Image credit: © sammydavisdog

Be sure to read the previous chapters first…

Chapter One: When The Universe Won’t Let You Die

Chapter Two

OK, Samuel J. Masterson, lets see what sort of mess you’ve gotten yourself into this time.

He only ever referred to himself using his full name when he was ticked off with himself.  Something he’d picked up from his mother.  At all other times he was just plain Sam, even if plain was one of the last adjectives you would ever use to describe him.  To look at, Sam was no prize.  His appearance wasn’t repulsive by any means, but he was the type you’d feel comfortable leaving your wife alone with.  A mistake that quite a few men had made over the years.

No, it wasn’t Sam’s appearance that set him apart from the plains of the world.  It wasn’t until you had spent a little time with him, all of maybe three minutes, that you realised you were not in the company of plainness.  He had an uncanny way of making you feel very comfortable around him.  You’d swear that you had known him for years, even though you only just met him.  Sam could read a person like an open book.  An ability that he used to outrageous advantage, as many a poker player could attest to.

Of course, winning every hand in every poker game you play can often lead to getting the crap beaten out of you if you’re not careful.  Sam was careful.  Well, mostly.   Occasionally when the good folks he’d just cheated out of all their money decided that losing graciously just wasn’t in them, they’d want their pound of flesh.  At this point, Sam would try to lie his way out of it, and if that didn’t work he’d simply enforce his will upon them.  It wasn’t an easy thing for him to do, and it hurt like hell, but he could manipulate another person’s thoughts if he needed to.

Luckily, reading another’s thoughts didn’t cause him any pain, so as he got up he did so with his mind wide open, “listening” for anyone who might be nearby.  He could vaguely sense some people about, but none seemed to be close by.  Sam relaxed a little and took in his surroundings.

He saw that he was inside a long narrow building that was maybe four to five metres wide and perhaps three to four times that in length.  The floor was made of earth, well, strictly speaking, there was no floor.  There had been no effort put into leveling the ground to make a floor.  It was like somebody had just fenced off a rectangular piece of land and slapped a roof on top.

The roof.  It was a thatched roof.

A thatched roof?  For the love of God, where the hell am I?

He whispered to himself.  He looked around and could see daylight through the cracks in all four walls.  That told him it was a single room structure.  Even if “structure” might have been a bit of an exaggeration.  There was a mustiness to the air in there which suggested that it had gone unused and unoccupied for quite some time.  Unoccupied?  He couldn’t imagine anyone ever wanting to live in this building.

There were remnants of hay on the ground, and  some old wooden crates and boards stacked up along what he was calling the back wall of the place.  To one side of the crates were a couple of ancient looking farming implements.  At least he thought that that was what they were.  He’d never been much into agricultural history.  The odd thing about everything that he saw was that it was all hand made.  There also was no sign of anything engineered or machined.

Sam’s gut was telling him to be extra careful and to keep a very low profile for the time being.  He decided that until he could figure out what was what he would stay hidden.  If he wanted to find out more about his situation he needed to venture outside.   But he wasn’t going anywhere until he had the cover of darkness, he couldn’t risk being spotted by anyone just yet.

This wasn’t the first occasion where Sam had been catapulted into another time and place via a trans-dimensional portal.  He’d done this dance before, and knew first hand how dangerous it can be popping up out of nowhere when you have no idea of what the locals are used to.  Sometimes they chase you with laser cannons and phasers, other times with pitch forks and torches, but they nearly always chase you.   And always with the same goal in mind… to kill you.

Yes it was true, half an hour earlier Sam had just jumped out of a jumbo jet flying high above the Atlantic Ocean with the intent of killing himself.  But that was different.  That was his idea, and not some mob that was drunk on fear of the unknown.  He had no intention of dying at the hands of somebody else.  Actually, for the time being at least, he had no intention of dying at anyone’s hand, not even his own.

He was beginning to wish he had some of his equipment with him.  Some of that 42nd century tech would have proven quite useful right about now.  He’d know with pin-point accuracy exactly where and when he was, for a start.  The only “tech” he had with him was his watch, and his cell phone.

Think Sam, think.  What can your watch tell you?  The time in a timezone that you most likely are not in, and just to keep you guessing, we ain’t gonna tell ya which timezone you are in.  So nyah!

Talking to himself and with himself, although strange to an onlooker, was the way Sam kept from going completely insane.

Your phone?  Hmm, well if there’s a signal that tells me I’m somewhere between the latter part of the twentieth century and mid twenty-first.  If there’s no signal I could be further back than the twentieth century, or I could just be in a bad spot.  Ah, to hell with it!  That tells me nothing either!

He was just about to put his phone back in his pocket when he remembered that his phone had a GPS receiver that was a lot more sensitive than the phone’s GSM receiver.  Even when he couldn’t get a phone signal he could still get a good lock with the GPS.

C’mon Mr GPS, tell me where I am.

Nothing.

Whaddya mean: can’t locate any positioning satellites?  We’ll bloody see about that.

He took the back off of the phone and slid the sim-card out.  On the reverse side of the sim-card was another bit of circuitry, something that he had designed himself.  It shut down, or more precisely, overrode the security protocols built into the GPS receiver that prevented the phone from talking to the military’s spy network of satellites.  Those satellites all had GPS capabilities and if they were up there Sam would now be able to find them.

Nothing.

Terrific!

OK, Mr Smarty-Pants, what have we learned?  Well, lessee, we know what time it is in New York City at some unknown point in space and time, which is about as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike.  We know that there is no GSM phone signal in this area to be had.  We know that there are no man-made satellites in orbit.  Gee, Sam, you’ve excelled yourself.  Fourteen and a half thousand years of dealing with this exact sort of problem and all you can say is that you are somewhere before 1950!

He went and sat down behind some crates.  With his back up against the wall and the crates, which were about a metre high, in front of him he felt reasonably comfortable that he’d see anyone coming before they saw him.  There he sat waiting for the sun to go down so he could venture outside and take a good look around.

Sitting on the bare earth isn’t comfortable at the best of times so it wasn’t long before he was shifting his butt around trying to find a softer spot.

OUCH!  What the hell was that?

Something had dug into his left butt cheek and it hurt like hell.  He moved to one side and began brushing away that part of the “floor” with his hand, thinking it must have just been a sharp rock or something.  He found it, and it was certainly sharp.  But it wasn’t a rock.  It was something that felt like metal.

He continued to dig around it with his fingers and soon discovered that it was a sword.  An ancient medieval broadsword.  Except that it wasn’t ancient.  Apart from it being dirty from having laid on the ground for a while, it looked as though it was made yesterday.  The blade was sharp and not dull at all.  And it was solid.  This wasn’t some cheap knock off you’d find in a tourist shop.  This was the real deal.

Trying to come to grips with what his discovery meant he began looking more closely at his immediate surroundings.  He noticed a symmetrical shape in the ground protruding out from underneath one of the crates.  Moving the crate away and scraping at the ground he found it to be rectangular, like the top of a box or chest.  He continued to scrape away the earth and it wasn’t long before he could feel wood.  And this thing was big too.  Almost the size of a man.

Oh god, don’t tell me I’m digging up a shallow grave.  A grave inside a barn?  Who buries someone inside a barn?

Sam was feeling rather anxious and just a little bit nervous right now, but his curiosity was outweighing his common sense at this point so he kept at it.  A few minutes later he could see that it wasn’t a coffin (relief).  It was a huge chest of some sort.  He was about to open it when he heard something outside.

