» archive
2006-01-05 17:30:48 Source: Web
The year seems to be off to an OK start. I have a few contracts that have landed for the company and work is well underway developing our new product (more on that around the beginning of spring). We could always do with a few *more* contracts of course, but it is at least en encouraging start.
I'm looking into lots of interesting things at the moment like marketing plans, stalls at various exhibitions and conferences and ways of spreading word of our products. It's all fairly new to me as working within B2B the companies I've been involved with have always marketed mostly through word of mouth. Now I'm looking to create products with both B2B and B2C applications and I have to look at new (for me) ways of marketing. It feels pretty good, especially as I'm not the world's most natural sales person (even if I'm not doing *too* bad a job of it).
To get back to being my usual techie self, I got a bluetooth headset for my phone at christmas (thanks Mum!) and I'm really pleased with it. It's not illegal to use the phone and drive here in Sweden, though I think it probably should be. So far I've not had a single person ring me while I've been in the car with the headset on, but I've used it in the office quite a bit and it's definitely nice to not have to set with your hand glued to the side of your head when talking to people.
The only downside has been the abysmal support for Bluetooth headsets in Windows XP. I've found a tutorial that explains how to get it up and running, but I'm waiting for a weekend when I have some downtime to make it happen. The goal is to be able to use Skype with the Bluetooth headset for making calls to the UK.
Also on a techie note, I have found one of the most complicated solutions for what *should* be a really simple problem. Returning a list of date values (could be weeks, days or months) with some other values from a database. I have needed to show even the weeks where the value is 0. For instance....
Week 1 - 10
Week 2 - 23
Week 3 - 0
Week 4 - 14
...
Seems really simple right? The problem is that the database won't return the empty values. I experimented with just adding in the values when I loop through the results, but there are so many different oddities to take into account when working with dates (week 1 in Swedish is the first week of the year that contains 4 days for instance) that it seemed almost impossible to get right.
Then I found this article, which describes setting up a calendar table containing unique values for a long series of dates and which can be used to fill in the gaps. It's quite technical and only of interest to programmers, but it has certainly opened my eyes to a load of possibilities when working with dates that I had never thought possible before.
When I finally knew what I was looking for to solve the problem I found LOADS of resources about creating such tables. Makes one wonder why one never came across the solution before!
2005-12-28 08:29:42 Source: Web
I've added a box linking to my account on All Consuming - you can find it down to the bottom left. It's a fun little site inspired by 43 Things (which I also love!)
2005-12-26 09:11:53 Source: Web
MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE!
We've had a great christmas celebration here in Gothenburg. We spent christmas eve celebrating in the traditional Swedish style at Lotta's parent's house. My Mum is here visting for her first taste of Swedish christmas which has been a great success.
Opening presents took a loooong time this year. It seems like everyone went a little overboard, despite our protestations of "we tend to be quite restrained with present buying"! I even ended up with 2 (count them) Pac-Man games, a hand-held classic LCD game with fantastic retro appeal and a TV plug-in game with 4 other Namco classics. Wonderful stuff!
On christmas day itself my mum and I prepared a full-blown dinner for everyone else. A lot of work, but it was a great success. We served a giant turkey breast with two stypes of stuffing (apple, breadcrumbs and rosemary plus a sausagemeat, sage and onion variety). This was served with julienne potatoes, glazed carrots, sprouts with chestnuts, parmesan roasted parsnips and of course sausages with bacon and extra balls of stuffing. Completely fantastic!
To round things off, my mum had brought over a christmas pud (a new experience for the swedes in retaliation to their herring!) and made a fantastic pavlova which was extremely well received by Lotta who's been asking after one since we made plans for this christmas.
To cap things off nicely, it has snowed overnight (though only a little) so we have a white boxing day at least! Today I have nothing strenuous to do for the first time in ages and I fully intend to take advantage of the new Pac-man games!
2005-12-08 09:48:26 Source: Web
Pretty cool - a WW2 British shipping mine was brought into Gothenburg Harbour this morning - by mistake. It was fished up by a fishing vessel that thought it was an oil drum. However it apparently contains 150kg of explosives, which could do a bit of damage. Pedestrians have been warned to keep at least one building between them and the harbour area where the mine is located.
I remember quite vividly that in Dawlish, the small seaside town where I grew up, there were old disused mines around the town. They were painted bright red and had a slot where one could put in money which went to support the RNLI (Royal National Lifeboat Institution).
