Merlin’s found a page of great tips for artists.

I’d love to think that when Merlin finds a post like this, he’s sat at his computer thinking “Hey great! I’ll get a mention on PigPog!”, but I doubt he does. We’re grateful for the splendid stuff he finds, anyway.

Sorry – it looks like I’d broken our comments some time back when I was trying to stop a flood of spam. I thought it had been a bit quiet around here. Seems to be working again now, anyway – within a couple of minutes of fixing it, there were six new spam attempts queued up trying to get through. It’ll be staying moderated, then, I’m afraid.

(Oh, and many thanks to Gary for letting us know it was broken!)

Update: After getting things going again, I was struck somewhat by how much worse the whole blog spam problem has got. I kept everything moderated, so it didn’t actually appear here anyway, but I was having to delete maybe a hundred spam attempts each morning, then more than that during the day. Time consuming. Anyway, we’ve now added Spam Karma 2 to our WordPress installation, and it works great – seems to let real comments straight through, but has no trouble spotting even the spams that I was having to look twice at myself. Highly recommended. Anyway, let us know if you have any problems posting.

As we got close to home tonight, there was a fantastic sunset going on – I spotted a few good views of it from the A46, but we were on the wrong side, and didn’t find a good place to stop. At the last roundabout before home, we turned right around and came back to park in a lay-by, and got these shots…

There was a sad twist to the spot we ended up stopping at, though. It was the exact spot of a serious accident a couple of weeks ago, where a tanker had crashed with a car, killing the car driver. The hedge we were taking the photos over had been filled with flowers…

…and this note was on the ground…

…he will obviously be very much missed by his family and loved ones.

An excellent article from Doug at DIY Planner – Surfing the Alpha Waves – all about how to get into that creative mindset.

Alpha waves, on the other hand, tend to “turn on” our creativity. You’ve no doubt experienced those elusive semi-relaxed moments when you’re struck by inventive ideas, innovative solutions, and entirely new ways of looking at the same old things? Those little satori flashes of enlightenment when a new and exciting path is revealed? Well, you were probably surfing your alpha waves.

Good stuff, with lots of nice, practical advice on how to get into this state, and how to stay in it for longer. It mainly involves avoiding stress, so I guess I’m on the way there one way or another now

Michael and I have been together for nearly 10 years, and for most of those years he’s had to endure me hopping from job to job to job as I attempt to find something to do for a living that I find at least half interesting. I’ve had temp jobs and permanent jobs, I’ve been in and out of work and not once has he complained that maybe I ought to get my act together.

After nearly 9 years of service in his job, Michael has decided to quit. What sort of partner would I be if, after all the times he’s supported me, if I didn’t do the same in return? (Answer – one that has a permanent seat reserved on the train to Dumpsville). Not only do I support him, I’m proud of him and I’m excited about what the future brings.

Michael is a wonderful man with a beautiful, fascinating and creative mind. He’s already wasted too much of his life advising people to reboot and apply service pack yada yada. Now’s the time for him to share his creativity on a full-time basis. If you’re familiar with Michael through GTD and all that, I’m sure he’ll be writing about productivity now and again, but this is the time for his art to shine. It’s going to be worth looking at, so stick around.

As for me, well, I’m still working, just 3 days a week for the time being, but if our finances get low* then I will increase my hours. Because I’m a temp, I can work fairly flexibly, changing hours around and taking breaks between assignments. The idea initially was I’d gradually reduce the hours I worked, then stop when we had enough PigPog income coming in to make up the shortfall. That all changed when it became obvious that Michael really needed to quit his job, and soon.

What was the first thing he did the morning after his resignation? Service packed my computer. I find that sweet and very amusing.

Our dream is to make this site a success, enough for us to make it our living, and I believe that if two people in love share a dream it can come true. We are definitely two people in love, so I can’t see how we can go wrong.

*buy something from Amazon! Please!

Time to Stop

I won’t go into any details, but over the last few years, my job in computer support that used to be pleasant and fun has gradually become more and more difficult, and more and more stressful. Last week, I finally reached the point where I just didn’t feel that continuing with it was an option any more. On Friday, I handed in my notice.

It was a big decision for many reasons…

• I’ve been there for almost nine years – it’s a long time.
• Even though the job isn’t really something that I’ve really wanted to do for the rest of my life, stopping feels a little bit like it’s making the time I have spent doing it into a waste of time.
• We were kind of relying on the money. I don’t have another job to go to, we have relatively little savings, and bills that come to more than Sam earns.
• It feels like it’s all I know, so even though I’ve not been enjoying it, it still felt like a ‘safe’ option.
• I have a lot of friends there. OK, I can keep in touch, but I won’t be seeing them every day as I have for a long time.

…but once it started to feel like I just couldn’t do it any more, stopping turned into the only option.

What This Means for PigPog

Let’s cut straight to the bit you might be interested in if you’re reading – PigPog. Will we be giving up now we can’t afford to do this any more?

No. We can’t afford not to do this. We pay quite a bit more than we need to for hosting, to cut any risk should PigPog be featured somewhere big (like 43 Folders, I guess – thanks, Merlin), but we’re more than covering the hosting costs now. Only just, but PigPog is actually profitable. Not enough to give up work and live on, but it’s a start.

Although I’m likely to have to get another job at some point in the near future, for a little while at least, we’re going to try to manage by cutting our living costs as far as we can, and supplementing it by whatever means we can find – selling bits and pieces of stuff we no longer need, working as slowly as we can through our savings, the money Google gives us through AdSense, and thost little cuts we get when people buy from Amazon through our links.

