Day 46: Business before pleasure

My Project: 365 Creative Writing Prompts

Day 46: Business before pleasure

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but my project has taken a bit of a beating lately. When I first started out, I wrote every day, but over the past week or so, my project has been on the backburner.

That is not to say that I haven’t been writing. On the contrary, I’ve been writing quite a bit, but for clients. Paying clients. And you know how it goes, business before pleasure.

The client in question was a travel agent who wanted to draw attention to various European cities. As such, I visited London, Ronda, Barcelona, Sicily, Wallis, and Geneva. My visits were online, of course, researching various websites for information on these cities.

And you cannot imagine the work involved to write a 600-word article. But I did it. I researched until I was blue in the face, typed until my fingers were numb and in the process learned all about what there is to see and do in these various cities. With the exception of London, I visited these places personally, but it was so long ago, I can’t remember the details.

I do remember Barcelona though. I was only a teenager when I was there with my family and their friends, but my visit to the Sagrada Familia was one of those memorable moments that stayed with me.

Having visited Madrid, Malaga, Valencia, Seville and Granada, we had our fill of churches, cathedrals and other historic buildings such as the Alhambra. When we arrived in Barcelona and Mom suggested a visit to the Sagrada Familia, we thought … great, another church. Dad said as much with an exasperated “Haven’t we seen enough churches?”  

“Apparently the Sagrada Familia is quite special,” Mom said. “It’s unlike any other church.”

Oh, and it was special alright. Mom was quite right, the church was unlike any other church. After we stood in line for a good 20 minutes, in the baking hot sun I might add, we paid the fee to enter the church. We pushed open the heavy door and … we stood under the clear blue sky. What the heck?

Par explanation … back in those days, the Sagrada Familia wasn’t finished. It still isn’t finished, but back then there was no church to speak off. There was a church façade, but very little else. There was no floor, no windows, no pews, no altar, and most importantly … no ceiling. We felt horribly cheated.

But back to my writing days.

Another job that kept me busy was translating. Dutch to English, Spanish to English, French to Dutch, and German to English. Some of these works were enjoyable, others were a bit of a pain in the butt. 

There was this one particular job where a love-smitten man wanted a 1700-word blog post translated about some skanky saxophone player. I nearly gave up on the whole thing.

But all these were paying jobs, and since money is welcome here, I kept plodding along. 

Right now I’m on a break. There is no work available. However, that can change tomorrow and then off we go again.

www.connymanero.weebly.com

Why Use the Plus Sign When Searching the Internet

With the arrival of the Internet, the world is your oyster.  Unfortunately, it’s not just your oyster, it’s anybody’s and with a pearl of information, you find a whole lot of junk.  Along with reputable companies, advertisers, spammers, bloggers, and other Internet users all vie for your attention.  If you’ve heard of the plus sign and you’re wondering, why use the plus sign searching the Internet, your life is about to become a whole lot easier.

The problem

If you’ve never used the plus sign when searching the Internet, you probably shake your head in frustration wading through pages and pages of useless information.  You know what you want, you formulated your request in your favorite search engine, but you still have to put up with bogus sites, websites with misleading ads, link farms, and false listings.

The solution

Next time when you use a search engine, start you search with the plus sign (+).  As an experiment, say that you’re looking for information on owls.  Type “owls” in the search engine and you’ll be presented with 72 million listings.  Now type “+owls” in the search engine and you’ll only get 71,000 listings.  The plus sign removes all the rig raff.

What does the plus sign do?

The plus sign removes (almost) all undesirable info from your search.  The plus sign tells the search engine that whatever you’re looking for has to include the word that you specified.  If you’re looking for owls, the search engine will only bring up information on those birds and will ignore pages that link themselves to info about owls.

Broaden your search

In addition to the plus sign, try broaden your search for a particular item.  For instance, if you’re looking for sugar free drink, don’t type just drinks in the search engine.  Typing “+drinks” produces about 8,660 results, while “+sugar free drinks” generates only 2,300 results.  Try to be as specific as possible.

Where it goes wrong

Clever advertisers know that subjects such as “love”, “employment”, “pets” and “cars” are hot topics.  They link their marketing pages to those popular sites and as a result you get flooded with millions of search results.  Fortunately, a few search engines are on to those advertisers and eliminate their ads automatically.  Still, it doesn’t take long to type a plus sign before the word or term you are searching for, letting the search engine know that you are not willing to put up with useless pages.

When it gets worse

You might find that, at certain times of the year, you get presented with more and more junk pages while looking for valuable information.  The problem is obvious, annual celebrations such as Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother and Father’s Day bring on a stream of advertisers all trying to lure you to their sites.  

Wonder no longer about why use the plus sign searching the Internet, try it, you’ll be pleasantly surprised and save a whole lot of time finding what you’re looking for.

www.connymanero.weebly.com

Time management

Some blogger I am. My last entry is dated November 2nd, which means I haven’t written anything in two weeks. Has life really been that boring or have I been super busy with other things? A little of both I suppose.

There was a time that I sat up until all hours of the night, but now that I’m working (for the past three months and one week I might add) I have to be in bed at a certain time.

Of course working gets in the way of blogging too. Not only is there not a moment to spare to put a blog entry together, but at the end of the working day blogging is not exactly at the top of my list.
I usually come home bone tired. After a change of clothing and a short rest with a cup of coffee, there are chores to be done and dinner to be made.
After dinner and some TV there are email messages to be read and replied to and a farm to tend to, a farm at Farmville I mean. Ah yes, who is not playing that game these days? I’m at level 61 with limited crops, but more animals than I can handle.

And soon I will be having even less time. Yesterday we went to pick out wallpaper for the bedrooms, living room, kitchen and bathroom and I’m the one who is going to do the papering. I’ve done it before, you could say I’m an old hand at wallpapering so I don’t foresee any problems, but still, it will take time so there will be even less time for blogging. How do other people manage? Do they have a time schedule? If you know something I don't, I'd love to hear from you.