Thanks to the wayback machine, it’s possible to have a look back at some of my previous web presence. It’s an interesting story if you just go back nine years; a story of trial and error, lacking of vision or confidence, and finally breakthrough.

Self-employment circa April 2003

While I had a full-time job, I decided it was time to go self-employed. I figured I’d need to build a client base before I could take the leap from employment. I received approximately two phone calls for this business, and never had the confidence to actually sign up to a contract. It was the first time I considered it could be possible to work for myself. But it should be noted I was very much suffering from the Entrepreneurial Seizure of The E-Myth.

Self-employment circa August 2006

While full-time employed again (for a different company this time), I decided to start making money from my photography. Lacking direction and focus, I didn’t really feel happy taking on work. I was happy to sell work I’d already made, but had no way to do that. It was shortly after this that I actually contacted a few people and did some free photoshoots. At this point, having my name accredited to photos was more important than earning any money. This is called “The Employee Mindset”. It is very dangerous if you want to work for yourself.

Self-employment circa January 2012

There’s quite a gap in the intervening six years. Two of the years were spent still muddling along with the “part-time” photography. Then, after a slightly surprising redundancy, I realised I’d better start making money at it. That’s where it gets serious, and I feel I’m now more interested in business than photography. Photography is merely the vehicle for providing the income.

The Moral

The moral is simple: Keep trying. Get focussed. Understand your vision. Take it seriously.

If you’re at stage 1 or 2 of this plan, I’ll happily sit down with you to help you get to stage 3 in less than the 9 years it took me!

If you found you were missing from the blogroll recently, it’s not because I hate you. When I upgraded WordPress recently, I forgot I’d fudged the blogroll code. So anyone I’d actually put into the blogroll category still showed up, everyone else vanished.

It didn’t used to matter with my fudged version whether you were in the blogroll category or not.

Just so you know.

We lost 2010. Sure, we got married – that was a biggie. And, following that we had a great two weeks in Ireland. But the rest of the year pretty much dashed by unnoticed.

So before 2011 began, we made a list of twelve things (an average of one per month) that we had to do by the end of the year. The list was flexible, so items could be removed/cancelled as long something else was put on the list as a substitute. The final list was completed on Wednesday 28th of December with a visit to the Northampton Lift Tower. It looks like this:

• Docklands Light Railway & Greenwich
• Severn Valley Railway
• Go for a walk based around the Great Central Railway
• Centre Point (the point furthest from the sea)
• Southern Tour & HenryTheThirst’s Geocache
• Cropredy Festival
• Go on a real Stag Do (and a real Hen Do for Helen)
• Northampton Lift Tower
• Suffolk County Top
• Make Your Own Tofu
• Visit Cinema with a voucher we had
• Go to Leicester by train as a tourist (& have curry at The Curry House)

Items which were moved/cancelled were:

• Fitzpatrick’s Temperance Bar – we realised, come the end of the year, that we weren’t planning to pass by the North-West, and 300 miles round is a long way to go for a glass of dandelion and burdock. It is postponed to the 2012 list, which has a few North-West items.
• HenryTheThirst’s Cache – although we got close, on the Southern Tour, we didn’t do the cache. More on the report itself.
• Seahenge – apparantly, there’s nothing to see.

Over the next few blogs, I’ll tell you about our experiences with these things. I notice there are quite a lot of railways involved. It was well worth doing, and on New Years Eve, we finalised our 2012 list, which is as follows:

• Watch a Bollywood Film
• Visit Every Pub in Loughborough
• Do a Wainwright Walk
• Fix Utility Room
• Fitzpatrick’s Temperance Bar (bumped from 2011 list)
• Mersey Tunnel
• Wymeswold Auction House
• A Big Group Walk
• Eglantine Vinyard, East Leake
• National Railway Museum
• Centre of Britain (there’s a new one we’ve become aware of!)
• Take a Random Journey on Buses

A long time ago, in a galaxy very near here, I started writing a course on Japanese writing. I then left my job, moved house and lots of other things happened and I never got finished. I was moderately upset and carried the guilt forwards for years and years; especially given the people who had started the course, and I had let down.

But no more! I’ve finished writing a 12-part course. Finished. It’s all up and available for perusal.

There’s a lesson index available. Or just dive in and start at Japanese Writing – Learn Katakana Part One.