The real hope is that given a bit of time doing this, we just might be able to drive traffic up enough to make PigPog actually pay enough that I don’t have to get another job. Then keep pushing it until Sam can give up too. We know it’s a bit of a long shot, but we’re going to give it a serious try, because if we didn’t, we’d just spend the rest of our lives wondering if we perhaps might have been able to make it if we’d only tried.

So, for PigPog? For a while at least, you now have one full-time staffer working on the site. That should mean some pretty impressive growth. Lots of new articles, lots of new photos, and lots more experiences to write about.

How Does It Feel?

Scary. We’ve not prepared for doing this, and I have no other job to go to, so I’m obviously feeling somewhat frightened about how we’re going to pay the bills now. At first, that was almost everything. Now, it’s subsiding.

I’m still only slowly coming to terms with the idea that, for a while at least, I can do almost anything. For the last ten years of my life, I’ve got up each morning knowing what I have to do – usually getting dressed relatively smartly, and going to work. Now I don’t have that any more, and the lack of knowing is a bit daunting. I could get up and just spend the day lounging about the house, and getting nothing done. I could rush around doing housework all day. I could go out and take photos. I could go and sit somewhere with my Tablet PC and write. I could come home and sit in our office writing and working on PigPog. I could make things to try to sell to make money. I could spend the whole day in the bath. Too many options.

Now that the fear is subsiding, though, I’m starting to feel more hopeful about how things might turn out. I’ve always thought that if you’re passionate enough about something, and willing to put in enough work on it, the money should follow. Now, I’m going to test the theory. I’m passionate about PigPog, art, photography, and sharing all this through the Internet. Time to see if that can translate into enough money to live on.

As for actually handing in my notice at work, that was difficult and emotional. I’ve known some of the people there for almost nine years, and a number of people I work closely with I’ve known for several years. For years, I’ve seen them most days of my life, and now that’s going to come to an end. I’ll keep in touch with some people, but it won’t ever be the same again.

How it Should Have Been Done

One regret I have is that I didn’t see this coming some time ago and prepare for it. I knew things hadn’t been much fun for a long time (someone moved my cheese), but had kept thinking that I’d stick with it for a while longer yet. If we’d actually started saving up some time ago, we’d be in a position to do this without the financial concerns. Until staying really stopped being an option, though, I didn’t really examine the alternatives. If you aren’t really happy in your job any more, start working on your escape plan now. Don’t blow the money on a holiday to get away for a fortnight, or alcohol to forget it for an evening at a time – save it, think about it, and change your life to what you actually want. You might fail, but if you don’t try, you already did fail.

Things I’m Glad I Have

I’ve bought some expensive items in recent times that I’m actually glad to have now. If I’m going to try to do this PigPog thing more seriously, it would be difficult without…

• Moog – my Toshiba M200 Tablet PC. Enough computing power to do everything I need, in a small and convenient package that I can use almost anywhere.
• My Casio EXILIM EX-750Z. The photography here is my main artistic outlet – it’s what I do best. If I didn’t already have this camera, I wouldn’t feel I could buy one now, but I wouldn’t be able to do the things I can do now without it.

People Who’ve Made This Easier

• Sam has supported me and encouraged me through this, and given me the guts to go for it despite not knowing what’s coming up – helped me to work through the fears. I couldn’t have done it without her (like so much else in life).
• My parents have been very supportive (as they have always been), and their advice and offers of help have made the decision easier than it would otherwise have been.

So What Now?

I have given four weeks’ notice, and by my estimates, I probably have around two weeks of holidays remaining, so I’ll probably actually stop going to work in about two weeks. Then I’ll have a couple of weeks of theoretically being on holiday before I actually become unemployed.

From PigPog’s point of view, a few things will drop for the next couple of weeks. I’m not going to do any themed sets of photos this week at least, and there will probably be relatively few posts during the week. They’ve only been happening recently because they’re scheduled during the weekend to flow out in a trickle through the week. In a couple of weeks, the distinction between week days and weekends will become very blurred, to say the least, so regular posting during the week should resume naturally.

It’s only a week ago we were considering how to reduce the scope of PigPog, because we just couldn’t cover the ground we were trying to cover with the time we had available. Even that short a time ago, we didn’t think for a moment we might tackle the problem this way.

I’ll be posting more as things happen. It will also be nice to be able to share more of my life here, rather than most of my time being out of bounds for public discussion. Blogs are always better when the real people show through from behind them. For too long, I’ve not felt able to do that. Well, I’m here now, and should be much more so as time goes by.

How You Can Help

If you want to help with all of this, you can do so by helping to spread the word about PigPog to anyone you know who could benefit from some creative outlets. One of the first things we need to do is to get more readers. Other than that, you can always buy yourself something from Amazon UK or Amazon US using our links (those just there) – it won’t cost you any more, and we get a little cut that will help us to – well, to live. Drag them to your bookmarks now, and any time you use them to visit Amazon, we’ll get a little tip sent our way.

Thanks in advance if you do any of this.

An X in the sky. Contrails from planes.

Morning sun over rooftops. The sky was quite startling one morning, as we were setting out to work, so I snapped this from just outside our house.

No more free parachutists, I’m afraid – it was only while stocks lasted.

If you plan (or just play at planning) comics, videos, films, etc, you might find this useful – DIY Planner have released Storyboard Templates. It’s a PDF file with framed storyboard areas, and sections for titles and notes – 1, 2, or 6 to a page.

I know we’ve had this one here before, and not too long ago, but I like it, and that’s reason enough for a repeat.

Oh, and here’s some plane poo…