The Blog of James Smith

Today has been a very odd day at work.  Lots of stuff to do, but have found parts of it very hard going.  Work still got done (he hastily adds), but I found myself rewriting bits of stuff, as I just couldn’t get what I was trying to say out in the right way.  I think I succeeded in the end.  Hopefully.

Also, now that the £15 billion of work on the West coast mainline has finished, every train timetable has changed.  I am having to adjust my morning and evening routines, which is a bit of a pain in the bum, but I have suffered worse trauma in my life.

Now to try and catch the 18:48 train.   There is a slightly earlier one at 18:31 or so, but it goes from platform 13, which anyone who has been to Manchester Piccadilly train station will tell you, is about a 10 minute trek to get to from the actual main part of the station.

So I gave made it though 3 weeks if work, and to be honest it is better than I thought it would be in several diferent ways.

People are cool.
Work is interesting.
Office is very nice.

However, there is one issue. I am currently on a virgin train, traveling from Manchester to London. Yesterday I was in Southport and the day before in Doncaster. I am hoping that in a bit it will not be as busy but it’s not too big a deal.

Bring on the weekend – rugby and cricket to watch!

So I left my previous job at an SEO agency about 6 months ago, and then went freelance for a while, and have now just started up with a new SEO agency.

There are several reasons why I went from freelance to working full time again, but the answer is two fold:

1. The current economic climate is a bit crap
2. Working at home is lonely and a bit boring

I have to say I am very happy with the new job so far.  Office is right smack bang in the middle of Manchester, overlooking Piccadilly Gardens, there is a Bar Burrito 2 minutes walk away, and the work is interesting and with large big name clients.

I have vowed to myself that I am going to write in this at least 3 times a week, so lets see how I do with that.

I use a MacBook at work, and firefox is absolutely screwed on it. It loads stuff about half the time, and the other half it randomly stops loading webpages, but doesn’t beachball, just doesn’t respond. I would say it might be the addons I have – I have quite a few, but I disabled them all and it as worse?!?!? I would delete it entirely and redownload it, but to be honest, I am liking the Safari browser layout more and more, it is simple. I have been using the latest webkit nightlies, and they are very nice.

So yeah, firefox, you are not as great as you once were :/

So I am at my parents house with my dog – dogs, if you count the Matilda, my parents dog. Anyways, the internet here is very slow and unreliable. Which would be okay. Except other than walk the dogs and watch Sky Sports there isn’t much else to do. God how I love Sky Sports. From 20/20 cricket to premiership rugby to watching Derby almost win, there is everthing on Sky Sports.

So I was trying to do some work today – nothing on TV and the dogs had just been on a walk for an hour and a bit, so I decided to do some shit that should really have been done before. So I decided to do that. And then the internet went tits up and, this is the honest truth, the only site that would load with any kind of speed was www.blastbilliards.com. Seriously. So I played that for a while, rebooted the router a few times and then left it to watch reruns of Braniac and The Simpsons.

Then lo and behold, it starts working, at about half 9 at night. After I have lost all urges to do anything vaguely work related and instead now just want to play stupid flash games.

Awesome!

So I work for a company that does Internet Marketing, carrying out Search Engine Optimisation on websites.  Or to be more precise I did.  Now that I have changed jobs within the company, I don’t really have a title.  My signature says R&D Programmer and Content Creator, though I made that up . I still do SEO.  However, I also do a lot of other stuff.  From creating proposals to writing blog entries to doing everything other than the bread and butter SEO that I have been doing for the past year, and it is pretty darn good to be doing different things every day.  I like doing just SEO, but at the end of the day, SEO doesn’t change that much from month to month any more.  There are no more crazy algorithym updates, or things that make you worry, it is now mostly about common sense and content.

I have to pay a fine everytime I fart at work.  In my own office.  The travesty and unfairness of it.  Today so far I have done two and have had to pay 50p into the TARDIS money box.  It is meant to be a quid per fart, but if that was the case I would be skint by Tuesday every week.

Tomorrow is my  girlfriends graduation.  So I took the day off work to go watch her get an MA from Manchester University in town and country planning.  Hopefully there will be free food.  Maybe cake.  Cake would be nice.