Mind Pilot – Take Self Control

I know this website might be more about mood swings, but I’ll have to admit that my cooking standards have been a bit bipolar lately as well. Last night, I thought I was being well disciplined when I took a pizza and chips out of the freezer, and then decided to put them back and cook a stirfry, but it really did end up as one of the most disgusting concoctions (voice recognition says comic options — if only it was that funny) I’ve ever made. Unfortunately, I already had a bit of a headache when I started looking, so I was feeling extremely rough after I finished. I’m not sure exactly what I did to make it so bad, but I will certainly remember to never use frozen mini carrots in a stir-fry again — they had absolutely no flavour.

On the other hand, on Wednesday night I cooked pasta dish, which I was extremely proud of. I named it ‘Pasta Toulouse’ after the French ‘ville rose’ (pink City), and I guess it was a bit of an answer to spaghetti Bolognese, which does after all take its name from the redbrick city of Bologna, which I’m visiting next month! Whereas last night’s meal was almost toxic, Wednesday’s meal is what I would call nutritionally balanced — i.e. it had some very healthy ingredients (lashings of garlic, red onion, whole wheat pasta and harvest brown garlic bread) and some not so healthy (bacon, crème fraîche). Fortunately, Wednesday night was when I had agreed to cook for three guests, so at least I presented the best of my culinary skills to them.

Concurrently, this is often the way I am with my moods — most of the time when I’m out meeting people, I am confident an upbeat, and it is only when I’m with a select bunch of people I really know that I might discuss some of my more darker or downbeat moods. Hopefully, by having this website, I can make more people aware that there are two very different sides of my personality, and that I am far from alone in being this way. In the meantime, here’s to healthy eating and looking on the brighter side of life!

(21:38) — 4 1/2 posts in just under an hour , that’s enough for now.

(21:21) One thing I always wonder about when writing blog posts like this is just who exactly is going to read them? The bottom line is that I have absolutely no idea who could end up here, and in certain ways I don’t even really want to know. Some of the stuff here is quite personal, but I have decided that it is better out than in, so does it actually matter who might be reading?

One thing I’d like to keep is the conversational style that I get when using voice recognition, but oddly enough, I really hate to work on this if I think there is anyone else in the background. My housemate is home right now, but she’s upstairs, so I’m not too worried there, but there’s no way I could see myself sharing an office and using voice recognition, even when working on my other website, where the content is purely travel related, and nothing like so personal.

Meanwhile, there are people walking past my front door all the time, as it is Friday night, and I’m on a street with six pubs. Would I rather be out in one of them at the moment enjoying a drink, or some might say, drowning my sorrows? Well, if I had been more organised in the week, perhaps I would be, but I’m not really too bothered as next week is already looking extremely busy. Would I like to randomly go out to one of the pubs, and just start a conversation with whoever I met at the bar? I do that sometimes at my local, but as it is an Irish pub, and this is the weekend before St Patrick’s Day, I know it will be an extremely tight squeeze in at night, just as it is on any other Friday night, I really don’t enjoy that. Last week, I picked a pub at random, but it didn’t take too long for the conversation to degenerate down to the person standing next to me using the phrase ‘ I’m not racist but’, and we all know where that ends up.

So actually, I’d rather have a conversation with his blog, even though I have no idea who I’m talking to. But if you have read this far, please drop a comment and say hi!

As I was saying in an earlier blog post this afternoon, I would much rather share any ideas I have, rather than keep them to myself just in case somebody else might ’steal’ them. I think that a lot of people grossly overestimate the value of the ideas they have, and in my experience an idea is worth next to nothing if it isn’t acted on. As it happens, the one idea I did have which has made me money was never really that original; all it did was take an existing idea which appears in print in many places, and put it on the Internet.

I have one particular idea for a new website which I keep on telling people I’m going to launch, but I don’t think that anyone would take from me, because it is going require a significant amount of passion and detail subject knowledge to make it happen. For now, this idea is to stay on the back burner whilst I keep my main website afloat.

But what about other ideas I have for future projects, some of which don’t really have that much to do with the Internet? What if an idea is just a quick sketch or a design or in many cases as I find, just a play on words? I’d far rather flesh out a very brief description of what I’m thinking about in no more than one page, and stick it up on the Internet somewhere. If I should happen to meet someone, whether in person or online, who expresses an interest in something similar, then I can always point them in that direction. In the meantime, I always have plenty on my plate to get on with.