Horses.  And they were getting closer.  Horses meant people, and Sam wasn’t at his best right now and really didn’t want to entertain guests.  He had to hide.  He made his way to the back of the building where it was darkest.  As luck would have it there was a small rise in the ground and then a dip right before the back wall.  It made a natural tiny blind, just big enough for a man to lie in and remain unseen.  Sam hoped that the black of his jump suit would help keep him hidden in the shadow.

He slid into place just as the door to the barn was opening.  He held completely still, not daring to even breathe in case it tipped off the newcomers of his presence.  He tried to hear what they were saying, but they were too far away and were talking in low voices.  He was pretty sure they were speaking English though.  That in itself was a relief.  He carefully reached out with his mind.  Why he was being careful he couldn’t say, reading another’s mind had never made the other person aware of it before so there wasn’t any risk of discovery.  But right now he was scared and he wasn’t about to take any chances.

There were four of them, all male.  One was obviously the leader, he was in a constant state of planning and delegating.  He was also very confident.  Another, who seemed to be quite a bit younger than the leader was full of hope, but at the same time there was a lot of anger.  A third man was hungry and was hoping they’d find a fat pig they could kill and roast.  The last man had his mind in the bedroom.  Sam couldn’t help but smile, it seems that no matter where you go, or what time period you are in, there are always guys who think with their dicks.

There was a common thread running through all their minds.  They were all a part of a group, and they believed wholeheartedly that their cause was just and true.  Sam had never encountered such honour and justness before as he did within these men.  It was like he was watching an old movie about King Arthur and the Knights of the round table.

The four were in the center of the room, huddled in a small circle and talking quietly.  Sam still couldn’t make out what they were saying.  There was dirt and dust going up his nose and he couldn’t stop himself.  Right then he let out a very loud

SNEEZE!

Who’s THERE!

Demanded the leader, as he jumped around toward the sound and drew his sword.

Show thyself and make haste about it, lest I believe you to be the King’s spy and run you through with my blade.

Sam knew he was in trouble and that there was no point in pretending that the sneeze could be mistaken for something other than a man in hiding.  He slowly, and very carefully, rose to his feet.  He was still in shadow and the men couldn’t quite make out any of his features.

Step closer.  Slowly!

Barked the leader.  Sam began to move toward the men, his arms stretched out at a 45° angle from his body and his palms facing outward.  He wanted to show that he wasn’t concealing any weapons or anything that might have been construed as a threat.  When he came out of the shadow, three of the men took a half step backward and the look on their faces was one of terror.

Only the leader stood his ground, but even on his face were signs of fear.  The other three men all had their hands on their swords and were about to draw them.  Sam knew that he wouldn’t be able to talk his way out of this one, he didn’t even know if these people would understand anything he might have said.  It was obvious that he had travelled many centuries into the past, the language, although English, was vastly different to what he was familiar with.  He couldn’t risk insulting them or scaring them any more than he already had.

Instead of speaking, he projected two thoughts:  safe and friend.

The pain was almost unbearable, and before he lost consciousness he could feel the blood running from his nose.

When he came to he felt oddly comfortable.  He seemed to be in a make-shift bed of sorts.  There was a blanket over him and dried grass beneath him.  He was inside a tent.  Outside he could hear people, maybe a dozen or more, all talking.   He noticed that his clothes were missing.  He wasn’t naked, but what he wore now wasn’t what he had on this morning.  This clothing smelled bad, was heavy and itchy.

Still groggy, he got up and poked his head outside the tent.  It was dark, but there was plenty of light coming from a roaring fire that had half a dozen or so people sitting around it.  From what he could tell, he was in the clearing of some wooded area, a forest perhaps.  Just then the leader from the four that had found him in the barn spotted him.

Come friend!  Come sit with us and eat.

That’s when the glorious smell of roasting pork hit his nose and he remembered that his last meal was two days ago.  Yeah, two days and about a thousand bloody years, he thought to himself.

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Image credit: © Photo Extremist

Chapter One

It was cold and dark in the luggage compartment of that boeing 747.  He didn’t know that yet.  He was still bundled up in the foetal position safe and warm inside the custom made duffel bag.  This duffel bag had some very special “features”.  Not only was it completely water proof and air-tight, it was impervious to x-ray and ultra-sound scans.  Actually, if the bag ever was scanned the sensors built into the lining would detect what sort of scan it was and then project a false image back to the scanner.  This bag was a smuggler’s dream come true.

He twisted his left wrist slightly towards his face so he could see his watch.  6 minutes of air left.  It was time to get started.  He closed his eyes and tilted his head slightly, trying to listen for signs of any life.  The only thing that he could hear was the drone of the plane’s engines.  Good, that means that everything is going to plan.  He freed himself from the bag, thinking again how stupid it was that the people who had made him the bag had neglected to include a way for it to be opened from the inside.  Obviously he had sent that one back and demanded a replacement.  It had arrived just in time, and it was out of this bag that he now emerged.

Three hours spent curled up in a bag designed to carry not much more than a few days worth of underwear and clothes tends to make a person a little in need of a damn good stretch.  So that’s what he did… slowly he stood up, straightened his body to its full height, then arched his back and extended his arms. legs. fingers, even his toes.  There were several loud cracks as his joints found the freedom of unrestricted movement once more.

Ahhhhhhh!  That’s better.

No time to relax, he thought.  Time to find his tools and supplies.  He set to work at finding the other bag.  The bag that had everything he needed to carry out his mission.  A mission that he had put so many years into planning and preparing for.  He had already tried and failed at least a thousand times before, but this time… This time would be different.  He had taken into account every conceivable variable.  He had thought of everything.  He couldn’t fail.  He had to succeed.

He found his bag of tools and supplies a couple feet away from where he’d been laying and headed for the maintenance hatch above the main undercarriage assembly.  Once there, the first thing he had to do was to fool the aircraft’s computer systems into thinking that nothing was going on.  The last thing he needed was for some over-observant airline pilot to investigate a blinking red light.  He popped the cover off of an access panel beside the hatch that exposed a mass of wires.  Within a few short seconds he had located the wires he needed, stripped back a little of the plastic shielding and had attached the tiny piece of electronics that would allow him to work unnoticed.

He opened the maintenance hatch and then grabbed the small battery powered drill and drilled a 1cm diameter hole through the hatch door.  This was very slow going and would probably completely drain the battery on the drill.  Couldn’t be helped, and besides, all of the rest of the work could be done by hand, even if if would have been easier to use the spanner tool on the drill.  Once the drill finished cutting through the multiple layers of the hatch door he inserted the rubber tubing and applied a sealing resin around the hole to make it air tight.

The other end of the hose looked just like an air attachment you see at any garage that is used for inflating car tyres.  In fact, that is exactly what it was, except this one was designed to deflate tyres.   He checked that he had everything with him for the one millionth time and then hid the drill inside of an unsuspecting suitcase.

He climbed down into the undercarriage feet first and carefully closed the hatch above him.  With the hatch closed it was incredibly cramped.  That area, although quite large and can easily fit a man in, was quite a snug fit for the gigantic undercarriage assembly.  He somehow managed to maneuver himself into position so he could attach the other end of the rubber hose to the valve on the closest tyre to him.  He held his breathe and listened out for the tell-tale hiss of the dry nitrogen escaping harmlessly into the baggage compartment above his head.

