Pazzardous Material Vol 31 – the week’s posts on a single page (most recent at the bottom):

You To Me Are Everything

I love being a dad: telling terrible jokes, teaching Shiana and Mischa, my daughters, the history of Watford FC, and trying my best to set them up to live happy, healthy lives.

They are the reason why I write books, why I blog and why I tie autobiographical stories to songs in a playlist.

In the past, I owned the domain name legacyblogs.com.

I also ran a blog called ForShianaAndMischa.com, a resource for Shiana and Mischa to read about me and my work so that if they wanted to do anything similar in years to come, they’d have a bank of knowledge to help them.

I think it’s important for kids to be able to get their teeth into as much as possible that relates to their parents.

The Pretender

Yesterday I wrote that I once ran a blog called ForShianaAndMischa.com, a resource for my daughters.

I stopped working on it and gave up ownership of that domain a while ago, and revisited it yesterday for the first time in ages.

What’s there baffles me: a ghostly, hollow, clothing retail website, seemingly devoid of any human element:

There are no names on there, no company details (not even in the privacy policy), all the social media icons – and two other links – in the footer just point at the site’s domain name:

It exists, as far as I can make out, to extract money from people who are less likely to spot a scam.

Going Up The Country

A brief but important inted lesson for kids should involve teaching them how to search for and book train tickets and flights.

Some questions to answer:

Which are the best/most popular sites to search for flights, and why?
What do those companies gain by offering that service?
Which sites are best to buy train tickets in the UK?
What ticketing options are available?
Do you need to get physical tickets posted to you or can you use your smartphone?
Can you get a refund if you need to change or cancel your booking?
Can you book flights that take off and land in another country?

Over And Over

Something I see lots and lots, online and off, is poor writing.

Many will argue that it doesn’t matter.

Others will say language is always evolving, and they’re right.

Ignoring poor grammar and misspellings, what I think is more important is the ability to write coherently, to some kind of structure. The ability to tell a story with the written word. The know-how to refine the first attempt (which is rarely, if ever, better than a revised version).

It’s great that kids are learning to code but I question the value of that if their emails, pitching documents and CV fail to deliver.

Sad But True

Sadly, some companies want to rip us off and then hide.

Sometimes they hide behind anonymity, but there are two places where we can try to uncover a bit about companies online who want to avoid our awkward questions:

A whois lookup website, to try to identify the company that runs a particular website
Companies House, to find the registered details of that company

And from there and with that information, we’re on to them.

Patience

A simple lesson I’ve learned over the years is that things tend to take much longer than you think.

Whether it’s putting a quote together when pricing up a project for a new client, learning how to use a new piece of software, or – dare I say it – writing a book.

Everything takes twice as long, so what’s required are:

An alternative
Perseverance
Dogged determination
Patience

The Lemon Song

After 13 years of working, studying, trying and failing online, you’d l think I’d have learned my lesson.

I tried with Naughty by Nature, a novel that didn’t make it past the first draft despite me lining up a formatting person in the States, having a series of covers designed (above) and tweeting the whole thing – 81,000 words – line by line.

I even had the temerity to write this in my bio:

That had followed another failure: the sitcom I tried to get commissioned called Skidmark. About a driving instructor/musician character who wasn’t very good at either. I’d tried to promote it by sending out a synopsis with a drumstick that had a Skidmark sticker on bearing the tagline: “Because everyone loves comedy and music”.