Go on, why not challenge yourself? Maybe if you start the New Year with a New Challenge and do one lesson per week, you’ll be reading and writing phrases like フル　イングリッシュ　ブレックファスト – furu ingurisshu burekkufasuto – ‘full English breakfast’ by the 18th of March. How would that be? Amazing! That’s how!

Wow, Google… you’ve pulled of a storming coup with your new analytics offering. I’m not sure how many of my readers use google analytics to watch what visitors are doing on their site, but the new version has a brilliant feature called ‘visitor flow’.

Have a look at the diagram below:

In this case, I’ve asked it to show people who have found my Japan Club site from a google search (you can do all sorts of different sources, or even list all visitors by source, location, etc.etc.) You’ll see that the number of visitors is very low, having only just set the site up. It’s quite encouraging that it’s already being found in google, though!

You can see that most people came looking for Japanese Dictionary Apps, but they weren’t interested in exploring the site further. One person was interested in Hyper Japan, the regular Japanese culture show in London. Likewise, they were not interested in exploring further.

The person who found out about Japanese Dictionaries Online, then had a look at Apps and left.

But the person who found out about Japanese Dictionary Books stayed a while longer. The whole flow doesn’t show in the diagram, but they had a look at the apps, then had a look at the Japanese Kanji books, and even read through two of the Japanese Writing lessons (although, spending 18 seconds on part one and 10 seconds on part two, they probably only just had time to skim-read and bookmark them).

So that’s very exciting. It lets me know where I should be putting effort into websites. If you don’t use analytics and have a website, it’s worth looking into it – it’s completely free of charge!

If you’re not too technical, Masters Allen (who alerted me to it) will set it all up for you. They are associates of mine in the Loughborough Marketing Group, and a hugely talented design and marketing team.

So, I previously mentioned the Japanese writing lessons I’ve been producing. Well, you know how when something’s on TV, but you don’t watch it because your TV-box is recording it, and you have to leave it long enough to be able to whizz through the adverts and still not catch up with the end of it?

Well, I’ve made the lesson plans for all 12 lessons, with 5 complete and 3 drafted.

So, with Japanese writing lesson 5 having gone up today, it’d be a good time to start at lesson one now if you want to. If you take it steady, making sure you really know the characters as you learn them, then you won’t catch up with my posting them.

By the time you’ve finished the course (in just 12 lessons), you’ll be able to buy sandwiches from convenience stores in Japan! Or be warned off buying them in the case of the ‘furuutsu sando’ (fruit sandwich) shown below…

Mmmm! 'furutsu sando' = 'fruit sandwich'

I haven’t worked in computers for some time now, but something I still love is a unix terminal and grep. Grep is a small program that lets you search for, or not for, or for not certain characters.

I’m building a tutorial course on Japanese writing at the moment, and although my vocabulary list is held in Excel, it’s grep that allows me to get the data in a useful order. For example, I can issue the following command:

stu@graham:$ cat wordlist.txt | grep ‘^[カラオケールメンスキトイ アウエクコソタチツテミッガギグゲゴダデドズサザシジセゼソゾ]\+$’ | grep ‘[サザシ ジセゼソゾ]‘

And what happens is that the system returns a list of all the words that use both the characters we’ve learnt up to now and the new set of characters we’ve just learned, but only shows the ones that contain the new characters. So it’s a great tool for showing new vocabulary available given a set of new characters.

I couldn’t find a way to do this in Excel, despite the fact it costs millions of pounds and takes up all of my computer’s disk space and memory.

Grep, however, in its simplicity, made it an easy task.

If you’re thinking of doing the Japanese writing course, then don’t look now (this is about week 7′s word list), but the results it came back with, in the unlikely event you’re interested, are:

Ok, I admit it. If it’s not on the internet, it doesn’t exist.

What makes me say that?

Helen said we needed a photo. One that says “New Year”. I thought for a moment and jokingly said:

“Goats. Goats say New Year. And racing cars. Goat, Car. You see… GOAT, CAR. NEW, YEAR. A three-letter word and a four-letter word… both end in R. Perfect!”

So, off to google to find (as if it was the most common thing to search for in the world) a picture of a goat in a racing car.

What do you know? 4th picture along…

Well done! The internet elders must be proud!