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Archive: vee8

Merry Christmas — looking back and forward

24 December 2009 18:00

Categories: Admin, Blogging, Commuting, Current affairs, Fife, General, Personal, Politics, Scotland, Technology, Work

I would like to wish everyone who still reads this a very merry Christmas.

As time has gone on, my updates have become increasingly sporadic. I am surprised and touched that people keep coming back to read and comment on what I have written. Looking back, I have actually written almost a hundred articles for this website in the past year (I am surprised it is that many). But at times it has been at the rate of just a few a month.

My year in brief

It has been quite a strange year. It started with me losing my part-time job at Woolworths. The closure of the store was itself quite an odd experience.

But losing that job didn’t hit me so hard. My long term future was never going to be with Woolworths. I graduated in summer 2008 and was hoping to find a job that could have reflected this. But it wasn’t happening.

I spent several months visiting the Jobcentre while experimenting with being self employed. While the bits and bobs of freelance work I was doing was good in the sense that I made an amount of money that was greater than zero, it didn’t provide anything like the security I needed in order to make plans for the long term.

Over the summer things slowed down quite alarmingly. I took a break after I was amazingly invited to a tour around the Williams F1 factory and museum.

It was the first time I had gone on anything resembling a holiday for a long while. I hung around in Oxford for a day or so then on the way back went via London to briefly visit friends. But because of the last-minute nature of the trip it was very hectic and felt rushed. It is the only time I have ever felt what I would call being intensely tired.

I arrived back to bad news on the work front. After another month or so of inactivity, it had felt like things had hit rock bottom.

Luckily, it was rock bottom. Since then, the news has all been good. Having decided that doing anything was better than rotting at home, I applied for an internship in the office of an MP. Unlike the freelance work, I did not earn more than zero by doing this. However, I can safely say that nothing has been more valuable to me in terms of gaining confidence in my abilities, which had been totally shot.

I only had to spend a couple of months there before — finally — finding a good job. My first month working at the University of St Andrews has been great. The only problem is the journey from Kirkcaldy, which is a bit on the long side. But apart from that, things are going well. In complete contrast to earlier on this year, I now feel lucky in so many ways.

The future of my online activities

Now that I am settling down to some kind of routine, I am hoping to be able to update this website more regularly. Certainly, once I move closer to St Andrews I will hopefully have more spare time in the evenings.

But now that I am in full time employment, I don’t have the time or energy to continue running three separate blogs, as I have been doing for the past couple of years. At the start of 2007, I decided to stop writing about motorsport here and set up a separate blog, vee8, to act as an outlet for my thoughts on Formula 1.

That worked really well at first. But over the past year or so, as I have had less and less time on my hands, it has meant that both doctorvee and vee8 have been neglected too much. It is so easy to concentrate on one blog and forget about the other. I feel that now both websites are suffering.

So I have taken the decision to close down vee8, and bring my writing on motorsport back onto this website. I know this won’t be popular with everyone, but it no longer makes sense to have these two separate websites when I no longer even have the time to properly maintain one. The change will happen some time in the new year.

In preparation for the change, I will remind those readers who are not in the least bit interested in F1 that the F1-free RSS feed still works. So if you want to subscribe to this website without being bombarded with opinion on motorsport, subscribe to the F1-free RSS feed.

Merry Christmas!

Until that happens, I hope you all have a relaxing Christmas period. I could certainly do with a wee break to recover from the hectic nature of the tail end of this year, and the extra time will come in handy for working on the changes I am making to this website.

5 comments

A change in the sidebar

1 September 2008 22:12

Categories: Admin, Blogging, General, Technology

I know this sort of thing bores most people to tears, but I wanted to point out a change I’ve made to this blog. For a long time I’ve wanted to bring more attention to the stuff I do elsewhere — my other blogs, Twitter and the like. This blog still gets more visitors than my other blogs even though I can go quiet here for weeks.

At first I put up two different solutions on the one page (lifestream). But that was still out of the way, and it wasn’t very good either.

So instead I have decided to sweep up the sidebar and put in what I’m calling a ‘sideblog’. Note that if you’ve come here from an RSS reader, it only appears on the homepage.

