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National Year of Reading 2012

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Ponders…

I spent last night reading blogs mostly to do with books but with an odd personal blog inserted in there and it’s been interesting. I came across a giveaway of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley as a part of Banned Book Week Blog Hop. You can find more details of the Blog Hop here, it’s a little late to sign your blog up for it but you can read the blogs and enter competitions. It looks great fun and very educational.

I read various other blogs including one by my friend, Olga. Most of the first page is reviews of the historical books she’s read recently, a rant about a shopping cart she’s having trouble installing on her website and this, a lovely little gem concluding with the statement about her patting an alien if she saw one. A braver man than I, Gungadin.

I interleaved this with a conversation on Facebook about the differences between the English, Americans, Australians and New Zealanders, at least that’s what I think the conversation is about, you might have other ideas. It’s on the Discworld Monthly group and I wouldn’t consider joining them as you might have fun.

Thanks to one of the personal blogs I perused last night I’m now thinking about the contents of a personal blog; what should be on it and why would someone read it? I’m no further in my pondering as this particular blog (I won’t share with you) was all about them, their health, their doings and nothing about anything else. I think I need to read more personal blogs rather than blogs aimed at a particular niche before I consider pondering anything more about them.

Where I really started was with my handbag. I pulled a few things out of it the other day while looking for a ticket I’d lost, I found the ticket on the kitchen bench the day after I needed it, thank goodness they let me in anyway. One of the things I decided I didn’t really need in my bag was the Get Reading! All Australian Guide for 2012, it has 50 books you can’t put down. I do agree that having the description of these books is far lighter than having the books themselves but it doesn’t get me very far. Most of them look really good and I’m going to have to add them to my GoodReads list although I have no idea when I’m going to get around to reading them.

I’m currently reading a book by and about the person behind The Beechworth Bakery, it’s awesome and I can’t wait to be finished and write about it. We’re having a brief sojourn in Beechworth soonish, I do hope I manage to actually meet him.

Thursday, Friday and Saturday I’m attending a business conference with many thanks to the organisers as I won a double pass in their competition. I’ll be scribbling a few words about it next week if I have the energy as the following day we’ll be having a garage sale. I suspect I’m a tad busy this week and I can’t guarantee to be able to write much more until next week but I’ll do my best for you.

Stupid Day

I’m declaring today a Stupid Day.  It’s one of those days where I can’t seem to do anything right.  Being Wednesday it’s meant to be my housework day yet I’ve spent most of the day on the computer making very little headway.  I felt it was time to let people loose on the new blog and let them see the colours, maybe get some feedback even.  As soon as I’d dealt with that I noticed there was no search function and decided it just wasn’t on.  I’ve spent the rest of the day in between lunch and messages trying to install some sort of search function that actually searches correctly with absolutely zero success.  I did take a break to make a phone call but I couldn’t find the phone number so I headed out to find the office of the AEC Hotham.  Wrong move.

I thought I had the address in my head as well as having seen the office so I drove to the Oakleigh shopping centre and parked underground as I used to do.  Walked through the shopping centre and off to where I thought the office was only to see a street sign with what I thought was the wrong street name, turned around and headed in the direction of the two op shops.  Checked them out and found nothing, found a Father’s Day pressie somewhere else, bought some stuff for dinner and went back to the car.  At the car I checked the map and found the street I thought I should have been looking for and almost got lost heading in that general direction.  At that point I gave up and went home again.  Good thing too.  When I sat down in front of the computer I looked at the paper I’d had with me the whole time and discovered I had been on the street I wanted and was only metres away from the right building but hadn’t seen it.  Not only that but the paper had the phone number on it.  All I’d needed to do was to look at the paper and ring the number.

Not only, but also…the address I had in my head is actually a house, I’ve just recalled some friends who used to live there!

So, there you go.  I officially declare today a Stupid Day.  I don’t think I’ll bother trying to do any more work, might do some ironing and stuff that up instead.  It’ll be different.

Welcome to the new Suz’s Space Blog

Hello!  Welcome the new address for the Suz’s Space Blog.  It’s only been a few days since I downed tools on the old address and announced a move, but it feels much longer.  Thank you for your patience during this time of change and refurbishment.  I’m loving the the new address, it’s in line with my website so it will be much easier to find one from the other.  Please take a few moments to familiarise yourself with your surroundings and to update your bookmarks to reflect the new url as I’m sure you’d hate to lose me.  I do hope everything works as it should, if it doesn’t please leave me a comment or email me and complain bitterly.

Moving soon

I admit to being embarrassed to blog at the moment. I’m in the process of creating a new blog and hoping to implement a lot of the changes I picked up at the Problogger event last week. Until then I’m going to take a break from blogging.

