30000 views, egg waffles, tube strikes and YouTube Challenge 2!

Firstly, I shall blow my own trumpet - I have made an achievement logo for myself to mark something...

Yes, thank you to everyone who has read my blog, shared it, subscribe to it, all that gubbins, thank you.

What else?  Well, I made a video on my YouTube channel about egg waffles...

And, keeping up to date with the hot topics I was in London today, and there was a tube strike on.  This was mainly disconcerting, as I was slightly worried that I wouldn't get to my conference (and back again) in time, but it did have two positives:

a) A lot of people decided not to travel to London, so the train had plenty of space - hi to the seven very nice ladies who cracked open the Bucks Fizz on the way down and had a picnic in the train (and offered it to total strangers such as me!) before spending a day in the capital, and;

b) At Kings Cross there was a big queue to get through the ticket barriers into the underground, and like any good English person there's not much I like more than an unexpected queue!  It moved quite quickly as well which cheered me up no end.

True to my country, I love being mildly inconvenienced - it makes you feel as though you've achieved something by merely overcoming the slight challenge.

Anyway, onto my YouTube challenges, which is what I wanted to blog about today.

So, I set myself a bunch of challenges to improve my YouTube videos and channel in 2014, with the first one being to improve my home page, my artwork, all that gubbins.

Well, some of that has actually been done! I have refreshed my artwork (although it is still really bad - I need someone with some sort of talent for artwork and that can understand the YouTube template for channel art to help me!  If you have some graphics skills and fancy volunteering let me know!)

I've also started using custom thumbnails for my videos, and you know what - they actually work! They do attract more attention which is great. Plus I made a new channel ad (which also is queued up in the free YouTube Fan Finder programme) so hopefully that will attract more attention too.

If that wasn't enough, I've also learned how to use Audacity to improve the audio on my videos, so fingers crossed there should be a lot less static on my videos in the future.

Time for Challenge 2 in my list of video challenges, and that is to watch other YouTubers! So I'm going to watch as many YouTubers as I possibly can. If you have any channels you particularly recommend, please put them in the comments, or if you want to mention your own channel, do that too!

Finally, I very much hope you've been enjoying my series of interviews with YouTube folk, the last one went live at the weekend, and featured the brilliant Brutall - if you haven't seen his stuff yet go check him out now, you will become addicted to one (if not all) of his video series!

Just drinking a coffee

I'm just drinking a coffee.

I'm struggling to produce anything half decent for my blog.  It's bizarre - half the time I have four to five posts ready to go, lined up, and I'm impatiently waiting for an opportunity to get another post out there, and the rest of the time is like this - I can't think of anything good enough to write.  Or I get halfway into a post, until I realise that it isn't very good and/or is overly offensive, and abandon it, forever to exist in the limbo of draft posts that I can't quite bring myself to delete but don't want to publish.

And then I'll hit the drinks - tonight being a coffee.

I wasn't always into hot drinks.  Well, coffee has always been okay.  Preferably with a large amount of cream and sugar, whatever that is required to remove the taste of the coffee and reduce the heat.  I've never understood people that have hot drinks without anything to cool them down.

Tea, though, I've only really gotten into in the last three or four years, when in an effort to cut my caffeine levels I switched to tea (and yes I do know that there is caffeine in tea, but a bit less I hope?).  To begin with I really struggled with the taste, but eventually managed to get to drinking it without milk or sugar, and just with a bit of cold water to cool it down.

I should say, if you've ever read my blog, and especially if you (fools that you are!) have come back and read it more than once - thank you.  I passed through 15,000 views the other day, which is a big achievement to me.  I need to make an icon or something for it...

There we go!

While I witter on about drinking, is it wrong to drink a 75cl bottle of 4% perry to yourself?  I've taken care of one of these and my other half is asking if everything is alright (which it is - I just don't have anything pressing to do in the morning so I'm taking the opportunity to push the boat out a little tonight).

For anyone that's interested, I've mentioned recently that I've been making an audition video for a computer gaming show - well, the video has been finished and was sent off Monday night, and I've been told that they'd like me to go into the studio in person to do an audition!  There was some issues with the video, which is completely acceptable (if my YouTube channel had ten million subscribers I might query this, but hell, I don't have ten million, I have 27! And I love every one of you.  And when I say love, I mean appreciate. Sincerely.), I'm just really enjoying the opportunity to try for this, and everything that I'm learning from it.  I ought to say special thanks to Matt for letting me record him play and talk about GTA V.  And Kirsty for letting me invade their house and not coughing and sneezing all through the recording (I ended up cutting all the audio out - but thank you anyway!)

Now I'm going to go play more Card Hunter.  Expect a proper post about it soon.

Fortune telling and DIY achievement!

Hi!

Apologies for the delay in blogging - it's been a busy bank holiday weekend (highlights including talking about toasters and fuel efficiency in a bar, a wide variety of beers, and consuming two doner kebab wraps) so now things are settling down a little I wanted to get something up.

Firstly, I wanted to flag up to readers a fortune-telling friend of mine.  Carys is starting to work for herself telling fortunes, and she's really good - do head over to her facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/carys.lester.7) and fire her a message if you'd be interested in getting a paid reading.  Definitely well worth a visit.

Next, I have an announcement to make!  I have unlocked an achievement in real life - DIY!

This is drawn using Paint Joy on my tablet.  Text added in Paint. Go me!

In summary, I changed the toilet seat.  This wasn't as easy as it sounds because the hinges for the new seat weren't in the right place to fit, so I had to take a drill equipped with a screwdriver tip to them so that I could turn them around.  I know this is pretty minor stuff but I'm still pleased that I managed to do it without help!  Our old one was cracked and we wanted one with an integrated child seat for my son (which this one has) so it should be better for him.

It's not available yet (it's encoding as I type this) but in a few hours I'll have a new video on my YouTube channel, one of my book vlogs.  This time I'm talking about Betrayer from Aaron-Dembski-Bowden, one of the Horus Heresy books from Black Library.  In the meantime I'd love it if you meet Omega 4.