Deflating the tyre was going to take at least half an hour but it was necessary because he needed the room.  He could have just uncoupled the whole thing and dropped it out the bottom of the plane over the Atlantic, but that would mean that the plane would not have been able to land safely and hundreds of innocent people could have been killed.

He used the time to meditate and keep himself and his mind as relaxed as possible.  It was vitally important that his adrenaline levels were at their lowest possible point, otherwise all of this would be a complete waste of time.  Listening to the hiss of the escaping gas he closed his eyes, took some long drawn out breaths and began lowering his heart rate.

Finally, after what seemed an eternity, he had the room he needed.  He made his way down past the, now completely deflated, tyre to the aircraft’s outer hull.  He located the manual release that opened the door to allow the undercarriage to be extended.  Before opening the door he checked his watch which came equipped with an altimeter… 9,603 metres.  Excellent, he thought to himself, that will give him the time he needed to reach terminal velocity.

He took a few seconds to ready himself, and then began cranking the handle that would open the outer door to the undercarriage bay.  This part of the aircraft wasn’t pressurised so there was no danger of being blown out of the plane before he was ready.  All the same though, there was a noticeable drop in pressure when the seal was broken.  At that moment he stopped, held his breath, and listened.  An odd thing to do really considering that he would not have been able to hear anyone coming anyway.  A second or two later he realised that and got back to cranking.  He only needed to open that door enough to fit his body through, but it was hard going and was going to take some time.

Time to go!

He positioned himself so that he was sitting on the door with his back to the nose of the plane, and slowly inched toward the opening.  Once he got his legs almost all the way out of the plane, with just his buttocks on the edge of the door he flipped over onto his stomach.  He could feel the passing wind pulling him out and knew that all he had to do now was let go.  He tested the strength of his left arm by gingerly letting go with his right.  Good, he could maintain his position with just one arm for now.

With his right hand he reached into a pocket on his left sleeve and pulled out the hypo gun.  The same sort that diabetics use to inject themselves with insulin, but this one didn’t contain insulin.  It had a chemical cocktail that would put him into a deep sleep exactly 45 seconds from when he injected it.  It’s affects would only last 12 minutes, but that would be ample time.

45 seconds to go.  Let go!

As soon as he was clear of the plane he quickly got his bearings and straightened his body with his arms by his sides.

35 seconds to go.

He pointed his head toward the ground and began to accelerate.

25 seconds to go, 185 kilometres per hour.

15 seconds to go, 265 kilometres per hour.

4 seconds to go, 345 kilometres per hour.  Terminal velocity!  Yes! he thought to himself, it is going to work!!  It has to work.

Darkness.

He hadn’t expected to dream, but dream he did.  He dreamed of when he was a boy of maybe 4 or 5.  His parents had taken him out for a day at the fair, there were rides and ponies.  He loved ponies and was pleading with his father to let him ride on the pony.  At the next moment they were in a completely different place and different time.  Something in his subconscious noted how odd it was how dreams jump all over the place.  His parents were gone and he was alone… all alone.  He felt scared.

It was the universe fighting back.  It wasn’t much, but it was enough to raise his pulse a few beats per minute.   The higher his heart rate, the more hold the universe could exert over him.  Strangely it was the steps he had taken so that this wouldn’t happen which was the exact reason why it was.  While sleeping he couldn’t be influenced by the sight of the ocean heading toward him at 345 kilometres per hour, or the sound of the air rushing passed him.  He could keep his adrenaline from rising.  He just couldn’t stop himself from dreaming.  It was through his dreams that the universe was fighting him now.

His heart rate was now a staggering 245 beats per minute and he regained consciousness.  That should have been impossible.  The chemicals in his body should have ensured that.  But something brought him back to consciousness, he couldn’t figure out why.  It was at that moment that he felt it.  The hotness that began somewhere in the middle of his head, behind his eyes.

Noooooo!  Not again!

It filled him with fear and anxiety which only made things worse.  Those feelings fuelled what was now inevitable.  Sure enough, when he opened his eyes he could see the distortion beginning to form in front of him.  It would have gone unnoticed to anyone else it was so slight, but he had seen it countless times before and could spot it a mile away.  Part of space in front of him was out of kilter by a few millimetres.

When he came to he could smell animal.  Not quite sure what sort of animal, but definitely animal.  Horse!  Yes, that was it.  He could smell horse.  He opened his eyes and could see he was inside some sort of structure.  There was hay on the ground, and a definite odour of horse.

Where am I?

He whispered to himself, and followed it up with a more pressing question…

When am I?

Till next time…

Chapter Two:  Men Of Honour.  But make sure you leave a comment here before you head over to the next chapter, yeah?

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Image credit: © Carlos Smith

Have you ever noticed that sometimes the longer you sit working on a project on your computer, the harder it becomes to stay focused?  Your mind slowly but surely gets fuzzier as the hours click by.  Sure, part of it is fatigue, but it is more than that.  Your brain’s fuel reserves are running low.  That’s what this article is about… How to fill up the tank.

The Single Most Important Ingredient

To keep your brain healthy you need to keep it active and expose it to all kinds of wondrous things.  New ideas, culture, problems, games, stimulating conversations.  Give it things that make you laugh, things that make you cry, things that scare the crap out of you, and things that make you stretch your mind.  There are an unlimited number of things that you can do to keep the old grey matter from turning into a dried up old prune.  But we’re missing something here.

None of that will mean squat without one simple ingredient.  It’s a simple thing.  It’s easy to get.  It costs you nothing.  Yet, without it you literally cannot survive.  What is it?

Oxygen!

To be able to function on any level, you, and your brain, needs oxygen.  Now, if you just sit on your big fat hairy butt all day long, yes, your brain is getting oxygen.  But only enough to keep you out of the morgue.  Those headaches you have?  Your inability to focus on something for any length of time?  That fuzziness?  Difficulty in making decisions?  Do you know what all that really is?  It is your brain telling you that it needs more of it’s primary fuel… It is craving oxygen and you are not listening!

Filling Up The Tank

So how do you go about giving your brain more oxygen?  Take a deep breath in?  Well, yeah, that will work, but only until you next breathe out.  No, to increase the oxygen getting to your brain you need to get more oxygen into your blood stream.  You do that through exercise.  Specifically, aerobic exercise.

Aerobic exercise is all about getting your heart rate up for extended periods of time.  At its core it is exercising your ticker.  Of course other parts of you benefit as well, but it is your heart that will get stronger and more efficient at pumping that red stuff around your body.  And that red stuff is doing what?  It is delivering oxygen to all parts of your body.  And… Your brain gets a good dose of it too.

That oxygen is coming from your lungs, of course.  So it, too, needs to be strong and healthy to keep up with demand.  Luckily that same aerobic exercise you’ve been doing for your heart is also helping your lungs.  It becomes healthier, stronger, and a lot better at what it does.

Aerobic exercise is so good for your entire circulatory system that it will even go so far as to create new blood vessels so more oxygen can get to more parts of your body.  Not only are you filling up the tank, you are making the tank bigger!

How Much

Part of aerobic exercise is endurance, so the benefits only come into play if you do enough of it.  And what is enough, you ask?  30 minutes a day, at least 5 days per week (I’ll let you have weekends off).  You can’t fit 30 minutes of exercise into your day?  Well, ignoring for a moment that I don’t believe you and you shouldn’t believe you either, how about 15 minutes, twice a day, 5 days a week?  That’s easy.  I wouldn’t chop it down any further than that though, otherwise you’d not be getting the endurance side of things happening.

