Another year arrives! Woo! Of course, it’s quite pre­dict­able, although what hap­pens each year never fol­lows any logic or sense.

I share only a little about myself online, but let’s say that 2006 was prob­ably a year which, for me, could have become pivotal for so many reas­ons. Exper­i­ences which I’ll never for­get, such as climb­ing Machu Pic­chu, nearly being struck by light­ning on a Chilean moun­tain, hav­ing a bot­fly removed, launch­ing a new busi­ness ven­ture… all incred­ible. Friends have been sim­il­arly amaz­ing. I also took second place over­all yet again in the Liv­er­pool and Chester Speed Cham­pi­on­ship as well as a brace of class pos­i­tions in the ANWCC championships.

The down­side of all this has been nearly burn­ing myself out. I think one can only take so much excite­ment in a year and I really went to town in 2006. I also decided that it was finally time to attack my house and ren­ov­ate. Me being me this didn’t mean a quick re-decorate but a strip down includ­ing a full re-wire, some re-plumbing, and lots more besides. Not some­thing I’d do again to a house I live in, to be hon­est, but it’s been a fas­cin­at­ing learn­ing pro­cess. Not least of which is just how well dust can get through under­neath doors, into draw­ers, cup­boards and clothes. It’s com­ing on now, but has a fair way to go.

The web­site has come on rather a lot too. I’ve had a ‘place-holder’ site for years now, but per­sist­antly failed to do any­thing much with it. How­ever, with the rise of blog­ging soft­ware to make main­tain­ing a web­site easy I decided it was time to do some­thing about it. I still had a very basic site, but now it con­tained a blog so people could fol­low my travels in South Amer­ica. Then I added stuff about my motor­s­port… and well, it just took on a life of its own. The site espe­cially took off when my tale of bot­fly woes reached some pop­u­lar web­sites like b3ta.com and I found myself with thou­sands of vis­its. Since then the site has man­aged to aver­age around 4000 unique vis­its per month, with peaks of up to 12,000.

Guide Books

So where now for the web­site? Well, I travel a bit, and have noticed that the pop­u­lar guide books vary some­what dra­mat­ic­ally in their use­ful­ness and advice. Some are ver­ging on the down­right dan­ger­ous in some cases — for example I saw a (admit­tedly old­ish) Guide du Routard from France which sug­ges­ted that the YMCA in Liverpool’s Mount Pleas­ant would be an inter­est­ing place to stay. Yes… a typ­ical middle class, French back­packer may ini­tially be fooled by the building’s gothic facade into think­ing he or she had arrived in a hostel of quite excep­tional stand­ards. Per­haps if the trav­el­ler had arrived late when most of the alco­holic and junkie home­less res­id­ents had settled in for the night the dangers would go un-noticed, but oth­er­wise I have a feel­ing that there are quite a few French stu­dent trav­el­lers who’ve left Liv­er­pool with an alto­gether inac­cur­ate view of what con­situtes fun in this won­der­ful city. On the other hand, Jean-Paul Sartre is some­thing of a French hero who believed in hold­ing few pos­ses­sions — if you wish to move towards such an exist­en­tial­ist exist­ence then per­haps this is the ideal way to start?

I could eas­ily ramble on about the prob­lems with guide­books, but I won’t until I start a new sec­tion. Yes indeed, I’m going to start a guide­book review sec­tion. I intend to take the three key books to any par­tic­u­lar loc­a­tion I cover and will test it for accur­acy. If you’d like to send in reviews of what you’ve found, then please do so and they could well be included on the site. If you’re good, you’ll even get a contributor’s account and be able to add your own entries.

Other Drivers

As the site gen­er­ates a fair bit of sprint and hillclimb related traffic, other drivers have expressed an interest in con­trib­ut­ing. Whether I add sec­tions to this site to that end, or whether I cre­ate a new com­munity site is still some­thing I’ve yet to decide. Watch this space.…

More Travel

I’m cer­tain to be trav­el­ling more, and cov­er­ing some new loc­a­tions. But as usual I don’t announce these trips in advance, nor do I announce when I return. The site is often updated on dif­fer­ent dates to the exact time I travel as well. Why? Well, secur­ity, basic­ally. If people know where I am, and when… it could mean trouble. I trust most of you of course, but the internet’s a very pub­lic place and you never know who’s watching.

Busi­ness

Although I’ve had my own busi­ness for many years in order to be a freel­ance con­tractor, it all changed around dra­mat­ic­ally this sum­mer when I decided that PeopleSoft was a declin­ing force. With this in mind I knew that I’d find it hard to main­tain rates, and even harder to find work I could travel to eas­ily. Although the trav­el­ling has been enorm­ous fun, I was rather tired of con­stantly uproot­ing myself. I was also miss­ing my friends and had a pecu­liar social life.

With all this in mind, I relaunched the com­pany as Inter­con­nect IT Ltd, joined forces with James White­head, and we set to the task of form­ing some­thing new and excit­ing. We star­ted out with a vis­ion for a gen­er­al­ist tech­no­logy con­sultancy — solv­ing the tech­no­logy related prob­lems all com­pan­ies come across. How­ever, the most com­mon prob­lem right now appears to be get­ting a good web­site run­ning. So by and large we spe­cial­ise now in Web Design. It’s fun, rel­at­ively straight­for­ward, and cre­at­ively chal­len­ging. 2007 should hope­fully be the year we turn it into a prof­it­able com­pany once more. But if you hap­pen to know any­one who needs a website.…

Bot­toms Up!

So here’s to 2007! Let’s make it a great one, with lots of fun, work, travel and motorsport!

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