The sidebar aggregates my content from all sorts of different places — my other blogs, Twitter, Delicious, Last.fm, Flickr and more. Comments that are posted on this blog also now reside there — although I haven’t yet worked out if this is a mistake or not. Everything else in the sideblog is ‘my’ content, but the comments are clearly not. So I might separate them out again later on. Any thoughts?

The sideblog is arranged in chronological order, but to save it from getting bombarded with content from one place (for instance, I uploaded 40-odd photographs to Flickr today), I’ve limited each site to having five entries at a time. The exceptions are Delicious which is limited to 10 and Last.fm which is limited to 1.

I built the sideblog using Yahoo! Pipes (which I found very difficult to get to grips with at first, but I eventually got it to do more or less what I wanted to do) and SimplePie. Some pretty desperate CSS magic got the icons appearing kind-of where I wanted them to.

Any thoughts on it? Hopefully it will be a good way of getting more fresh content here for the times when I am posting more at other places. I’ve kept a copy of the old sidebar though in case anyone is offended enough to want the old one back.

5 comments

An explanation for the quietness

10 June 2008 02:02

Categories: Admin, Blogging, Books, Edinburgh, Entertainment, General, Music, Personal, Scotland, Technology, University

Jeff at SNP Tactical Voting took the baton from me and listed his top 10 blogs (although unlike me, he concentrated just on Scottish political blogs). In the process, he accused this place of having “a scarcity of posts of late”.

Guilty as charged. A number of elements have conspired against me when it comes to updating this blog.

First of all, I set up a separate F1 blog — immediately robbing this place of around half its content! Then there was the fact that I was in my final year at university. I didn’t want to mess it up as the dissertation deadline passed, then essay deadlines, then the exams came along.

Even since the exams have finished, though, it hasn’t quite worked out. I always find the transition from busy (!) student to lazy summertime bum difficult for some reason that I can’t put my finger on. Blogging always takes a back seat for a week or two as I grab some rest and get those summer jobs dealt with. I have been — gasp — reading books for leisure (which I never get the time to do during term time). I have been listening to that pile of unlistened-to CDs that has built up since last summer. The pile is now down to six which is very exciting. I have also tidied my room from top to bottom, sorting through stuff to work out if I should chuck them out or not.

Then there is the small matter of finding a job. Or, more accurately, working out what my career is going to be. Now that university is over for good (and I doubt I will be darkening the doors of academia again), I can now — belatedly — devote more of my brain power towards researching careers. I have not got very far forward. Every time I seem to get closer to finding a path that I find acceptable, something comes along to put me off. For this and various other reasons, I still find myself running around Edinburgh from time to time.

Also, for the past seven or eight months I have routinely been taking daily walks round the park and suchlike. This was partly to get me out of the house and into the sun. It is also with one eye on my slowly-but-surely expanding belly. A good side-effect is that I spend the walks listening to podcasts that I would never otherwise manage to listen to. However, it’s possibly fair to assume that this time may otherwise have been spent blogging which is why things have been a lot quieter here over the past year or so.

Then, just when I was ready to get back into the swing of things, all of my websites were knocked out by that exploding transformer. Then a different issue put my websites out of action on Tuesday as well! All-in-all, I lost about three days of possible blogging activity.

And then I got some good news. I’ve got a degree, and it’s a 2:1. It was such a relief — I was genuinely worried that I was headed for a 2:2 which would have been seriously demoralising. I would really have kicked myself for a few things if that happened, but somehow I have escaped.

I still don’t know the marks for all of my courses yet, which is quite frustrating. Of the scores that I know, I was on course for a 2:2. And I am sure I muffed up one of the exams that I haven’t had back yet. I’d love to think it was my dissertation that pulled the whole lot up. Anyway, I shouldn’t worry about that now. What matters is that I’ll be doing the silly dressing up thing with the stupid hats and scroll things later this month. (Incidentally, does anyone know where the hell you get a white bow tie in this area? That is the rubbish I am being asked to wear for this thing.)

All of this is just a really long-winded way of saying: yes, I know, it’s quiet round here. Jeff said that the scarcity posts is made up for with thorough detail. That is really a side-effect of the fact that it takes me so bloody long to get round to writing anything. By the time I’ve reached this little screen my head has collected so many thoughts on the issue that I end up writing a bloomin’ essay. Even this post is probably about 2,000 words long now.