That’s how much aerobic exercise you should be doing each week.  Lets now look at how hard you should be pushing yourself.

How Hard

You’re not exercising aerobically until you get your heart rate up to about 70% to 80% of its maximum (and keep it there for an extended time).  So it varies greatly depending on your current fitness levels and age.  The following infographic (Tristan!  Look, ma! I’m using an infographic) shows the heart rates you should be hitting.

Image credit: © I, Morgoth666

So, a 20 year old, for example would be looking to get their heart rate up to 140 to 160 beats per minute.  A 40 year old… 126 to 144 bpm, and a 65 year old should strive for 109 to 124 bpm.

In case you’re not very good at taking your own pulse, or if you don’t have a sexy little gadget to tell you how fast your heart is beating, then a general rule of thumb is:  Aerobic exercise should make you sweat, but you should still be able to carry on with a conversation (not that anyone will want to talk to you because you’re all sweaty and smell).

See Your Doctor And Start Small

If you are just starting out and it has been a while since you last did any sort of exercise  you absolutely must see your doctor first.  Tell your doc what you want to work up to (30 minutes a day, 5 days a week)  and have him (or her) give you a thorough check up.  Make sure that they test your heart under stress.

Your doctor is also a good person to ask about what sort of exercises you could do (and how to do them), they’d probably even help you put together a complete exercise programme, or at least introduce you to someone that can.

For now, forget about heart rates and the 30 minutes a day hoohar.  Go for a 10 minute walk at a comfortable pace.  Try to do that a couple of times per week.  Increase that to 20 minutes and then 30 minutes as soon as you can, but keep the pace comfortable.  Increase the frequency to 5 days per week, and gradually bring the pace up.  By now your walk is a jog, and before you know it, you’re starting to sweat.

It Doesn’t Happen Over Night

You won’t notice any results or benefits from your exercising for a little while, so you have to hang in there and keep at it.  This is a life time thing after all.  But I promise that you will start feeling improvement after only a few short weeks.  You’ll also be amazed at how exercising your body has nice affects on things like your emotions and stress levels.

Keep your body healthy and exercise it regularly.  Your brain will love you for it and will show its appreciation by working better for you.

Till next time…

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Image credit: © John P. Warren

I’ve never been one to get overly obsessed with statistics, but a couple of months ago I made a decision that meant I should at least keep one eye on my stats.  So, at the beginning of each month I’m going to post a summary of the previous month’s statistics.  I’m not sure how useful this will be for anyone other than me, so I’ll also try to include a run-down of the strategies I’m using to keep the numbers moving in the right direction.

That Decision

I said that I had made a decision a couple of months back that resulted in me needing (wanting) to keep a closer eye on my statistics.  That decision was thus:  Today I am an entrepreneur, and this site is one of my business assets.  I’ve turned pro.  This is no longer a hobby, this is now a part of what I do for a living.

I’m not going to talk much about it in this article because I plan to write about all the behind the scenes stuff in future articles.  One thing that I will say right now though is that I’ll never be secretive about what I’m doing.  Of course, that doesn’t mean I’ll be disclosing and talking about things before they are ready, just that I will once they are.

The coming weeks are going to be busy busy busy for me.  This is going to be fun, guys!

About Stats

When you talk about website statistics there are almost countless numbers of different metrics and things that you can measure.  There are also a similar number of ways and means of collecting the numbers.  And you know what?  I don’t think  any of them are accurate.  As an example, one of my “stat collectors” says I had 12,500 visitors during December, while another one says I had 600.

Why the big difference between those 2?  Only one of them is counting visits by search engine crawlers, spiders, and wankers trying to crack my site with dumb-arsed IIS exploits.  Can you guess which?  From a purely mathematical perspective, the 12.5K visitors is more accurate, but the other stat (600) is more useful.  What’s more important though, is not the numbers themselves, but the increase (or decrease) of the same set of number over two different accounting periods.

To put it another way, the numbers are all bogus but it’s OK because they are consistently bogus.   I’m choosing to look at them as a guideline to show me if I’m improving or not.  For this blog, that is more than sufficient.

How Am I Counting

I’ve decided to use Google Analytics for most of my stat tracking.  Not because I think it is accurate (because it’s really not), but because it’s easy.  It also allows me to look at the numbers in a huge amount of different ways (most of which I’ll be completely ignoring but nice to know it’s there if I want it).

I’ll also be looking at Feedburner , and email list subscriber numbers.  Lets not forget Alexa.  I’ll be reporting her numbers too.

SYcom Stats For December 2010

Quick aside:  In case you haven’t noticed, “SYcom” is how I abbreviate “Steve Youngs dot Com”.  The correct pronunciation is:  sigh-com, not: ess-why-com

Notes And Strategies

I’m very happy with all of those numbers.  The ones that should be going up are going up, and the ones that should be coming down are coming down.  That tells me that I’m doing something right.  One of the things that I didn’t track in December was the number of comments I left on other blogs.  I’ll be tracking that from now on.

Oh, and don’t worry about those big fat zeroes beside “List Subscribers”.  It’s because I don’t have a list yet.

The Alexa ranking is absolutely phenomenal!  I am very proud of it.  It’s the first time I’ve ever had a site with a ranking below 1 million.  I also know that the improvements there are going to be a lot slower from now on.  It’s easier to drop from 3 million to 1 million than it is to drop from 400K to 300K.  As my  Alexa ranking improves, the harder it becomes to gain further improvement.  Either that or I’ll be pushing Google off of top spot some time next week.

My goal for my Alexa rank is to be sub 100K by my birthday this year.  I’m not telling when that is, lets just say I’m well and truly on track.

2011! Here I am, baby!  I’ve hit the ground running, and I’m not about to let up.

Till next time…

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Image credit: © valcanno

As I sit here writing this article, the year (and the decade) are fast drawing to a close.   Right now there is 80 minutes left of my 2010.  So even though I didn’t publish this article until 2011 (by my timezone) it is technically the last one that I’ll write for 2010.  Many people touched my life during 2010, and this article is for them.  I want to say

Thanks!

Family

Before I talk about anyone else in my family, I want to make special mention of my eldest daughter, Tiffany.

Tiffany. I want you to know just how wonderful and special you are to me.  Never a day goes by when you are not in my thoughts.  I truly love you with all of my heart.

I know that the rest of you guys are with me 24/7, and you all know how I feel about you and how much I appreciate you, but how often do I get to tell you in such a public way?

Michelle. What can I say… you’re awesome!  I mean what other woman would put up with my moods, and “bastard-mode”?  Thank you so much for being you and making me a better person for it.  ”I love you” just doesn’t seem enough, but it’s all I’ve got, I’m afraid.

Kaitlyn.  Every day I look at you and see that you’ve become even more beautiful than you were the previous day.  A little older, a little taller, a little smarter, a little more mature.  You are very quickly turning into a fabulous young lady.  I love you so much it hurts.  Thank you for being awesome and wonderful, Kitty-Kat.

Blake.  You’re my man!  I think you have the biggest heart in the whole wide world.  I’ve never met a more loving and caring soul as you, son.  You always cheer me up when I’m feeling down or sad.  Thank you for that.  You are, by far, the best ever son any man could ever dream to have.  You so totally rock, dude!

Old Friends

Here are a number of people that I’ve known since long before 2010 who I’d like to reach out to and say thanks for being in my life.  Each and every one of you is dear to me and special in some way.

