One of my friends from our London office, Moray Mclaren, recently released his debut single, “We Got Time”. The music video for it, shot by the director, David Wilson, is embeded below, and apparently won “Best Budget Video” at the recent UK MVAs.

I think you’ll agree, that it’s a damn impressive video, and a pretty good tune too. The making of video is really interesting, and well worth a watch to see how they pulled off all that impressive animation.

After numerous emails to my hosts support staff, and a DM to them on Twitter, I still haven’t heard anything decent back from them regarding the fact that during their mail server migration they deleted my email accounts and any email forwarding I’d setup. All I got was a note on the support call saying it had been escalated and they’d let me know once they’d been able to look at it. Considering I can see exactly what has happened to the accounts, and all it would have taken is for them to setup one simple forwarding rule to get my main account running again, I would have expected a better response than they’d escalated the request. In fact, the tool to make this change has been locked down over the migration, which is fine, but that’s only so people don’t create email accounts on the older system during the migration. Basically, after three days without my email I’m pretty annoyed about the whole thing.

Instead of sitting here waiting for a response to say someone was actually done, or a simple explanation as to why all my email accounts and forwarding rules we deleted in the first place, I’ve decided to move my email elsewhere.

I’ve signed up for a Standard Google Apps account, pointed my MX records at them, and in the next few days I should be fully up and running over there. I’ve noticed a few emails coming into my account, but the MX record change hasn’t propogated fully out over the web yet. So if you’re trying to send me an email and it bounces, please use one of the other methods I mentioned earlier, or wait a day or so and everything should be working again.

I’ve used GMail, Google Docs, etc. for a while, but this is the first time I’ve taken a look at Google Apps. So far I like the way it’s setup, and that I can create other user accounts under my domain really easily. I think I may have to start using it for other projects in the future.

My hosts are migrating their email servers at the moment and appear to have run into a few problems. As it stands, any emails to my me are being rejected saying the account doesn’t exist, which is somewhat annoying.

Hopefully this will be resolved by tomorrow morning, but with these things it’s always difficult to tell. If you want to get in touch before then I would recommend sending me a DM over Twitter or leaving a comment here on the website.

This has been a particularly difficult week.

When I got sick over the weekend I expected to be able to shake it off after a few days of resting, but that didn’t seem to want to happen. The fourth day of being sick I came into work for a meeting, and attempted to stay for at least half the day, but by the end of the meeting an hour and a half later I was a complete wreck. So I made my way home and promptly went back to bed to try to finally shake this bug off.

Yesterday I woke up feeling much better than I had, but still not completely 100%. I dragged myself out of bed, and after the usual morning routine found myself standing at the bus stop waiting on the “turns up whenever the hell it feels like” 36. I was able to last the full day yesterday but started to feel pretty tired by 4pm. Today I feel so much better than yesterday and have been able to actually think properly, and get some of the backlog of work off my desk. I’m almost back to 100% again and I think after relaxing over the weekend I should be completely back to normal by Monday.

I’m going to risk a couple of beers after work to see how I handle them, and then head home early. The fact that I have to work tomorrow, while normally annoying, is in fact a good thing this week. It means that even if I feel like staying out I can’t. It’s a good way to keep me out of trouble this weekend.

Especially considering I’m going to be getting myself into enough trouble next weekend.

** update ** You know how I said I was going to come home early… well that didn’t happen. I had too much fun and ended up getting home at 2.30am

It seems like I’ve been sick more in the last few years than in the entire decade before that.

I started feeling a little off on Saturday morning, but had a busy day ahead of me so I ignored it and went out to meet people at the pub. Then I was out that evening, where I carried on drinking and without realising it started feeling worse. I ended up leaving the night out early because I assumed I was just a bit too drunk.

I woke up really early Sunday morning, somewhere around 5.30, because my throat had become so sore, and I realised my entire body ached. I got myself a glass of iced water which helped with the sore throat enough that I was able to get back to sleep. Almost my entire day yesterday involved me trying to sleep as much as possible, and drinking as much water as I could even though it was quite painful to do so. I had a lot I wanted to get done on Sunday but that never happened because of this virus or whatever the hell it is.

Today I woke up around 6am and felt almost as bad as I had on Sunday morning, although most of the ache over the rest of my body had lessened, although my throat was just as bad. I had lots to do at work today too, including prep for a couple of meetings I have tomorrow that I just couldn’t do. So I email my boss to say I was too sick to come in, and then managed to get back to sleep for a few more hours. I’ve spent the day lying in bed, drifting off too sleep now and again, but left my laptop beside my bed so I could check emails every so often to try to stay on top of as much work as possible.

I had hoped that I would have recovered enough tonight that I would be able to do a few of the things I missed out on the last couple of days, but I don’t think I really have the energy to use my brain in any major way. I’m not shuffling around like a broken down old man anymore, which means this bug is leaving my system and I don’t hurt all over, but my throat is still really sore. I’m hoping that sorts itself out throughout the night, but I need to be in work whether it’s better or not tomorrow.

The one entertaining moment from all this is when I tried to talk earlier today for the first time since Saturday evening, and what actually escaped from my mouth made me sound like a zombie hunting for brains. My flatmate looked at me and struggled not to laugh… actually he didn’t struggle at all, he just laughed at me, questioned my masculinity and then asked if I ever went to work… the cheeky b*****d!

Things have improved since then, although I still feel pretty crappy, and I’m hoping I improve greatly overnight. If I don’t these meetings tomorrow are going to be interesting.

I am a highly skilled procrastinator. With the deftest of touches I can send myself away from my required goal to complete some unimportant, trivial task because it appears to be something I need to do. That touch is so light, usually an hour or so will pass before I realise I’ve become completely side tracked from what I really wanted, or needed to do ensuring that I end up quite annoyed with myself, and promise myself that I’m not going to let it happen again. Of course I begin the following evening with good intentions only to be side tracked by something and repeat the cycle all over again.

