Maybe China is getting kickbacks from all these VPN companies which are now doing roaring trade thanks to this unprecedented level of blocking.

It takes a long time, a lot of hard work and even then you have to do all sorts of other things to pay the rent. This is the first in a series of blog posts where I’ll talk about these “extra” activities.

So today’s money earner is modelling. It’s pretty self explanatory. In terms of an income stream, it’s unreliable, the work is sporadic, it’s quite fun and it pays pretty well. You don’t necessarily get to keep your dignity, but as long as you can laugh at yourself you should survive. It’s all about staying focussed on the reason you’re doing it.

I’ll try to keep you updated on progress.

I’m a life long apple fan. My parents bought your computers and then in turn when I went to university I did too and believe me £2000 was a lot for an impoverished university student to spend, but I just had to have a PowerBook G4. After my 17″ MacBook Pro was stolen late last year I was so happy to finally get up and running with my new uni-body MacBook Pro, but it’s been a rocky start and your support website doesn’t even have a category for the problems I’m having let alone any bloody way to contact you. Interesting to note that on iTunes where I have spent exactly £39.50 I recently received very good email support. Anyway sadly my problems are frequent, but intermittent so unless they happen during my visit to your repair centre there is little way to convince you they’re real.

I’ll admit I’m not super nice to my laptops, but then again I never have been and I pay the big bucks to buy the best because I need performance. In the past week though you’ve let me down 3 times, I lost data, wasted time and energy.

I’m a busy entrepreneur trying to make things happen. Steve you must know what that’s like. So tell me Apple what should I do?

Update: Did it again this morning

Update: Recent OS 10.6.4 software update seems to have fixed the problem

For those of you who haven’t heard there has been an election in the UK in the past 24hrs. The results are in and it’s a hung parliament. Whether a government will emerge and who will be Prime minister remain to be seen over the next few days.

The Liberal Democrats have long complained that the system is broken and disadvantages them, but what is the real price of coming 2nd so often? Even though a few results still remain to be declared I threw together this quick table showing the number of votes each party achieved divided by the number of parliamentary seats they won. The answer couldn’t be more striking, at 123,909 the Liberal Democrats get almost 4x as many votes per seat they win as the two main parties. This is chronically inefficient by any stretch of the imagination. The £s and hours that must be wasted to achieve those few victories and so many many 2nd places.

With a hung parliament having being declared I can imagine Nick Clegg is enjoying this rare taste of power and good luck to him. In the meantime I’m going to concentrate on winning, 2nd place doesn’t look so good.

Jamie’s recent series following his ‘Food Revolution’ was nothing short of inspirational. After every episode I watched I felt compelled to get off my backside and throw everything I had at my endeavours. The way Jamie battled against people who didn’t want him there and won over even his staunchest opponents was incredible to watch. It was at times hard to remember that what Jamie was fighting people to achieve was in fact in thier own best interests to do.

I challenge every man, woman and child to watch these programs and not be inspired by what Jamie is trying to do. Though his and my worlds in some respects cannot be more different the challenges we face require the same extraordinary level of dedication to overcome.

Jamie Oliver is a man who walks through walls, I want to be so too. Go watch his show on Hulu now…

If you’re not in the US and can’t watch this, you can buy a very reliable VPN from Blacklogic.com for only $100 per year.

One of the hardest things I think I’ve had to deal with in my life so far is that I am an ideas guy and not a finisher. It has at times been debilitating, but I’m finally starting to get on top of it. This blog is a prime example of how painful it can be. In the past 18 months I must have created a dozen new designs for it, half written twice as many blog posts and yet none of it ever saw the light of day, because I just couldn’t get myself to finish anything.

Then last week something flipped in my brain. I became once again angry and depressed at my seeming inability to get anything finished. At almost two in the morning this came to a head and I turned all of that energy and aggression on my blog. So here we are 5 days and very little sleep later it’s finished…sort of. There is an endless list of things I want to do to it, but for now at least it’s online and I’m back sharing my thoughts and experiences with the world again!

And the amount of spam and just general nonsense that is flooding all of these services is crippling. As a user, I spend far too much time weeding it all out to find the few gems of real content from people I care about.
 -  Michael Arrington on TechCrunch, Jan 2010

I couldn’t agree more. While people like Robert Scoble proclaim the death of RSS I just don’t feel like the social web is ready to be an alternative yet. In Google Reader I have an unread count, I can read through all of my feeds in an organised way and add new feeds in as and when I find them. I’m not subjected to the type of clutter that makes me mute people on brizzly. With twitter I feel like I grab odd handfuls of the stream, like I’m always running the risk of missing out on the good bits in amongst all the noise. Don’t get me wrong I definitely see the potential of the social web and Twitter and for me the future seems to be in projects like which analyse all of our interactions and filter out the noise.

As Michael says whilst this is currently a pain in the neck it’s also a fantastic opportunity to innovate and one I will certainly be trying to spend more time thinking about.

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Another place guilty of going so far, but not quite making it is Element Fresh. I’ll prefix this by saying with 20,000 points on my Friend’s card I’m a pretty loyal customer, but every time I eat in their restaurants there is one teeny tiny little thing that pi**es me off. In the UK it is customary to wait for everyone to finish eating before clearing the plates. Element fresh is so well staffed that half a second after the last bite of my meal enters my mouth my plate has been whipped away and is presumably being cleaned only to be presented to an adjacent table minutes later. This may sound like a ridiculously small thing to get upset about, but for me it’s an example of what separates the good from the best.

Yes, I’m nitpicking, but every time these things happen it grates and if I’m paying 45元 or more for a sandwich I feel like I’m allowed to nitpick. Rant over.