyer doing a job. He’s not Stalin or Hitler or Saddam Hussein nor even Margaret Thatchet.

Some people exercise their brains with crossowords or Sudoku. I do LSAT logic games.

Today the saga of the strange continues. Somebody chased after me along St Andrew’s Road earlier, frantically trying to take photos of my QR tag or the back of my vehicle. They took photos of the signs on the side and pulled alongside at the lights so I wound my window down and gave them a business card. Very strange approach! Later, somebody with a grey dodge caravan drove upto the house I was in at the time and reversed out. Very strange. I bet they don’t live there and wonder why they were there in the first place. It’s even more strange than that – according to my web stats, people have been doing very strange searches with my name including one for “nude newsgroup photos”. All I can say is it’s just plain weird!

All is not bad though. Today I had an excellent day at work and when I got back, worked through most of my to-do list then found a lot more copies of my book had sold – in both e-book version and physical version. Like I said – air-heads giving negative reviews don’t do much harm at all, especially when the alleged review is clearly spiteful hatred.

Twitter just stuns me. Not only have my website hits rocketed but several copies of my book have also sold. I am amazed. It seems a bit easy to call it a successful marketing campaign but it’s rather too coincidental. I still find it hard to believe that Twitter has had this much impact already.

That clay pigeon was tough. You don’t get many clay pigeons that survive a bullet from a 22LR rifle!

I am now getting a load more website hits. Interestingly the traces are coming from all over the place. Google, some .co site and a few search engines I have never heard of before. Now that I can set to and work on the online side of the business without interference, I seem to be developing an interesting set of statistics though statistics are only numbers until the green rolls in from them. I need to cover all facets of advertising rather than just the Yellow Pages. Online seems to be an interesting way. I despise the internet as much as I dislike electronic tablets. The problem is that I must be a bit of a dinosaur as they seem all to be on the way in. I fear that when everything is electric, something innocuous could happen to render the whole lot useless worldwide.

I look at the change in technology from paper to e-readers. I don’t like the change at all. I can and have read things off e-readers but I dislike the change in technology. Having said that, I can well imagine that the advent of the Gutenburg press raised the fears of many that books would become much lower quality. Indeed they probably did. Instead of having hand-written scholarly texts written on a wide variety of materials, many of which survive today (and many of which probably didn’t last too long), we now have entertainment in book form such as novels. Since the advent of self-publishing and the vanity press, many books have indeed suffered from the lack of an editor. I have a classic example of this – one of the books I purchased when I was researching for my book was clearly written by somebody who wanted to cover all bases but lacked the experience of those bases to cover them properly. It was clear to see where his expertise ended and his theorizing began. Similarly with the evolution of the book into the ebook format, many books that lack editorial control have been published that would never before have made it into print. Having said that, there are a few gems out there and many authors that only publish in e-book formats.

Today I had 8 times the number of hits on my most Twitter advertised website. It’s not advertised anywhere else save for Twitter and I had a ton of hits. Is this the start of something, I wonder or is it yet another red herring?

Meanwhile, I notice the same loser that seems to have a bee in his/her bonnet about my book seems to have written more garbage about my ebook. Ah well, all I can say is that if that’s all they want to spend their time doing, then they can’t be doing very much else. Most likely they’re unemployed, looking for somebody to attack for their situation rather than actively trying to do something useful like mowing lawns for pensioners, washing cars and/or windows etc. Whatever their problem is, it’s not hurting sales because it’s abundantly clear that it’s just spiteful reviewing. That individual must rate others as being very unintelligent. Actually in terms of impact on sales, the negative reviews make no difference. I suspect either nobody wastes time reading reviews from unknown reviewers or they just don’t bother with reviews. In my opinion there’s just too much of this forum type rubbish online and that’s all these online “reviews” are.

It’s 68 in my place still and it’s in the wee hours already. This is good. Heaven knows what it’ll be like here in the summer. Like as not, I won’t bother with air conditioning but will use a fan instead. That’s a load cheaper and just as effective. I have experience of fans versus air conditioning. I also come from a country where air-conditioning is just not used.

I cooked again last night. This time the cooking was a load better. I put cabbage, sweet potato, carrots and beans into my crock pot together with a sachet of brown gravy mix and the result is wonderful. I hope after it has steeped a while it will be even more wonderful. There’s nothing quite like home cooking. Restaurants are expensive and the food is never quite as good. I remember the last mango chicken dish I had a few months ago. It was so sugary that my mouth felt furry for a few hours. I love mango chicken but can do without Fido in the mix!