The thing is, just because I’m not posting much on this blog doesn’t mean I’m not posting much at all. There are four other major outlets of mine. Twitter is the main one where I post anything that will fit into the 140 character limit. Then there is Delicious where I post interesting links, often along with a pithy comment. Then there are the two other blogs, Scottish Roundup and vee8.

These all have a presence on the sidebar here, but I thought it would be good to have an area where all of these various updates are gathered on one page. I started with a lifestream (launched a few weeks ago, though I kept it quiet). But I wanted something a bit different so I spent a bit of time in Yahoo! Pipes to create what I have modestly called the “megafeed“. For the time being I’ve placed it just above the lifestream on… the lifestream page.

Neither of them is exactly perfect. The lifestream just contains the headlines of each item. It incorporates Last.fm as well, but it’s pretty rough and ready really. Meanwhile, the megafeed just looks like a big list of stuff. There’s no way to tell whether it’s a Twitter update, a blog post or what. I tried to make it more obvious, but either there isn’t a way to do it in Yahoo! Pipes or I am too much of a n00b to work out how to do it. Just thought I’d mention it since I spent a bit of time on it. Think of it as a stalking opportunity.

Now that I have sorted that out, it is time to post not just in the four other places but here as well. Now I have drawn up a little list of posts I want to write. My calendar for this week looks fairly empty. I should probably be looking for a job but I will try to get some stuff up here too.

3 comments

What’s happening here

31 March 2008 04:20

Categories: Admin, Blogging, Current affairs, General, Personal, Politics, Technology, University

First things first. I have upgraded to WordPress 2.5. The new admin panel takes a bit of getting used to, and it is a little bit buggy for my liking. But then again that is probably because I am using so many plugins.

For the first time I upgraded using the astonishing WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin. I’ve been meaning to use it for a while, but forgot about it until James O’Malley reminded me. So thanks for that James. Upgrading vee8 and doctorvee was flawless, although something funny happened to Scottish Roundup. Fixed it in the end (I hope), but it did make me scratch my head, especially as the other two upgrades went so smoothly.

Another thing to point out is that I have finally got that OpenID plugin installed. It doesn’t work exactly how I’d like it to, but it will do. Don’t be freaked out by it if you leave a comment and you don’t know what OpenID is. You can leave the OpenID field blank.

You might be wondering if it was even worth me upgrading this blog. It is rather shit of me to have posted next to nothing for the past three weeks and come back with a dull admin post. Well here’s what’s happening.

Last week in the comments of this increasingly quiet blog, a very public sociologist wrote:

Looks like F1 has stolen you away from us.

It’s kind of true. When I launched vee8, originally I had every intention of posting here (almost) as often as before.

What I was forgetting was that because of my mad hectic busy important 24/7 lifestyle and / or laziness, I was blogging less and less here anyway. In all seriousness, I am in my final year at university. And while I still have luxuries such as not having to get up before lunchtime, it does mean that I get shards of guilt searing through my conscience every time I write a blog post or open Google Reader. After all, I should be studying.

For around — ooh, let’s see — the past year, I have had hardly any time to blog, or indeed read blogs. Google Reader always has 1000+ items for me to read. I think I’ve only got it down to zero about twice in the past year.

Plainly, even pretending that I can keep on top of all my RSS feeds is a nonsense. I have come to realise that I don’t have the time to read blogs in the same way as I used to. I have probably gone for weeks without even reading blogs actually (excepting Scottish blogs which I have to read for the Roundup). And the thing is that I don’t really miss the blogosphere — especially the politics blogs. (My years at university studying politics have ironically made me deeply apathetic.)

“Boo, hiss,” I hear you cry. But that’s the way it is. Once I got fed up with Guido et al, it was just the start of the ball rolling and reading hundreds of posts like this is no longer my idea of fun.

This is not to say that I will retreat from politics or political blogging — and definitely not blogging as a whole — altogether. But I have to face up to the fact that as a student I have increasingly found that I do not have enough time to engage in it properly.

So many of the posts I have written over the past few months have been about topics that were lingering in my head for weeks or even months. For instance, the one about road tolls was written in my head in December as a response to Calum Cashley. I didn’t get the chance to actually write it until March. See if you can spot more (a fun game for long journeys, I’m sure)!