Erik Arneson.  Erik is one of my oldest friends, we go back more than 10 years.  And yet, we’ve never met.  You’re awesome, man… for an american.  Thanks so much for keeping in touch over the years and I hope we continue to do so for a shit load more years to come.

Sebastian Freundt.  Sebastian is a kraut mathematician who used to be cool.  A while back he found himself a woman and nobody’s seen him since.  You do the math!  No, I take it back, you’re still cool, mate.  All I ask is that we get to see a bit more of you in 2011.  Danke sehr für Sein ein guter Freund.

Nelson Ferreira.  Nelson is the quintessential international man.  He is Portuguese, living in New York City, married to a Brasilian.  He’s also one of the best mates a guy could ever ask for.  Thank you, Nelson, for everything you’ve done for me personally, and for all the amazing stuff you do with hacking SXEmacs.  You rock, mate!

Horst Burkhardt.  I’ve known Horst for a number of years now.  He tries his best to be helpful in and around the SXEmacs project.  Very often he succeeds too.  He’s a young guy, (I’m pretty sure I have food in my refrigerator that is older than he is), but you’d never know it by talking to him.  You’ve been a tremendous friend, Horst.  Thank you so much for cheering me up and making me smile all those countless times.

New Friends

Here are some folks that came into my life and meant something to me during 2010.  Actually, I think one or two may be from before 2010, but not far enough before to put them into the “old friends” category just yet.

Marcus Eskilsson.  Marcus is from Sweden and likes to hang out on IRC with the other SXEmacs developers.  You’re always great to chat to, mate, and I know I’m not the only one there who gets great benefit from your presence.  You may not have contributed much in the way of code to SXEmacs, but your ideas and feedback are awesome.  Thank you for that, mate.  Oh, and guys, Marcus assures me that we are right about Swedish women… they’re all busty blonde nymphomaniacs who never wear any clothes!

Ben Lumley.  If you took a big box, threw in a life coach, a blogger, a martial artist that was a menace to house bricks everywhere, the Buddha, and Yoda, and then gave it a good shake, out would pop a Ben Lumley.  Ben, I’ve honestly never met anyone who can put up with my crap as well and as calmly as you do.  You’re awesome, man!  I really enjoy our chats and I nearly always come away from them feeling like a better person than what I was before we started.  Thank you!

Eleanor Edwards (or, El, as she likes to be called now).  El is a lovely lass from Wales that saw something wrong with the world and decided to fix it.  The difference between El and most other people who “say” they’re gonna fix the world is that El is actually doing it.  She started a charity, Give-A-Brick, which is going great guns helping all kinds of people, and she is making it her life’s work to put a smile on as many faces as she can.  El, you’ve put a smile on my face more times than I can count.  From the bottom of my heart, I love you, and thank you.

Peter Pellica (you know him as @AussieSire, or just plain Sire).  Being an Aussie, he’s automatically awesome.  Peter’s been blogging for quite a while now and I have learned so much from him.  He’s also as genuine as they come.  I know my life, and especially my blog, are a lot better for having known you, mate.  Thank you.  BTW, Kaitlyn thinks you have a funny name (Sire).  :-)

Barbara Ling.  She’s the newbie to my list of awesome friends, but she is by no means any less awesome than the rest.  I can’t make up my mind what I like best about Barbara… her business and marketing acumen and experience (experience that goes back to before a lot of these wannabe Internet marketing gurus were a twinkle in their Daddy’s eye), her incredible energy, her completely crazy sense of humour, her old-school UNIX skills, or the fact that she appears to have a slight problem telling a dog from a moose.  In the very short time I’ve known you, Barbara, I’ve been impressed, amazed, confused, and laughed me effing arse off.  Thank you for being so… erm… you.  You’re one of a kind, and I love it!.

Steve Scott.  Hands up if you’ve ever heard the corny line: “you can talk the talk, but can you walk the walk”?  Well, in Steve you’ll find a man that can and does walk the walk.  Steve is another one who will blow your genuine-meter off the scale.  He likes to teach, and if you read his stuff I promise you that you will learn. and learn a truck load.  Steve, thank you so much for teaching me and for having such an impact on my life.  You rock, dude, you really do.

Future Friends

I’m going to rattle off a few names here of people that I have had some contact with and who have left a positive impression on me, but they’re more acquaintance than friend.  A state that I’m am 100% convinced will change in 2011.

Tristan Higbee

Jimi Jones

Patricia

Ryan Renfrew

Alex Whalley

Rick LaPoint

You’re all awesome in your own way, and I want to thank you all for doing what you do and doing it so well.

I’m sure that there are many many other people I could have and should have added to this list and I’m really sorry if I missed you.

Have an AWESOME 2011 everyone!

Till next time…

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Image credit: © MichaelBussell

A few weeks ago I was ultra-mega-organised with my blog.  I was nearly two weeks in advance on my articles and everything was running like clockwork.  Today?  Hmm, well I’m just now sitting down to write this article which should have been published approximately ten hours ago.   What’s gone wrong?  Basically… routine (or lack thereof).

The Birth

Routine is such an integral part of our lives that it begins the day they bring you home from the hospital.  You then spend the entire rest of your life either learning new routines, or reinforcing old ones.

If you were lucky enough to have had responsible parents, on that day they brought you home they began trying to get you into good routines.  Regular sleeping times, regular bath times, and things like that.  Even the way that your parents went about feeding you, bathing you, playing with you, or putting you down to sleep… the very mechanics of it, were all a deliberate attempt to get you into a good set of routines.

The key thing here is that during this part of your life you knew very little about the world, so little, in fact, that you needed somebody to set your routines for you.  I hope you were paying attention at the time, because there were some incredibly valuable lessons in those routines.

Potty Training

Aside:  I’ve been wondering how long it’d be before I talked about poop on here

OK, a serious question:  When was the last time you forgot to go to the toilet and ended up pooping your pants?  Hopefully, it was back when you were still wearing a nappy (diaper).  So why are you so good at these things now?  How is it that you can get through an entire day without one solitary bathroom related accident?

Because you have a routine.

When you were a toddler your parents would take you by the hand and sit you down on your potty at very specific times during the day and night.  After any meal, right before bed time, as soon as you wake in the morning, and a few other times during the day.  And whenever you managed to do the deed while you were sitting on the potty, we parents would do a big song and dance and heap the praise on with a trowel.  It was a momentous event.  Pooping in potty — G O O D!!

There’s a funny thing about humans, they all love praise for a job well done.  You loved the rewards and bonuses of pooping where and when you were supposed to so much that you subconsciously trained your body to only perform these feats at specific times.  Hands up if you wake up at almost the exact same time every night to go take a leak?  I can pretty much set my clock to Michelle’s middle of the night bathroom routine.

The bathroom routine is so ingrained and so solid a habit that nothing can upset it (actually, this is not completely true, but for the sake of cleanliness, lets just assume it is).  Think about it.  Is there any circumstance where you’d voluntarily soil or wet yourself rather than go to the bathroom?  I don’t care if you’re on the phone with the President of the United States, or the Queen of England, you would find some way to excuse yourself and go to the bathroom.

All righty, that’s more than enough poop talk I think.  The point I’m trying to make is that it is possible to have routines (BTW, “habit” is another name for “routine”) that are so strong that no force on earth can displace them.