(21:17) after complaining before, I’m now wanting the voice recognition and a warning to come up, so I can take a break, or at least go online or just do a bit of sketching in Flash. But for the time being, I have flagged up 10 potential blog posts that I could do, and I have just done one of them, so I think I’m going to be here for a little bit longer. Well, I restarted the session after dinner at 8:40, and I’ve now gone on for 40 minutes, so I think I’ll do another 20.

Earlier this week, I drew up a list of the small steps which might need to be taken to transfer from a lethargic mildly depressed state to having enough energy to go out on a bike ride. Now I’m thinking about how I ought to set up the house so it is as easy as possible to go out on a bike ride, or take part in any other exercise activity.

• Put the bike in the front room. Thankfully, this has already been done, and it is a great help. The bike used to be in a shed at the back of the house — how easy it was to open a backdoor and retreat back inside without even getting to touch the bike! If seeing is achieving, then the front room is the ideal place, as this is also where I have my office. Unfortunately, there is a lot of junk around the place where I usually hang my bike up, so that needs to be moved.
• Get some pictures up and on computer screen, in notebooks etc, to remind myself how much I enjoy cycling. Include pictures of some of the great places I have been cycling (especially Nevis, Zermatt, Grosse Scheidegg, Cotswolds, Scotland), and places where I’d like to go — especially places which are easily accessible in a day trip from here. These images should be part of a sequence of motivational images, which could also feature business goals, travel plans etc.
• Keep the house tidy — tidy house = tidy mind = get more done = easier to leave work and get exercising.
•  Sort out alarm clocks and getting up routine — if I’m up early enough in the day, it is so much easier to go out exercising first thing, and to enjoy the buzz that gives me for the rest of the day.
• Have kit ready — even if on many days it is perfectly fine to reuse cycling kit from the last trip, it is always nice to have fresh gear clean and ready if I want it.
• Hang cycling shirts up in bedroom — this is a great reminder, although perhaps I should now use the picture hooks for their original purpose and put up some cycling related pictures on them.
• Keep it up — once I get into a really good routine of regular daily exercise, it is so much easier to stay there. This really isn’t rocket science!

Friday 19:56

Last night, I took a pizza and chips from the freezer, but then decided to go healthy and cook a stir-fry, but unfortunately that ended up as a total disaster. So tonight, I have played it safe and gone for the pizza and chips. This will make this a short session, especially as I will have to turn the chips halfway through, but that is an easy excuse to just mess around online whilst I’m waiting. Spending 20 minutes on random websites would be no great loss, especially considering how much time I wasted in bed this morning, but I have a momentum from when I came back from my job and I really want to keep this going. I said that I would start to promote this blog when it got to 100 posts, and I’m up to 34 now, so that’s halfway there — sorry, no it isn’t, it’s one third of the way, but as I’m doing this with voice recognition, I’m not going to go back and correct that!

I said I was apprehensive about doing the London to Paris bike ride, so instead I decided to start small and sign up for a bike ride in the Peak District with the British Heart Foundation. This is only 29 miles, but the registration fee is just £10, and there is no minimum requirement for sponsorship. My pizza and chips might not be all that healthy, but at least I’m keeping my sugar intake down tonight with a Diet Coke, but I really do hate the stuff. I think I bought it on some ridiculous special offer where it was cheaper to buy two multipacks that was to buy just the one, so I guess I’ll be lumbered with it for a while. In the meantime, I’ll be back to the regular stuff tomorrow.

Now, where was I? There goes the first alarm, off to turn the chips, back in a minute. [20:05]

20:07

Well, those chips really do smell good (voice recognition took that down as smouldered, I hope that isn’t a premonition for me allowing them to burn by getting the timing settings wrong, or concentrating so hard on the computer that I don’t hear the oven alarm in the background!). I remember going to a chippy in Warwick used to regularly tell me that fish and chips were at least the most healthy takeaway food, or should that be the least unhealthy takeaway food? I would go out to the local chippy — I’m sure fish is much more healthy than pizza, with all those omega-3 oils, but their standards have really gone down lately, and the other one is a 15 minute walk away, and I don’t have the car any more (voice recognition says avocado, is it trying to give me a health hint?) more to drive there.

