Three were, for the most part, very helpful, apart from their bizarre attempts to downsell me. Usually anyone in telesales will try to persuade you that you need things which you don’t. In this case, two different operators separately tried to persuade me that I wouldn’t need the 8GB version, and that the original N95 was identical apart from the built-in memory of the 8GB model. That’s simply not true, but in any case you would have thought they would have been fighting to get me to spend the extra fiver a month the 8GB model will cost. On top of that, an operator tried to persuade me that I didn’t need the internet addon, again £5/month. I wasn’t wavering – I told him I needed it – and he proceeded to tell me why I didn’t. If 3 had had its own way, I would be paying them a total of £180 less over the course of the contract!

So far (all of about twelve hours) the phone’s been great. In particular, I’m loving the camera and the screen. I had a S60 phone before, the 6120 Classic, but the N95 is out of its league. More when I’ve had more time to get to know it.

I’m really excited to have started a new job, blogging and podcasting for the Virtual Worlds Forum website. The Virtual Worlds Forum is a wildly successful conference in London which debuted last year, and is coming back this year in October. I started on Tuesday this week, which couldn’t have been a bigger news day; Google finally got into the space with Lively, and I really welcome the opportunity to get really involved with a space that is clearly going to be of increasing importance in the future as advertisers go to new lengths to engage their audience.

I haven’t been doing proper, regular blogging for about a year now, and its a really nice feeling to be ‘back in the saddle’. I’m doing a handover period with my extremely helpful predeccessor at Virtual Worlds Forum blog, Stuart Dredge, for the next couple of weeks or so, and then I’ll be striking out on my own.

I’m in a bit of a blogging limbo at the moment. I don’t want to stop writing, but after the collapse of Blognation, I’ve not been sure where to write. I thought about restarting GizBuzz, but then doubted my ability and willingness to give sufficient time to it to make a renewed effort worthwhile. I’ve thought about trying to do some casual writing for bigger sites, but haven’t got round to getting in touch with people to arrange it. But frankly, that isn’t the problem.

Pompous as it sounds, I’ve got ‘bloggers block’, because lets face it, I could have been writing here. The very fact that the first post I have written in a while is on my bloggers block shows the desperation of my situation.

Joel is onto something at YouMakeMedia when he states “I don’t believe in writer’s block”, instead attributing it to a mere “deficit of motivation and a surplus of good old fashioned laziness”. Realistically, although I am ridiculously busy at the moment with school work, I do actually have some spare time that I should/could be using to write. I have a reason to write, to improve my skills for a career in journalism that I’m getting keener to pursue every day. Further, I continue to have the ability to write: I’m producing several thousand words a week in essays. And that’s the problem.

It’s a mindshare issue. I am doing so much ‘stuff’ that I lose the impetus to do things that I should really be doing, but which have less critical time scales or less direct benefits.

So I’m setting myself a challenge. Next week I am going to post every day on here. I haven’t racked up a load of posts; I’m just going to find something to write about and sit down and actually do it.

Fingers crossed!

I find my optimism on joining blognation about six months ago deeply irritating now. I don’t think it has been an entirely wasted period for me personally however; beyond the obvious “don’t lie to people you do business with”, which I would hope I could have worked out for myself anyway, I do think I have learnt some good lessons, and have come into contact with great people.

So where from here? I haven’t decided yet. In the short term I’ll probably do a bit more blogging here. In the long term, I will certainly continue to blog, although I am not sure what form that will take.

In the meantime, I find this 401 authorisation on Vecosys (Sam Sethi’s domain) deeply disturbing. It says ‘restricted access pre-launch’. The idea of Sam launching something else already seems an incredibly bad one to me.

Unlike most concerts I’m in, there isn’t a ‘promoter’ for this (be it a school, a charity, a venue etc) beyond the Consort itself, so we all have to work particularly hard in persuading to come. It’s a big church, and it we will look silly if no-one comes!

So, here comes the second purpose of this post- are there any ways you can think of to use the internet to advertise an event to non-tech people? If I wanted to run a tech conference I’d know where to start with online promotion, but a classical concert is a different ballgame- all suggestions gratefully received!

To celebrate the relaunch, below is a random Latin music track from Ioda Promonet.

Download “Un beso” (mp3)
from “God’s Project”
by Aventura
Premium Latin Music

Buy at iTunes Music Store

I quite enjoy having absolutely no access to the internet – on some levels I don’t give a monkeys about any of the top stories on TechMeme. That’s a good thing. I’m singing evensong in Truro Cathedral, which should be quite nice.

Out.

I’ve lined up about 4 drafts in the Gizbuzz system, which have the first paragraph written. So, over the course of next week, all I need to do is finish them. I have a feeling I will.

So – to get over future blocks, I will half write posts.

(by the way, I’m procrastinating again – I have a coursework essay to write, and it is midnight).

I have always used blogs as a way of work posponement. I set up Gizbuzz on Blogger partly to avoid revising for my GCSE mocks. When it came around to the real GCSEs, not only did I move Gizbuzz to WordPress, but I installed Ubuntu Linux on an old laptop, attached it to my network, got LAMP working, set up port forwarding and a static IP address and put Gizbuzz on that.

I’m not sure what it is about blogging which makes it so perfect for procrastination. I suspect that it is something to do with the combination of the technical challenge of setting the blog up in the first place, combined with the escapism of entering the virtual world of the internet, which seems at times strangely disjointed with the world in which most of us live, most of the time. Thus it takes up time, it is interesting and, most importantly, it is utterly irrelevant to the task in hand.

I really need to get on now.

Update: Have now done both essays, 48hrs later. Wow, that was effective procrastination!