Setting Routines — The Parental Method

If you are a parent you’ll be able to relate to this, and if you’re not, hopefully your imagination will kick in well enough to understand what I’m about to say.

When you are a parent trying to teach and guide your children, trying to instill good habits (routines), there are a number of rules and laws that you’ll adhere to.

• Start small.  No matter what it is, you always start small.  You don’t just turn to your 18 month old and proclaim: “That’s it, lad, from now on, no more nappies, you can use the toilet like the rest of us”.  In fact you’ll usually start so small that you’ll take the first few steps with your child.  Hand-holding to the extreme.
• Non-stop encouragement.  Every step of the way, you encourage and motivate your child.  You never let up.  You become your child’s own personal cheer-leading squad.
• Highlight the wins; downplay the losses.  Whenever there is a win, or a step in the right direction, you make a big huge show of it and it’s praise city.  But when there are the inevitable losses, there’s no admonishment or punishment.  You’ll probably just point out the good things they’ve accomplished so far and encourage them to try again.  When was the last time you saw a cheer-leading squad punish or ridicule their team for a messed up play?
• Test the boundaries.  All the while you are encouraging and hand-holding, you are also continually testing their limits.  A gentle push to take them a little outside their comfort zone.  You’ll usually ramp up the encouragement and win highlighting while you do this.  And sometime it hurts us, the parents, more than it does the child, but we also know it is an essential part of growing.  This is actually the hardest part of the whole deal, and not enough pushing is just as dangerous as too much pushing. (geez, who’d wanna be a parent?)
• No doubts.  At not point, not even for a second do you ever think that they can’t do it.  It literally never enters your mind.  And you know what?  Your kids can tell.  They know if you’re just faking it.  Don’t ask me how, but even a new born can tell when their parents aren’t 110% certain of what they’re doing.
• NEVER GIVE IN.  This is it, ladies and gentlemen.  The deal maker.  You absolutely NEVER EVER give in.  No matter how much it hurts.  No matter what the cost to you in time and effort.  When it comes to your children you will never stop until they grow into the remarkable human beings that you know that they are.

Be Your Own Parent

Imagine what you could achieve if you applied what you now know about how a parent will teach and guide a child toward good routines to your own life and your own routines.  Give yourself the same help and encouragement that you would give your own children.  Help yourself to grow into an amazing human being.  And understand that it all comes back to having good routines.

Till next time…

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Image credit: © cannonsnapper

You wake up Sunday morning, stumble into the bathroom, and even though you’re still half asleep;  in the back of your mind you are thinking:

oh god, I hope it flushes this time…

Face It — It’s Going To Break One Day

It’s true.  The chances are that almost everything you own will one day break or stop working as well as it did when you bought it.  Even the stuff you don’t own, but only use, like the apartment you live in.  Sometimes these things will break due to normal wear and tear, sometimes they’ll break because of poor manufacturing, and sometimes through misuse or accident.  No matter how something breaks, once it’s broken you can’t use it any more, and you have a choice to make:

Replace it, fix it, or trash it.

Obviously there’ll be a lot of extenuating circumstances that will influence your decision, like how badly it is broken, how important the item is to you, how much it would cost to have it fixed, and things like that.  But what if you had another choice?

What if you could fix it yourself?

Owning The Spanner

Think, for a moment, about the advantages and benefits of being able to fix a few things around the house…

• Cost.  Fixing things yourself is nearly always a lot cheaper than having somebody else fix it for you.
• Efficiency.  Do it yourself and it’s done now!  Take it back to where you bought it and nine times out of ten they have to send it away to have it repaired.  That can take days, weeks, or even months.
• Freedom. From guilt and ridicule.  You broke the thing, but if you can fix it before anyone finds out…
• Satisfaction.  The warm fuzzies and satisfaction  you will get after you have fixed the thing can sometimes be immeasurable.
• Bragging rights.  You fixed it!  You da maan (or woman)!  Yes you can, and should, brag about it.
• Self-esteem.  Related to the last couple of points, is your self-esteem.  It will get a mighty boost every time you fix something.
• Education.  To fix something you need to know the basics of how the thing works.  So every time you manage to fix something you’ve never fixed before, you are learning and growing.

With those benefits, surely you owe it to yourself to at least give it a go.  Maybe not on all the repair jobs you have around the house, but certainly on some of the smaller ones.

Become A Boy Scout

Do you remember the boy scout motto?  Be prepared! Well the same thing holds true for basic repairs.  You can’t fix stuff if you’re not prepared.  And the first step to that is having the right tools.

Don’t worry, you don’t need to turn into a full-blown home-handyman or mechanic or technician.  But having a few tools will save you loads of time and money.  At a minimum, I’d suggest you have:

• A medium sized carpenter’s hammer.
• A screwdriver set that has both flat edge and phillips head (cross) screwdrivers.  Get a set that has 3 or 4 different sizes of both types.
• A mini screwdriver set.  These are those tiny screwdrivers that jewelers use.
• Two or three pairs of pliers of different sizes.  Make sure you include at least one pair of needle-nosed pliers.
• Half a dozen spanners of various sizes.  Try to get the ones that are open-ended at one end and ringed at the other.  I’d probably suggest you have both metric and imperial sizes.
• A set of allen keys (sometimes called “hex keys”)
• Duct tape.  This is worth its weight in gold.  Seriously!
• Super glue.
• Electrical tape.
• Small paint brush.  Don’t think: painting.  Think: archaeology and brushing away the dirt.  That should give you an idea of the sort of brush I’m talking about.
• A candle.  No, I’m not kidding.  Candle wax is the perfect thing for lubricating those sticky drawers in your bedroom.
• An all-purpose spray lubricant like WD-40.
• An “odds and sods” box.  This is a box of all kinds of little things like nuts, washers, screws, bits of wire, anything really.  I don’t want you to go out and buy all the bits for your odds and sods box, you just collect it and scrounge it from all over the place.  Before you throw something out, give it a quick look to see if anything useful could be salvaged from it.  That sort of thing.

A couple of (slightly) more advanced things may be:

• A multi-meter for testing circuits and electrical items.
• A soldering kit.
• A power drill.
• A spirit-level.  This is  device to test if a surface or edge is level.  A large nut tied to some string can suffice too.

I would not be in the slightest bit surprised if most of you already had a good deal of the things I’ve just listed here laying about your house.  But having the right tools is only part of the story.  To be fully prepared you will also need several bucket loads of common sense, a good deal of patience, logical and lateral thinking, and a willingness to give it a go.

Nobody Knows Everything

You can’t be expected to know the ins and outs of everything so that means you’ll need some extra resources to get the job done from time to time.  For home repairs, one of the best places for information is your local hardware store.  Sure they’ll try to sell you something, but these guys generally know their stuff and are usually very helpful and willing to answer your questions.

Another great resource, of course, is Google.  It has the answers to any question you could ever possibly think of.  Lets say that you just slipped and put your elbow through a wall?  Search Google for “how do I fix a hole in a wall“.  I haven’t tried that, but I bet the first couple of results will tell you in step by step detail exactly how to fix that wall.

Think It Through

A lot of the time, things are much easier and simpler than what you first suspect.  Do you know what the number one cause of electrical appliance faults is?  That the thing isn’t plugged in or turned on.  Always, always, always check the obvious things first.