I looked at the time I spend on Facebook and regard it simply as lost time that I could be using doing something more productive. I’m “in contact” with a load of people who have me on their friends lists. Most of them don’t send as much as a single message or make a single commend on an uploaded image. This is not a negative reflection on them but rather on the whole Facebook concept. Why have something where you list somebody you once worked or studied with buy you never actively communicate with them? It’s like having a copy of the Greater Metropolis phonebook in your closet because it has an entry for John Fisher who you once sat next to in your first year in school.It’s just a great way to waste time and nothing else.

On other grounds, publication on Facebook is very misleading in terms of privacy. I have seen my privacy setting mutilated beyond what I’d set them as, on many occasions. Fortunately I don’t post anything that’s at all contentious. I have heard of people really falling down on Facebook though. I cannot believe the trust people put in things like Facebook – they believe what’s said on it can be seen only by themselves. Nobody can be that daft, surely? If it’s private, don’t put it online (not even in an email). If it’s public then you might as well have a blog like this.

In other news, I finally put each of my commercial websites on a different bit of webspace. Now they work well and I have separate and accurate hit counters for each of them. The one that I was counting skyrocketed today. I don’t know whether that was anything to do with the duplication process as I duplicated the site 3 times to produce different versions. Maybe it was to do with Twitter – I just don’t know. I tend to suspect all hit-counter figures.

Anyway, I resolved today than yesterday would be my last day on Facebook. I will not sit down in front of my computer with the Facebook page open again. I just don’t want to spend my time on it any more. Interestingly, I did post an announcement of this via my Blackberry and am now very happily FB free. There is no apparent way of deleting an account – it just has to be left there to age disgracefully.

Meanwhile I just had my latest electricity bill. This is the highest yet at $64. I’m wondering whether I have had the heat on too much. Oh well. It was necessary. It’s very nice right now that it’s 68F in my study and thus I don’t need heat. When it gets down to the low 50s I do tend to like a little heat. I could wish the place was better insulated but, it is an old house but more importantly, it’s a roof over my head.

It has been six days since I started sending automatic tweets. This saves my fingers a load of work. I send maybe 20 a day.

I counted the last 6 days and found I had an average of 15 hits a day. I counted the previous 25 days and found I had an average of 6 hits a day. This could vary tremendously. Six days does not a trend make, however.

By comparison I checked my other website and found that over the past month I had 28 visitors and just 1 this month. That’s less than 1 per day. I have been sending auto tweets on that site as long as I have been on the main site. Now, the big difference is on one site I have a small window in which my tweets are constantly displayed. This is the site with more hits. The other difference is that followers have increased rapidly on the Twitter username associated with the site that has hardly any hits but more slowly on the site with lots of hits. This is a paradox! Interestingly, the number of followers on the account that counts for no hits is more than on the other and has increased exceedingly rapidly. It’s all very weird and I’m sure there’s an explanation out there – somewhere!

Even more interestingly another site that is advertised via existing methods and which has been around for years and is reasonably well linked into search engines has about 17 hits a day over the 31 day period with no difference over the last 6 days that isn’t reflected during the previous 25. This muddies the waters yet further. Clearly more data is needed and a longer time period. Then I might be able to work out exactly what’s happening if anything.

When I know what’s happening, I’ll be able to target my advertising more effectively.

In other news, Facebook plans to float on the stock exchange. Looks like the party is coming to an end.

Interest in terms of visiting my websites has plummeted. It had picked up a little but Twitter doesn’t seem to have increased interest at all. I’m up to between 1500 and 1600 Twitter followers on both accounts. Neither seem to be adding website hits. I know it was recommended that I have a minimum of 2,500 – 3,000 followers before it becomes worthwhile but thus far it doesn’t even show any promise. Fortunately I have free follower adders and free tweet scheduling services running. I suspect it will all top out at 2,000 followers each without showing any promise. I rather suspect that 90% of Twitter accounts are automated anyway because like me, nobody has any interest at all in following the tripe on Twitter. Having said that, apparently US Homeland Security does. Somebody apparently claimed they were going to do something and it got misconstrued so they got banned from the country.

I’m getting more of a feeling these days that things like Twitter and Facebook are more of a liability than an asset for most people. I keep hearing of cases where people get into a ton of trouble over something they said quite innocently on Twitter or Facebook.

Cinema was replaced by television and video. Television was replaced by the internet and video was also. What is coming that will replace the internet? There’s bound to be a new idea out there somewhere.

Yes, it is perfectly possible to live life without a TV. I never really bothered with it when I had access to one. When I moved to my own place, I decided not to bother. I have not missed the tripe on TV at all. In fact I had forgotten about TVs until somebody brought them up in conversation earlier today. In fact, some of the people I work with don’t have TVs either. There’s just no need. Aside from that, TVs gobble up large amounts of power even on standby. I am glad to say my lowest electric bill was just over $20.