Back to the notebook:

(20:13) I’m sure that alarm would go off any moment now, but before I been given a chance to get going, NaturallySpeaking tells me that I’m up to the limit of what it is able to recognise in one session. This must be total nonsense — I have barely done a quarter of an hour worth of dictation, and even now I just pasted in a few notes from a previous block of text, there is no way that they should take things over the limit. Reminder to myself — see if I can adjust voice recognition settings to allow for longer dictation time. Anyway, there goes the alarm (20:14)\\.

//(20:42) Just before I left for dinner, the microphone stand started coming apart, but I have put it back together again, and I hope that with a bit of tightening it won’t trouble me again. The microphone itself has proved to be extremely resilient, having been dropped several times. That’s what I expect from quality German engineering — I’m not sure where the stand came from, but I won’t make any pre-judgements there. Voice recognition certainly has its trials and tribulations, but once you get used to it, it is way more efficient than typing, and there’s no way I would even consider doing a blog like this if it wasn’t for voice recognition software. In many ways, this whole thing feels like a bit of a one-way conversation with a completely unknown audience, but I do like the fact that I can essentially just ramble along and say what I think, and I hope that this makes enough sense to keep future readers interested. Now as I said before, back to the notebook:

I have a growing list of people to get back in touch with Facebook — the idea of meeting up with one Facebook contact each day that I mentioned earlier on a week would certainly keep me really busy, but I don’t think I’d have enough time left to get any serious work done. I’d love to see if somebody else has tried a similar project. Anyway, A is for Aldo, Ankit — and that’s just in east London, so now I can see my diary getting very busy once I actually pin people down to a meeting. Maybe I could interview people for this blog — I know that most Internet entrepreneurs have a very interesting take on personal development issues, it is only natural that people who don’t fit in to a normal office environment will end up running their own businesses, and what better way to do this than to run your own website in your own time?

Well, that’s about it for this particular session — I have made loads of other notes, but they all qualify for posts in their own right, some here, some elsewhere. Here’s the titles I plan to add on this blog:

• Preparing the house for an exercise mentality.
• Is it best to share ideas or keep them to yourself?
• Where did it all go wrong on Thursday? / general notebook update for Wednesday evening and Thursday
• Food swings
• Trainers or concert tickets — which is a better way to spend £75?
• Thought about twitter
• The diverse world of Internet publishing.
• ’Linkansen’
• Thoughts on Top 30 revenue earning websites and ‘I’m following the dream’ type blogs.
• A one-way conversation with who?

Right, that’s quite a good list. Potentially 10 more posts this evening, but I think I’ll also end up moving off into other arenas, and maybe having a bit of a drawing session. I know that I need to update the template for this blog, but my other two blogs could be neatened up quite a bit as well. I think it’s finally time to get our logo sorted, that’s one that I’ve been procrastinating on for years.

Well, I might as well start at the top: (tbc – next post)

Coming back from my jog, I filled in an enquiry form about the London to Paris bike ride, which I’d had my notice-board as a reminder for several weeks. Having looked into the details, I’m in two minds about doing this sort of thing. Of course, it would be a wonderful challenge to do, and a great way of meeting like-minded people. And it goes without saying that the big issue foundation is always a very good cause to raise money for. But I’m a little bit apprehensive about the amount of money that needs to be raised — £1300 by 20th May, and I’m also not sure if I will be a will to get full medical clearance and insurance for this kind of event, considering that I’m still having many days of extremely low energy, and that my most recent hospitalisation was just four months ago.

Of course, I can make this a self-fulfilling prophecy — if I say I’m not capable, then I won’t take any further, if I sign up and immediately start worrying about the amount of training I’ll have to do, or the amount of money I’ll have to raise, then I will never get anywhere near either target. If I decide that I’m going to go all out and do it, then I could theoretically pull out all the stops and make it happen — but there would be no point in even considering this without discussing it with my doctor first. I’m all for a challenge (and have done 100 miles in a day three times before — just not on consecutive days), but I think this one is a little bit daunting for now — perhaps I should try and find some one-day cycling challenges within the UK, and complete one of those first. If that goes well, there is always the London to Berlin cycling challenge for next year.