I’ll run you through a quick example of your hideously expensive computer system being completely unresponsive.  Here are the steps that I would take:

1. Are the lights in the room on?  Are other electrical devices still working?  Yes to both means it’s not a power failure of some kind.  This can be done without leaving your chair, just look up and see if the light is on, and listen for the TV or stereo playing.
2. Press the computer’s “on” button.  Did it come on?  Yes:  Congratulations, you’ve fixed it!  No: bugger. Read on.
3. Is the monitor turned on?  Often a computer monitor has a separate power outlet and needs to be turned on independently of the computer.    Is its power lead secure at both ends and is the wall outlet turned on?  Is the monitor’s data cable secure at both ends (monitor end and computer end).
4. Is the power lead plugged into the wall outlet firmly and is the wall outlet turned on?  Is the power lead plugged firmly into the computer?
5. Check all the other leads and cables coming out the back of your computer.  It’s not unusual for a loose keyboard cable to prevent a computer from booting so it really is worth your trouble to ensure all cables are secure and fitted properly.
6. Stop and think.  Double check what you’ve done so far.
7. Unplug everything and open up the computer case.  Don’t touch anything inside, just look and see if anything appears to be out of place.  Also have a good sniff.  Does it smell burnt?  Bad sign if it does.
8. Being extraordinarily careful of static electrical charge, check that all leads and connections are all firmly in place and fitted.  Computers get quite hot and when things get hot they expand, and when they cool down they shrink.  This continual expanding and shrinking causes a thing called “circuit creep” which is basically where the boards and leads literally “walk” themselves out of their connections.
9. How much dust and dirt is there?  Heaps of dust means poor air-flow.  Poor air-flow means over-heating.  Over-heating means one day Mr Computer will refuse to work.  Give the whole thing a damn good clean out.
10. Without putting the lid back on, plug in the bare essentials (monitor and keyboard) and see if it will turn on now.
11. When you turn it on, make sure all the fans are spinning.
12. If you are not back in business at this point, more drastic measures are called for.  Depending on what spare parts I have at my disposal I’ll start swapping bits and narrow it down through a process of elimination.

After all of that, one of two things would have happened.  Either the problem is fixed, or the problem has been narrowed down to one or maybe two faulty components.  A hundred dollar hard disc is easier on your pocket than a two thousand dollar computer.

What I was trying to illustrate there is that basic trouble-shooting and repair is all about being methodical.  Take it step by step and more often than not you’ll find the solution.

Fellowship Of The Spanner

The next time something breaks, instead of throwing it away, or picking up the phone to call a repair man, ask yourself:  Can I fix this myself?  If you think you can, go for it!  If you have absolutely no idea how, do a little research.   You may just find that it isn’t too difficult to fix.

Till next time…

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Image credit: © Kaitlyn Youngs

Everybody loves burgers, but burgers that you make at home are heaps better than the ones you buy at the shops.  And they are fun to make too.  Here’s how I make the most yummy burgers in the world.

Prep Time: 5 – 10 minutes  Cooking Time: 8 minutes  Serves: 4

Ingredients

4 x Burger buns
4 x Meat patties
Lettuce
Sliced Beetroot
Tomato
4 x Eggs
4 x Mushrooms
1 x Small onion
Cheese
Butter
Tomato sauce
BBQ sauce
Salt and pepper

Method

Burgers are really easy to make, but you need to be organised and make sure you have everything ready before you start cooking the meat patties.

1. Cut the burger buns in half and toast them just on the inside.  This will make the buns a little bit crunchy but still nice and soft at the same time.  I put them under the griller in the oven to toast them.
2. While the buns are toasting slice the tomatoes and onion and mushrooms.  If you don’t have sliced cheese, slice the cheese too.  Make sure that you have enough of each ingredient for four burgers.
3. Butter the toasted buns and then put tomato sauce on the bottom half and BBQ sauce on the top half.
4. Put some salt and pepper and a little bit of olive oil on the meat patties and then put them under the grill to cook.  After about 4 minutes turn them over and cook the other side.  Be careful though because the grill is very very hot.
5. While the meat patties are cooking put the sliced up onions and mushrooms into a frying pan on the stove with some olive oil.
6. Once the patties are cooked put one on the bottom half of each burger bun and put some of the fried mushrooms and onions on each one.
7. Crack the eggs into the frying pan and fry the eggs.  You have to be quick now because while the eggs are cooking you put the rest of the ingredients onto the burgers.
8. The next thing to go on the burger is the cheese, and then a couple of slices of tomato, and then beetroot.  Don’t put the lettuce on yet.
9. When the eggs are cooked put one on each burger.  This can be tricky because the burgers are pretty high already from the other ingredients and stuff slips off if you knock it.  I generally get my Dad to do this bit.
10. Finally put a piece of lettuce on each one and put the top half of the bun on.

I hope you like the burgers and I guarantee  you won’t be hungry afterwards!

By Kaitlyn Youngs

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Image credit: © rayparnova

We’ve all heard of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), and it is really important so I don’t really want you to forget it.  But I want to coin a new acronym that is just as important (perhaps even more so) than SEO… I give you:  SMO.

SMO — Social Media Optimisation

SMO is all about getting the most out of social media, but it’s more than that.  It is also about what and how you give to social media.

SMO Means:

• Getting the most from social media, or to put it another way, it’s about not wasting all day on social sites.  Use them in a productive way.
• Being genuine while you are using SM sites.  Be yourself.  For some reason, when most people have a computer screen between them and the person they are talking to they think they can be or do anything they like and turn into some sort of fantasy (almost a super hero) type figure.  All thoughts of the other person’s feelings go right out the window.
• Engaging with people!  Social media is all about people.  Using social media sites means you want to interact and engage with people.  Do so.
• Not being a jerk.  For the people that turn into the fantasy character when they are on SM, well, guess what?  You’re not witty, you’re not famous, you have no authority or respect in our eyes.  You’re just a jerk that is wasting our time.
• Not spamming.  Trust us, we will find the porn sites all by ourselves, we don’t need your help.  We’re also not going to fall for your get rich quick schemes, and you have lousy prices for viagra.  You’re wasting your own time and our time by polluting the Internet with this shit.  Stop it or we will report you to the authorities.
• Not over-promoting.  Yes, one of the benefits of SMO is self-promotion, or the promotion of your product or service or brand.  But don’t overdo it.  Unfortunately, I cannot really say how much is too much.  This is something that only the people in your SM network can tell you.  Tip: they tell you by leaving.
• Being approachable.  The ‘S’ in ‘SMO’ stands for ‘social’.  You’re not being overly social if nobody feels that they can interact with you.
• Being an active participant.  You add value.  You answer questions.  You initiate contact with other people in a positive way.

Tips For Better SMO

Here are a list of things that can help you get the most out of your SMO.