I’m sure you want to be kept up-to-date on all of this with the new url to ensure you’re the first people to see the new blog please click on the link below and follow the instructions.

The Boots Lady

In some circles I’m known as The Boots Lady, those who know me will be quite puzzled about this as I’m not known for my clothes sense, in fact I’m known far more for wanting to shave my hair off than for my clothes sense. I just don’t have much interest in the way clothes look, function is a different matter but fashion and me are not good bedfellows.

So, “How come you’re known as The Boots Lady I hear you ask”. What a good question and I’m so glad you asked that one.

I was in the middle of a business conference and we were doing a workshop on writing our FAQs. We had to take a piece of paper, write as few words as possible about our business and pass it on to the next person who then had to write three questions and pass it on to the next person who then had to write three more questions and so on until we were told to hand them back to the original person. We then had to look at our papers and were asked what we’d found out. My voice rang out “I need to do something about my writing”. That got a nice laugh and when I explained the poor lady who’d misread my writing was mortified. I’d written “I sell books online” and my writing was so bad it looked like boots so she’d asked me questions about selling boots.

There you go, most people know me as The Books Lady, but some people know me as The Boots Lady. I’m sure there’s a moral in that story but there’s a reason I learnt to type. In some places I’m known as The Badge Lady, but that’s another story entirely and will need photos.

Speaking of typing, I know I wasn’t really but I am now. I managed to secure myself a seat Tuesday this week in a fabulous training session run by the ever-lovely Darren Rowse. When he sent out the initial query asking if there was interest he was looking at a 20 person training session and ended up with upwards of 100 people. I now need to wear reading glasses when working on the computer or reading a book…or writing…so I took my laptop as it’s a real pain to look at the presentation with one pair of glasses then have to change to write something down and I generally only get a fraction of what I need. I was lucky enough to sit in the back row right near the powerpoint so I was able to type the whole day. I certainly typed…a lot, I’ve got a 26 page Word document which is fairly closely spaced. I sent these notes to Darren last night and we’ll see what happens.

I went to this session so I could learn how to make my blog work better, look better and give me more confidence about the whole process. I was already in the process of designing a new blog layout with a new url linked to my website and this session given me all the information I need to design the right blog. It won’t happen for a few weeks as I’m not really html savvy, I just know enough to be dangerous, but it will happen and I’ll announce it here first and give you all the url before I do the final switchover. Stay tuned to this Bat Channel for more information.

Teaser Tuesday: Problogger – Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett

Tuesday Tuesday is hosted by Miz B over at Should Be Reading.

This book is all about blogs and how to make money from them. I’m not reading a fiction book at the moment so I’m going to be a bit silly and give you my Teaser Tuesday from this one. I’m almost finished so I’ll be able to review it in a day or two and then have something less non-fictional for next Tuesday. The full title is Problogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income. Now, I’m going to be content with getting a four-figure income from my blog or blogs if I manage to start another one but the info is still useful.

“Go to Google and type in virtually any word you can think of, and you’ll often find millions of results. The interesting thing is that for most search results in Google (and other search engines) there is very little for readers to go by in deciding which result to click on.”

Very illuminating, I’m sure.

Doctor Who and being blogged

I’m sure you want to know what Doctor Who and me being blogged have to do with each other. Actually, to be honest, nothing at all. I only have a few words to say about both things and I’m going to talk about both of them today to make a longer blog.

A few days ago I mentioned a Doctor Who meeting my eldest was organising. It was great fun. For the initiated we watched An Unearthly Child episodes 1-4 (with jelly babies in hand) which just happen to be the first four episodes of Doctor Who. It was fabulous seeing William Hartnell again. I don’t think I’ve seen him for a very long time. Lovely to go back and see what it used to be like and to compare William Hartnell with David Tennant. Anyway, she is planning more meetings so if you’re in the south eastern suburbs of Melbourne and you don’t mind being threatened by miniature Daleks you might want to watch this space. You could also join the Doctor Who Club of Victoria.

I really don’t like bragging and I admit to being really uncomfortable about writing this and about the blog, but I put my hand up to be interviewed a few weeks ago in a fit of confidence and today I received notification that my entry had been published. Melissa Norfolk is a lovely lady who gave a presentation at the recent Business Mums Conference. Her presentation was on websites and she gave me such confidence about my own website I finally felt able to add the extra pages I’d been considering. She’s written a book called Starting an Online Business for Dummies and I really recommend it for anyone just starting out. I also recommend you visit her blog in a few days after my entry has hidden itself a bit, might make me feel a little less self conscious about it.

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