2005-12-06 17:53:28 Source: Web
I've had a problem with the guestbook on one of the sites I manage. I was receiving a lot of comment spam (and I do mean a lot!) which I was trying to remove manually asap to stop it being worthwhile for the spammers. Unfortunately this had no effect and the amount were increasing. So I took the slightly more drastic step of filtering out all html and for added effect, disallowing the post if it included URL links.
This has had the desired effect. I've noticed that the amount of spam has already started to tail off. The nice thing is that I get a mail from every posting to the guestbook so I can see that the spammers are still posting, but their spams aren't making it onto the page.
The downside of course is that the users of the guestbook can no longer post links to interesting events/pages. That is a shame and I curse the comment spammers for making it so. Maybe I'll look into a way of coding a link in such a way that my users can post a link using the secret code, but the spammers won't know how to post links themselves. Hmmm....
2005-12-01 17:38:32 Source: Web
Work work!
Since I got back from London it feels like all I've done is woken up, worked and gone to bed! Of course the upside of that is that there has been a lot to do, which is of course nice when one is running one's own business.
It's kind of difficult to gauge how the business is going. On the one hand, I've had to take in some external financial help to keep our heads above water. That's kind of expected when one is starting a business. Cashflow is a difficult thing to master on small resources and it's taking me some time to get a flow running with my sales process. On the other hand the main product is ready for clients to start using it and we are getting some good interest. We still don't have our first client, but it really does feel like it's just a matter of time.
In the meantime, I'm still focusing on driving in consulting work - web programming, design, consulting etc. There are some good signals on that side and I have some very satisfied clients.
This evening loks like being the first time in a while I don't have to sit in front of the computer all evening - so I think it's time for me to stop ;-)
2005-11-17 08:05:55 Source: Web
We've just come back from a week in London. We were over primarily to celebrate my mum's 60th birthday with a big party. The week got off to a bad start - we'd just arrived in London, left our cases at a Left Luggage place and were standing in Foyles bookshop when I started to feel really lousy. That was the start of a 3-day bout of what we're assuming was gastric flu. Not a great way to spend the first few days in London.
We still managed to get out and do a few things, not least meeting up with a big bunch of friend for a pub evening. But I was not in my usual ebullient mood and sat in the corner nursing one pint all evening!
I rested up the following day and missed an evening meal with Lotta's parents who had also come over for the party. Sounds like it was a very nice meal as well. Oh well! Sitting on a friend's sofa and sweating for a whole day has its charm as well I guess :-/
Finally I was starting to feel more normal the following day which was lucky as it was the day of the party. We had hired an area of a wacky Italian restaurant called Il Pagliaccio for the evening. I had struggled with the arrangements via phone and was nervous as to whether the evening would really be special for my mum. We had around 30 guests and a pianist and operatic tenor were booked to play. One of mum's friends had also helped arrange a fantastic cake.
The evening was a great success. I didn't have much chance to relax myself as I tended to the guests and played Maitre'D all evening. I guess the control freak in me came out! My mother seems to have really enjoyed the party in any case and the opera singer was great - despite having to compete against a loud and boisterous rugby team in the adjoining room.
The following day we had a gathering at my Mum's house with some of the guests who had travelled a long way. A nice chance to relax!
The last couple of days were a bit more active than the beginning of the week as my body was functioning more or less normally again. We were treated to a spa/gym visit by our friends Heather & Kevin. Thanks guys - we really enjoyed that. And the restaurant we had lunch at was excellent as well.
On the Monday evening we completed the familial tour and visited my Dad and his wife. It was a belated birthday evening for myself and we walked away with much heavier bags than we had taken there (which were later to almost cause us a problem as we had too much weight when checking in for our flight. However a kind Ryanair man said we could take one of our bags as carry-on which got the check-in weight down to an OK amount. Phew!).
Finally we rounded off the visit with a shopping day which included a trip to Hamleys. We were looking for a globe for my niece, but the only globes they sold were super-expensive interactive ones. Pah! I managed to find one later that evening at a store selling educational toys. It was suitable for children with a hard-wearing plastic globe which is also a night-light. That's one christmas present sorted anyway!
We also caught up with my mate Neil who we haven't seen since he visited us in Sweden about 3 years ago. In the evening we went and celebrated the actual day of my mum's birthday with a family visit to Pizza Express. Mmmmm! I still miss their pizzas as the Swedish pizza culture is appalling!
Our flight back was pretty straightforward apart from the slight baggage problem, but now it's noses back to the grindstone in the run-up before christmas.