And that’s what it’s like when I am a lazy student bum! So what on earth is it going to be like when I actually get a proper job?!

At the same time, last month I launched vee8, a dedicated Formula 1 blog. The original intention was to spare the many readers here who do not like F1 from having to read what can at some points during the year become a blog almost exclusively about F1.

But in its first month I think vee8 has quite unexpectedly taken a life of its own. I am enjoying every minute of it. It is such a refreshing feeling to be blogging about something that actually matters rather than that politics nonsense! Seriously though, I have been staggered by how much fun I am having with it and how successful it has been.

I try to avoid talking about stats because inevitably someone takes offence at the showing off. So I’ll say this up-front. The following may be a reflection of how bad this blog is. Readership here has, after all, stagnated over the past 2 or 3 years which shouldn’t really happen (as someone once told me, telling me off for showing off my stats, “it’s a viral thing”).

But at vee8 — which, I remind you, is little over a month old — I am already getting as more “returning visitors” than I am on this blog. As I say, that is probably partly down to the fact that I post here far less often than I used to, while there is usually daily content at vee8. But I’m still amazed at how quickly it has got a solid readership. Obviously it helps that I had plenty of F1 fans reading here originally, but boy — if only I found it this easy to get readers the first time round!

Long story short. I am now running three major blogs. Scottish Roundup has to have a new post every Sunday, so a lot of my Fridays and Saturdays are spent making sure that happens. vee8 is fresh, new and exciting and this season looks like it’s going to be a corker, so a lot of my attention is now focussed there. This one is my personal blog, so I don’t feel like I owe it much attention.

Just two years ago this was my only blog. Now it is just part of my wider blogging activity. With that fact along with impending adulthood, I am having to steer a new path for this blog.

I am probably being melodramatic (it is 4am), so I will say that probably not much will change. In fact, the changes have already happened and I just need to adapt to it.

I stopped being part of the conversation in the wider blogosphere a long time ago without ever meaning that to happen. I just don’t have the time to follow it. So that probably means writing fewer, more in depth posts on a miscellany of subjects.

You might well have noticed that already. The previous five posts here were about coffee, Autechre, income tax, Freeview and Radio 5 Live — quite a mixture. And that takes us practically to the beginning of March. To think that I used to write an average of six pithy posts per day about the day’s current subjects!

It won’t pick up any time soon. Those shards of guilt will be extra painful as it’s exam time. But I have just three exams, and then it will all be over! The difficult part comes after that — looking for a job. (My status as a person, incidentally, is another thing that it making me more reluctant to blog here… Google and all.)

I just remembered that almost a year ago I hilariously joked about giving up blogging. Now I am looking back on the past year thinking it was actually quite prescient.

Anyway, please forgive the navel gazing. I am planning to return tomorrow with another post here, but whether it will interest you is a different matter.

4 comments

vee8: Formula 1 liveblogging / Twittering

2 April 2007 21:32

Categories: Admin, Blogging, Formula 1, General, Internet, Technology

Contrary to the post I wrote yesterday morning, this week is actually a very good week for me and new web-ventures! Yesterday I moved Scottish Roundup to its new home.

Now I have gone ahead and created that Twitter account for Formula 1 liveblogging. This kind of kills two birds with one stone. The obvious advantage is that I won’t now bombard non-F1 fans with mundane posts like “OMG stupid crash” or somesuch.

Regular readers may remember that a while back I toyed with the idea of setting up a separate blog for Formula 1. In the end, I decided against it. But that meant that I couldn’t use the brilliant name I thought up for that blog — vee8.

Well, the second advantage is that now I can use that name with my Twitter account. So go ahead — if you’re an F1 fan and you use Twitter, add vee8 to your friends and you can have me constantly interrupting you during the race. Woohoo!

I am very proud of the logo, which was one of the most pain-free experiences I have ever had. I realised I needed an avatar, but I hadn’t thought up a logo. Instantly I thought of an appropriate way to edit my normal avatar. Five seconds in MS Paint later, and you can see the result on the right!

Here is the real test though: Will I be able to keep up the liveblogging all season? I doubt it somehow. Inevitably real life will get in the way. But I might just get bored of it as well. Who knows though, we’ll see.