I’m starting a new business. I’ve started businesses before but not like this, this is my baby, there’s nobody else involved except very soon, a whole bunch of customers and consumers. I am starting a community magazine for families. It will be funded by advertising and thus free for the consumers. So I’ve been looking for software and man, is that complicated. I want one or more programmes to handle the following:
- Database of possible advertisers – so sales leads basically which I can then convert when I start selling space.
- Database of possible distribution locations – again sort of sales leads although there’ll be no money involved here.
- Advertising sales manager – which from rigorous searching seems to be either a specialist Contact/Customer Relationship Manager or a Sales Force Automation tool or some other things that get shortened to three-letter acronyms. Unfortunately the ones aimed at print publishing seem to cost an absolute fortune.
- Accounting software with invoicing capability and preferably some kind of integration with my advertising database.
- Project management software – for handling copy deadlines, print deadlines, etc.
And you know what else can do all that stuff? A spreadsheet.
Whilst I eventually want some software with a few bells and whistles, I’ve so far wasted about 10 hours looking for it (not counting the Project Management software – I’ve been trying to find my favourite one of those for three years). So for now, it’s all going in a spreadsheet. A Google Spreadsheet in fact. With that clever form building thing they’ve got going on for idiots like me that don’t understand spreadsheets.
Here goes.
I’d like to say that the lack of posting has been due to my moving house, but since I only moved 10 days ago I’d be lying. The thing that has actually consumed my life and left me without the energy to write normal blog posts (not that I’ve ever been regular) is my forthcoming marriage to Silks (Silks being his World of Warcraft name, yes, I’m marrying a geek).
We went ring shopping together at the end of August and then he ‘officially’ popped the question a month later. And it’s taken me till now to mention it. Yes, I suck.
I now have to decide whether Quasi-Evil will be the place I blog endlessly about table centerpieces (although we’re not actually having any) or if I should protect the universe from my obsession. We’ll see.
Nebraska has a safe-haven law, as many states do, allowing parents to leave their children at a state-licensed hospital without risk of prosecution for abandonment. The law is designed to protect babies who would otherwise be at risk but what the law in Nebraska fails to mention is an age limit.
So a few days ago, the number of children abandoned since the law came into force in July reached 24. The twenty-fourth child? A 17-year-old boy.
Needless to say, they’re working on changing the wording of that law. So if your teenagers are driving you mental, get over to Nebraska before it’s too late!
Scarlett was a bit restless today, so I dressed her up in my favourite dress and took her outside for a posing session. She does love posing for the camera.
So far, being a stay-at-home-mum has meant I’ve had less time on the internet, not more as I expected. It’s wonderful having so much time with Scarlett and I know she’s loving it but it’s also knackering, and occasionally stressful. Most of the time she’s incredibly well-behaved but she wants constant attention (that comes from my side of the family unfortunately!) even if it’s only for me to watch her playing. This means I’ve gone from having 12 hours a day for my freelancing and volunteer work to trying to cram it all into four.
This is the most time I’ve spent with her in one go for over a year, and it’s totally worth it. So forgive me if posts are few and far between, but I’ve got this gorgeous little girl to see grow up.
As procrastination usually entails, I’ve been watching films…
Boudica aka Warrior Queen was both very cool and utter pants. I still can’t make up my mind whether I liked it or not. I liked the costumes (what? I’m a LARPer…I made notes and everything), I liked the way they did their make-up for battle, I liked most of the script, and the acting from the three main women (Boudica and her daughters) was always satisfactory, occasionally excellent. I liked that Boudica was still womanly in the way she acted and reacted; not just a bloke with breasts. The interweaving of magic was a bit pants but mostly bearable. The ending was horrendous, and utter tosh. I’ll probably watch it again, if only to get screencaps of how Boudica’s vambraces were attached.
WALL-E was fantastic, as I knew it would be coming from the same director/writer who did Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo.
WALL-E is a Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth-Class, the last surviving robot on earth which was abandoned 700 years previously when it could no longer sustain human life thanks to the rubbish produced by mankind. The film takes a very hard look at how we treat our planet and for much of it, pulls no punches in painting the human race as cowardly; choosing to run away sooner than take responsibility for problems of our own making. A nation of obese, uniformed slobs – their bone structure weakening with every generation – is waited on by robots which show far more personality than any of the humans and it’s only when WALL-E arrives, that they begin to wake up from their virtual worlds and realise that there’s more to living than food that comes in plastic cups.
Despite the bleak beginnings, WALL-E is full of optimism. It doesn’t hammer home the environmental message, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I don’t need Pixar telling me we’re wrecking the world, and anyone who does need telling that, wouldn’t get it if they’d written it in great big letters on every single bit of footage. Go see WALL-E, it’s the best thing to come out in ages.
Forgetting Sarah Marshall, written by the guy who did Knocked Up and directed by someone I’ve never heard of, is a rom-com that I was fully expecting to be crap. I was pleasantly surprised. OK, so I wasn’t crying with laughter but I chuckled a lot and may have even guffawed once or twice. Peter (played by the guy who wrote it) is an unusual choice for a male lead, being pretty plain, but he was endearing, loveable, and yet normal. Mila Kunis, who’s the voice of Meg in Family Guy, is freaking gorgeous. I don’t know how I missed that fact. And Russell Brand played Russell Brand. As usual, I couldn’t help but like him anyway.
There was no message, it wasn’t trying to be big and clever, it was just enjoyable and uplifting. The unrated version also had full frontal male nudity, Mila Kunis’s breasts and some entertaining sex positions from Russell Brand. Winner.
So after some good films, it was King Arthur that was the let down. I cannot see how the man who wrote Gladiator, one of my favourite films of all time, wrote this. The script wasn’t appalling, but it wasn’t fantastic either. The acting, from people who I usually adore, was wooden and just generally pants. Every time Clive Owen started making a speed, I cringed. His knights were decently written but badly acted, and his speeches to them just seem so forced because they weren’t the type of men to listen to them. It was like someone had said ‘It’s an historical epic, we need an average of four inspiring speeches per hour whether they’re appropriate or not.’
On the plus side, the cinematography wasn’t half bad and I did enjoy the battle scenes (I was watching the Director’s Cut so they were probably longer). I just didn’t really care who lived or died. If I’m perfectly willing to go away and get a drink, without pausing a film, in the middle of the climatic battle scene, there’s something very wrong with your character development.