1. Schedule it into your day.  Block off an amount of time in your diary for social media.  Probably several blocks.
2. Make sure your “profiles” are all complete and up to date.  Oh god, don’t look at my Facebook, I deleted everything (and everyone) from my Facebook profile the other week and haven’t redone it yet.  Oops.  Guess what I’ll be doing RSN™ (real soon now)
3. Your profiles should direct people to a special “landing page” instead of simply sending them to your site’s front page.  On this page you can tell people more about who you are and what you do, and you can do it knowing that everyone reading it has come from a particular place, like Twitter.  This gives you the opportunity to put things on this page that are designed especially for this audience.  You could, for example, have the times that you are most likely to be available on that social media site.  Please, if you are an Internet Marketer, do not use this SM landing page as a sales “squeeze” page.  Link to your sales pages from the SM landing page.
4. I discourage anonymity.  It’s up to you, but think about this… how can you be yourself and genuine if you are lying about who you are?  You can keep your private details private without having to resort to fake names.
5. If you are having a crap day, perhaps this is the day you keep away from SM.
6. If somebody pisses you off or attacks you online be careful how you handle it.  Most of the time all you need to do is ignore it.
7. Do not ever say anything to anyone that you would not be prepared to say to their face.
8. If you do not respond in some way to all genuine attempts to contact you, then you are a jerk.  Plain and simple.  And I don’t care how many followers you have, or how famous and important that you think you are.  One possible way of dealing with this if you cannot physically keep up with the engagements because you have a gazillion followers is to have a FAQ on you landing page.  Take the most common questions you are being asked and answer them in the FAQ.  Oh, and make sure people get to know you have that FAQ… tweet about it and mention it on your profiles.

As you can see, there’s no rocket science here.  It is all just common sense and being human.  Don’t forget that social media is all about being social.  That means interacting with people.  Real people.  So the vast majority of your time on social media sites should be used for interacting with people.  I know that I often fail at this, I’ll get into a groove where my Twitter stream seems to carry nothing but RT’s of other people’s awesome blog articles, or promoting my own articles.  I even have the odd ad or affiliate link go out too.  But at other times I try my best to engage with people.  To have conversations (sometimes not easy at 140 characters, but definitely doable).

Before anyone mentions it in the comments, yes I know that I don’t have a SM landing page.  But I promise you, this is a temporary situation.

Links And Thanks

I want to finish this up with two things.  First a shout out and big thank you to Tristan Higbee for inspiring this article.  Tristan had mentioned something about social media on Twitter last week that gave me the idea for “SMO”.  Thanks for that, Tristan.

Second, just a few days ago Brankica from Live Your Love left a comment on one of my articles here that had a ComLuv link back to an awesome article titled “Top 10 Ways To Lose Twitter Followers“.  It’s a great read and illustrates more common sense ways of dealing with social media.  SMO comes naturally to Brankica.

Till next time…

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It melts in your mouth!

Oh my god!  You guys are in for such a treat with this one.  This has got to be one of the tastiest things I’ve ever made.  If you like seafood, you’re gonna love this.

Prep Time: 10 – 15 minutes  Cooking Time: 20 minutes  Serves: 4

Ingredients

1 or 2 Barramundi fillets (enough for 4 steaks 8cm x 12cm x 2cm)
4 or 5 Decent sized potatoes
16 Asparagus stalks (or enough for four people)
1 Garlic clove
1 Tablespoon of butter
Salt and pepper to taste
Extra virgin olive oil

Sauce:

2 Tablespoons of butter
400ml Cream
A few sprigs of fresh parsley
Half a dozen or so fresh sage leaves
1 Thingy of fresh lemon grass
Juice of half a lime
2 Teaspoons of corn flour (optional, for thickening the sauce)

Method

• First up, peel and chop up your spuds and get them into your steamer.  Yeah, you can boil the spuds if you don’t have a steamer.  Do this first because cooking the potatoes is the most time consuming part of all of this.  It should take around about 20 minutes.
• At this point, I’d do the sauce, but I’ll list the instructions for that after the rest of the main instructions.
• Very finely chop the garlic clove (use a garlic crush if you’d prefer).  Put the chopped garlic into a small container or cup with the tablespoon of butter.  Grab a fork and mix the heck out of it.  Once you’ve done that, put it aside.  It’s going in the mash later.
• Chop off the woody bases of the asparagus stalks and pop them into the steamer.  They’ll only take 7 – 10 minutes in the steamer till they’re ready (hint: asparagus ain’t crunchy, but it doesn’t fall apart either)
• Once the potatoes are cooked grab your potato masher and squish em up.  Add in the garlic butter you prepared earlier, and perhaps 20 – 30ml of the cream.  Now get a fork and whisk it all up until it is nice and smooth.
• Slice the barramundi into rectangular steaks approximately  8cm x 12cm, and season them on both sides with a little salt and pepper.  Drizzle on some extra virgin olive oil, and lightly rub the oil and seasoning in.  Carefully place the steaks into a hot frying pan, skin side down.  The key to cooking fish is don’t overcook it!  And don’t mess with it while it’s cooking.  Just put it in the pan and then don’t touch that sucker until you want to turn it over.  Which you’ll be doing no more than 3 minutes after you put it in (maybe even less).  Use a spatula (that’s “egg-flip” to you heathens) and turn them over carefully.  I mean it, be careful, otherwise those steaks could fall apart.  2 or 3 minutes later, and these puppies are done!

Method (sauce)

The actual cooking of the sauce we’ll do in the same way you melt down chocolate for cooking… in a bowl (glass or metal, whichever you have.  Mine are metal) sitting on a saucepan of boiling water.  The idea is that you don’t burn it and it gets cooked gently.  And you absolutely do not get it hot enough to boil.

• Finely chop the parsley, sage, and lemon grass.  You can put the sage and parsley together and chop them at the same time.  Chop the lemon grass as finely as you can by itself and then add that into the parsley and sage.  Run your knife through it a few times and get it nice and fine.
• From here on you do everything at the stove.  Into the bowl you have on the saucepan of boiling water, put in the butter and let it melt.
• When the butter is completely melted add in the herbs and mix it all in with a teaspoon.  Actually, from this point you gotta pretty much be stirring it constantly, but don’t worry, the whole thing only takes a few minutes.
• Squeeze in the juice from half a lime (hang onto the other half to squeeze on top of the completed dish once it is plated)
• Add a tiny splash of extra virgin olive oil.
• Now add the cream (hold a little bit back to use in the mashed potatoes), and get a whisk (spoon or fork would be fine too) and gently whisk it.  The sauce is done when it is hot to the touch.  If you like your sauce to be a little thicker add in a bit of corn flour to thicken it.  Be careful not to make it too think though, you want to be able to pour this sauce.

Plating Up

Alright, now lets plate this baby up and make it look all fancy like they do in the restaurants.

Onto the centre of the plate goes the mash first.  Sculpt that into a brick roughly the same dimensions as the barramundi steak, perhaps one and a half to two times the height.

Lay the barramundi steak on top of the mash.  The fish shouldn’t touch the plate anywhere, so don’t lay it cross-ways, but along it.  I hope you get what I mean there.

Next comes the asparagus.  Lay them diagonally across the barramundi.  You want it to hang over both edges of the barra.  It won’t droop because you didn’t overcook it.

Pour the sauce over the top of it all.  Squeeze a little lime juice over that, and maybe a few drops of good quality extra virgin olive oil.  Garnish with a sprig of parsley if that’s your thing, and you’re good to go!

Alterations

There’s not much I’d change in this one.  A couple of things you might try could be to use beans instead of asparagus, and maybe grate a little parmesan into the sauce.  You could also experiment with different herbs.

Oh, one thing that you could do is use a different type of fish.  I realise that barramundi wouldn’t be available everywhere, even if it is the tastiest fish on the planet.  Don’t think I’d use oily fish though like salmon or tuna.  Although…  Sorry, I nearly wandered off there.  You see I love seafood… all seafood.  I’ve never found anything edible from an ocean that I didn’t like.

OK, well that’s it.  It’s a pretty easy recipe really.  I’d love to hear (down there in the comments) what you think of it.  And if you make if for someone, don’t blame me if they want you  to cook it for them again and again and again.

Till next time…

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