2005-10-28 08:04:30 Source: Web
Heh! I had a funny moment when registering a website on Google this morning.
Google Poopt
I hope it wasn't a comment on the URL I was registering. :-)
Made me laugh anyway!
2005-10-24 19:52:40 Source: Web
Things have been a little hectic lately. I'm putting a lot of work into the company of course. We're getting very close to launhcing our central product and on top of that we have a couple of consulting contracts underway. So things are ticking along. Sales always seem to take longer than one ever plans for though and we're at that vulnerable stage where we're still building up the company's contact net and trying to get the volume of sales visits up so that more contracts will start to fall into place later on.
After a discussion with my business mentor we identified that an area I need to work on is getting the sales process to become a habit. Basically I'm not worried about going out and selling, or even of picking up the phone and booking meetings with new prospects. Instead it's simply that the whole sales process is a new part of my working life and it needs to become a routine to be more effective. So I've been working on setting aside more time to identifying and ringing prospects. It's working out pretty well so far, but it does feel very time consuming when I also have development work to do.
The road cycling season is pretty much over - the weather is pretty yucky here at the moment and the evenings have closed in (it was almost dark at 17:30 today). I've been doing a little mountainbiking for fun though. I've been out with a small group from our cycling club (we're more used to road cycling, so we're quite evenly balanced) and did a litte off-roading myself at the weekend. I'll never be a good mountainbiker, but it's fun to mix things up a little - and it's killer training for the quads!
I've also been using a pedometer for the last week or so to get a feel for how much I walk per day and to start looking into what sort of information would be useful to know when using walking as a way of increasing fitness levels. It's pretty interesting - and I've found that I walk waaay less than is recommended for a healthy lifestyle. Room for improvement there then!
FInally we're planning a trip to London which, as usual, sees us completely overextended. It's actually a really difficult part of living in another country that when one is back home it is difficult to find a way of spending time with eveyone. Hopefully we'll manage, but of you read this and are wondering whether we can hook up, then drop me a mail!
2005-09-05 13:08:11 Source: Web
This weekend saw my last race of the season. So now it's officially winter I guess ;-)
The race was Mjörn Runt - a 100km race around a lake north of Gothenburg. There were 105 members of HCK registered at the race which meant that the sea of club jerseys really stood out! We had divided up into groups with various average speed goals. I decided to cycle with the 29+ kph group who the weekend before had done a practise run around the course and notched up a respectable 31kph average speed - so that was my goal for the race.
The morning was promising great weather, though with a little ground mist which cleared up pretty quickly. At the start I felt that my preparation could have been slightly better - I had been on a business trip the day before and had not had the chance to eat a decent carbo-rich meal. I'd also hopped over breakfast, which probably wasn't the best move.
We set off and quickly found our rhythm. The first 40km went quickly and our group had built up to be around 40 or so people. Our average speed was between 33 and 34kph and I was starting to feel that I was reaching my max. Then the speed in the group started to fluctuate a little and on a hill I found a gap opening up in front of me. I put in a push and closed the gap, but it put me up into a maximum exertion and I found that when I then reached the back of the group and another acceleration happened I was suddenly dropped.
OK - not too great a problem - I had an average speed which was considerably higher than my goal speed for the first half of the race, so I decided that if I put my head down and rode for myself I should still be able to make it round within my target. After another 10km or so I met up with the group again as there had been a clash of wheels and a rider had fallen. He was not hurt, but one of the group leaders was discussing the riding style of the group to prevent more accidents from happening.
The group started off again and I tried to hang on, but was quickly spat out the back again. Once again I decided this wasn't a problem and focused on just getting round as quickly as possible.
The next 40-50km I rode myself with one quick stop at the last food station to fill up on water and bananas. The riding had gone well and I was still averaging over 31kph for the ride. Then during the last 10km I managed to latch on the back of a small group who passed me. I found I had some strength to spare and was able to ride with them to the finish.
According to the result list (search for "cook"), my time was 3:13 - however their time taking is not 100% accurate as it doesn't seem to take into account which start group one was in. However as my cycle computer showed a time of around 3:15 (which included waiting in the start area for a couple of minutes). I think that this was pretty close. I seem to have placed around 198 in a field of 363 which is pretty respectable. Also my average speed of over 31kph is by far the fastest I've ridden that distance before.
Afterwards most of the club members who rode the race joined up at a nearby restaurant and we had a nice afternoon winding down.
So all-in-all I met my goals, rode my fastest 100km ever and had a really great day.