Well, at least the thought of this ride has got me thinking more about getting back my bike — my main bike needs to have its rear wheel sorted out, but I have the racer in the back garden which I can use in the meantime. What can I do now to make sure I have the motivation tomorrow to go out for a decent bike ride? Of course, I’ve already broken down the steps necessary to move from a lethargic state to getting started on a bike ride, but what if I’m just too busy working to be able to switch off and get out? My mind turns to the ‘think bike’ road safety signs, and wonders what else I can do to make the home environment more geared up towards chucking me out, rather than staying put!

See — preparing house for exercise mentality (separate post to follow)

I also remind myself of the simple anagram love/velo (velo is French for bicycle, and we all know how much the French love their cycling, not to mention their romance is well). A picture springs up a continuation of this play on words to make ‘lovelo’, with the two o’s as bike wheels, and the v as a heart, which could perhaps extend upwards to make the seat. That might be something to play around with later — it is always so much easier to come up with a very quick concept sketch than it is to have a completed drawing; ideas, rather than final presentation, have always been my strong point, and I still hope that one day I will be to find someone to work with who can instantly (well, reasonably quickly at least) turn my ideas into finished presentations. In the meantime, I just have to accept the fact that I probably have to come up with 10 ideas before one even makes it to the drawing board, and even when I start sketching anything out, however simple, I tend to go round and round in circles so many times. This has always been my great frustration, but I was thinking earlier on that the Internet can give incredible opportunities to partner up like-minded people.

I have no idea how many people will read this blog post — at the moment, I know that it will be very few, because I don’t even intend to start seriously promoting this blog until I have at least 100 posts, and until I’m a little bit more stable in my daily routine. However, once a few people do start reading it, who knows what possibilities might arise, especially as this blog is aimed at like-minded creative people. It could just take one person to take one particular idea from one post and run with it, or I might just find myself that by laying out a simple idea in text form I am able to quickly translate it into a finished project.

You might be asking just exactly what I mean what I’m talking about projects based on just one word, but that is always a starting point for a brand, a website, a project, an advertising campaign, a building, or just about anything else that has to be created. If I just look around the notes I made in 10 minutes after having a shower, I can see several other words I wrote down or quick sketches that I made that might also be turned into projects in some form at some stage.

A lot of people say that you should keep things yourself, and as I say this, the computer tells me I have reached the maximum amount I can dictate before the memory is full. So maybe I shouldn’t just blurt out everything in one go.

Next instalment to follow later.

6 p.m.

Wow, I’m feeling full of energy and super motivated — why has it taken me so long to get going today?

One method of ensuring I get up that has sometimes worked is to literally use a barrage of alarm clocks, so even if I skip one, another will go off shortly afterwards. Unfortunately, easy though this may sound, it is so easy to stop doing this — if I’m feeling tired at the end of one day, it is unlikely that I will remember to set the clocks for the next, so the cycle is easily broken. A few months ago, I bought some more alarm clocks from IKEA at the grand price of 59p each, but within a couple of weeks they were several hours away from the correct time — so far out that I wasn’t even sure if they were losing gaining time. I don’t know if this is down to the batteries or the clocks, but I have another two alarm clocks in front of me which I hope will be more accurate this time!

Right, now let’s look at all the notes I have scrawled down after taking a shower — this actually took just 10 minutes, but I suspect it will take a lot longer to type up:

Quick pat on the back time — I said that I needed to go to the pharmacy and go for a jog at the same time. I left at four (okay a little bit late, but that was all time well spent catching up with social contacts on Facebook), and found out that the pharmacy already had sorted out my prescription as part of its automated repeat service, so for once I’m actually ahead of myself when it comes to organisation. I then carried on to Memorial Park, and included a bit of sprinting before limping off with a blister on my left foot. I think it’s time for some new trainers, but that’s another conversation to follow shortly.

I haven’t sorted out anything social for this weekend, but I’m not really too bothered, and might well use the time for a major work catch up, as I have been so lousy over the last two weeks. Next week is looking much busier — I will be busy in London on Monday and Thursday, have the pub quiz on Wednesday and should be going to Cambridge for the weekend. Maybe we could do more pub quizzes, as the one we do in Leamington is only once every fortnight.