SEO and Search Engine Marketing

I have recently decided to switch from SEO more towards Search Engine Marketing.
Although SEO is still one of the most cost effective way of getting traffic to a site the real money and fast traffic delivery is in lead generation, PPC and other forms of SEM.

Misty Morning London - Putney Bridge

They say London is grey, it was this day.
A picture speaks a thousand words.
Taken from Putney Bridge.

Zen Do Kickboxing

I just had a class of Zen Do Kickboxing last night.
Fun, Quite a good workout and nice to get back to the external style of martial arts, I do find that a lot of these martial art classes dont put enough emphasis on the internal arts, balancing yourself, harmonising your energy and focusing your mind, thats why Im thinking of taking up a martial arts instructor class in Zen Budo, a new martial art style good balance of internal & external.

Ryanair - Cheap & Nasty?

I missed the check in for a ryanair flight by 5 minutes today, they still had 40 minutes for me to get on the plane, I had hand luggage only, but can they accomadate, no they cant, and they were far from helpfull, apparently I would have had to pay £40 extra to get on the next flight,"while the existing one was still on the ground" otherwise it would be £155 for the next plane, considering the initial ticket only cost £12 and I was only flying from London to Cork, whick is a couple of hundred miles I politely told them to stuff it and I would fly home next weekend with some other airline.

Ryanar, the Cheap and nasty airline?.
I needed to get a website template designed for monday anyway so I guess it will work out for the best, more money and my girlfriend is happy im staying home.
Not especially happy about having to go all the way to Gatwick for nothing though.
Next time I fly Aer Lingus, at least they wont screw me.

You Live You learn.
The Moral of the Story, Dont Fly Ryanair.

XP on Mac with Intel Core Duo

Apparently the new Intel Core Duo based Mac laptops and desktops will be able to run windows XP with a little software modification.
Apparently Pentium powerbooks are 4 times more powerfull than existing Powerbooks, which only confirms what I always thought, macs were underpowered.
A step in the right direction for macintosh.

Now will they run XP faster than the same spec PC is the question.
Might be worth testing out.

Web 2.0, Wap, RSS and Ajax

So Web 2.0 is upon us, a fancy buzzword for evolutionary technologies such as RSS, AJAX, and mobile web services, the technology is hardly as revolutionary as some of the stuff that was around when the web first started but the difference is how it is starting to be utilised, PDa/WAP and small screen browsing is looking to take of big and although the technology isnt groundbreaking, the types of platforms they will be running on should be.
Browser sniffing and PDA websites will soon become a prerequisite on all professional online businesses and the big money is going small screen.
Are you thinking small?

New Nikon F55 Camera, Digital V SLR Photography

I got a nice new Nikon F55 camera to do some photography.
Plus a nice Film Scanner from Ebay and, Tripod, etc
Now all I need is to travel the world and take some good shots.
I still prefer standard SLR cameras, mainly because they are about 1/4 the price of digital, higher quality , better colour depth with slide film and dont require a constant stream of batteries.
Digital is nice for convenience though, I have taken some nice shots on my phone.
Will have to start putting together a gallery of my photos soon.

Strange Chances

I had another funny occurance on friday night.
I was out on the piss in London for patricks day, my girlfriend had headed home early because she was working and after fighting off some horny chavettes about an hour later I decided to head home, I leave the bar and instead of leaving the bar I feel a pull towards the tube station, so of I go, I stop to get a ticket and help the guy in front of me use the ticket machine, just as soon as I have finished a girl walks up to me and asks me do I want a free tube ticket as she dosnt need it any more, so I get a free ticket home.
Then as a bonus I get on the tube and these austrailian girls decide to give me a free magners t shirt.
This sort of thing actually happens a lot to me, the weirdest was about 6 months ago I was looking for a new appartment & girlfriend and I took up a Korean Ki Gong/Dhan yoga class, I wanted to find a girl I could talk to about energy martial arts classes and the first appartment I look at there is a cute korean girl living there, we hit it off, I mention a book to her called the celestine prophecy, the 1st part of which talks about chances & strange occurances, she says she hasnt read it, but I check her bookshelf and there is a book with a blank white cover sitting there.
I open it up and sure enough its the celestine prophecy. she cant believe it.
I move in and we got together the next night.

There have been a lot more like that but I just felt like sharing a couple.

The death of .NET

Just got a new short term contract today, 7 weeks to create a web based aplication.
They hired me in because they had used .NET before and were unhappy with the development time it took to create an aplication.

I have worked with .NET people before but for all the talk about how it makes it easier to create .NET apps I have seen so many projects fall well behind scope.
It also seems very top heavy to me and I hate the code it generates.
It has some uses yes, but its not the do all aplication microsoft wants to make people believe it is.

Personally I prefer regular ASP, or even better, PHP.
Is the industry catching on.
I wonder?

Flash Back

Its been 5 years since I started using flash, "flash 5" to be precise, I remember sitting down for 2 days to learn it, 48 hours and 28KB later I had a fully funcional and very flash CV,(pardon the pun) complete with preloader, menu, tweening effects, etc.

Looking back I learned more in that 48 hours than I have in the 5 years since then, (with regards to flash that is) and looking at the new versions of flash I cant really see any groundbreaking changes, did macromedia just stop trying and will adobe bring anything new to flash since the takeover.

I think its a really great programme and the best, if not the only good aplication macromedia came out with, can adobe do any better, I doubt it, I think macromedia took it as far as it could be taken.

A flash in the pan, or will things continue to improve.
Only time will tell.

Words of Wisdom.

"Often people attempt to live their lives backwards; they try to have more things, or more money in order to do more of what they want, so they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then do what you need to do, in order to have what you want."

Live the life you want to lead, do not try, do or do not, if you believe you will succeed, you probably will, if you accept the posibility of failure, you probably will.

All the things you have around you reflect on you, the best way to get the things you want is to be the person you want to be and your reflection will change.

At a quantum level, everything is connected.

Ajax Programming, Starting Something New

Time for something new, time for another change on the wheel of life.
I started learning Ajax today and started my blog as well.
Simple to learn and powerfull, it looks like being the next big thing.

I found some links, by no means a full list, but a good place to start off.

• building forms with ajax validation


• simple ajax toolkit


• time management app


• scriptalicious full of nifty Ajax scripts


• jspan - maps php to js

To new beginnings
Mike D

Bhudist Jokes - Spiritual Humour

Why don't Buddhists vacuum in the corners?
Because they have no attachements.

What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?
Make me one with everything.

How many Zen Buddhists does it take to change a light bulb?
Tree falling in the forest.

What happens when a Buddhist becomes totally absorbed with the computer he's working with?
He enters Nerdvana.

A student goes to the Zen Master:
"Master, what happens when you die?"
Master: "I do not know."
Student: "But you are a Zen Master!"
Master "Yes, but I am not a dead Zen Master."