It’s getting to the point where I’m achieving nothing,  and my to-do list is growing longer and longer. Something needed to be done!

I spent a some time earlier looking over my ever growing to-do list and trying to figure out what was the most important item, or items on there with the intention of blitzing through them while I have this “must get things done” mentality. Then of course I realised I was spending extra time organising my to-do list instead of actually completing the tasks on it. It was around this point, (after a little swearing at myself for being so damned sneaky with the procrastination), that I made a decision to tackle the problem head on.

I haven’t broken down my to-do list in any decent manner. I haven’t even chosen tasks that compliment each other and making them easier to complete. Instead I’ve taken five things from the list completely at random. Then I’ve taken those five tasks, written them up on the little white board I have, put that white board beside my desk at eye level, with a message roughly saying that they need to be completed tonight before I can go to bed. I would share the exact message with you, but it’s quite… forceful in it’s language because I really was annoyed about the whole organising the to-do list debacle earlier.

One of the tasks was to write something on the site. I’ve become really slack at writing here, and I hope to motivate myself to write more. Tonight however, I am writing something here so I can put a line through one of my tasks, and hopefully give myself a little sense of achievement that is required to push myself to complete more of them. I’m also hoping that sharing my unproductive ways here, will give me that extra push to get a few more things done to make that to-do list look remotely manageable.

Whether choosing five tasks at random, or whether I’ll structure it a little more on other evenings I can’t really commit too at the moment. I may try both manners, and see which one works best for me, or I may change the number of tasks I need to finish each day. Whichever method I end up choosing will be the one that pushes me to actually work through the to-do list and rebuild a semblance of productivity.

This idea seems to be working as I’ve now crossed off two of the five tasks from tonights list, but if anyone has any other tips or ideas to help me maintain my productivity I’d love to hear from you. I need all the help I can get.

I’ve just upgraded my theme to Thesis 1.6

So far it hasn’t brought up any issues on the site, but if anyone discovers any problems, can you please let me know via the contact page, or by commenting on this post.

Thanks

As you can now see I’ve removed all the advertising from the front page of the site. I’ve also started the process of cleaning the whole site up, because I’ve been neglecting it quite a bit recently and it’s become a little messy.

There were a few reasons for removing the majority of advertising from the site. However, one reason in particular stands out behind my decision. It just simply looked bad! Does that mean I’ll rule out advertising on the front page of the site again in the future? No. I don’t mind doing it if it’s not detrimental to the whole experience of the site, for both myself writing here, and for those of you that stop by from time to time. As it stood though, every time I looked at the site I knew it had problems, and that I really needed to do something about it. Typically, this realisation occurred to me around the time several other things had to take priority in my brain, and the clean up slipped through the cracks.

I still have issues with various things dotted around the site, all of which will be looked at in due time. The first step has to be to go through the whole site and write a list of what I want to change. After that it’s simply a case of working through the list until I’m happier with my little corner of the web.

For the moment, the home page is ad free and a much cleaner, enjoyable place to visit.

I’m on my second day back at work after a two week break and it’s proving difficult to fully motivate myself to go through all the techie projects I have to do. I don’t even want to talk about the new paperwork side of my job. It requires a much different mindset than I’m used to, and I’m finding difficult to maintain.

My body clock is completely all over the place too which never helps. When you find yourself lying awake at 3am staring at the ceiling, the thought of getting up a few hours later to wander into work doesn’t fill you with any kind of joy. At least when I was off and the insomnia hit me, there was no rush to get out of bed the next day. All I can say is I’m very thankful for coffee.

While I’m completely unmotivated at the moment, I do seem to be burning through my enormous to-do list quite quickly. It could be because I’m trying to make my days pass quickly, and the best way to do that is to stay busy.

In reality I just can’t wait for this weekend to get here. My enthusiasm may improve in the next few days but at the moment I just want to go home, and do some more writing and potter around the flat. That’s not possible just now though, so I have to suck it up and get on with the working day. It could be worse, I could still be doing IT Support.

I decided that I needed a break from work and so took two weeks annual leave. I’ve been off all this week and I’m going to be away from the office all next week too.

Well that’s the theory.

So far this week I’ve had to go in for a meeting, and I’ve been called, emailed, or sent a text every day asking me about something at work. It’s good to feel needed but is really interfering with my attempt at relaxing. I had a whole plan whereby the first week of my break would be to allow my brain to just power down and let myself completely forget about work, and let the stress dissipate. Then the second week would be where I kickstarted my productivity, wrote every day, and began the first few steps for a project I want to do.

It looks like these plans are totally screwed too. I have to go in for a meeting next Friday, which is going to require prep. I also have very little confidence in no one calling me to ask me something. To the point where I think I’m just going to have to switch my mobile off and make myself completely un-contactable each day. It’s not an ideal scenario since it’s my personal mobile as well as the one I use for work, but there is nothing quite as disruptive to having a good time as having someone from work call you up to ask you something. I think I’ll just have to make pre-arranged plans with friends and only switch my phone on when I have to make a phone call.

It’s not a huge reason to complain. It’s not like I’m having to spend all day fixing problems, but if I know someones on holiday I don’t call them unless it’s an emergency, or it’s something they really need to know for there first day back so they don’t walk into a nightmare that day. That rule doesn’t seem to apply to me at the moment and it’s getting on my nerves.

This post was getting a little ranty, so I’m just going to draw it to a close. I have a few post ideas bubbling and they should start appearing soon. First though I need a coffee, and no-one from work to contact me. I am on holiday after all!