Well well 2013, you started so well….. For all of the first 24 hours or so. Ok so that’s perhaps an exaggeration, the first 20-ish days weren’t all that bad (the 16th being a particular highlight – it being my birthday an all). I learnt a great many lessons over the past few months, the highlights of which I’ll share with you below.

Snow I literally hate it. Your car gets stuck, . . .

. . . it’s hard to walk in and it makes moving house, very, very difficult as you can’t get the van in the car park so you have to unload it on the street and between two of you carry everything into the building through snow an then carry it all up 3 flights of stairs!

Car being written off I was in Redditch less than an hour when some local van driver decided to pull out from parked at the side of the road straight into my car. Now the damage caused wasn’t massive . . .

. . . But due to the age of the vehicle, it’s not worth much so the cost of repairing it would of been more than its worth “beyond economical repair” so the insurance people wrote it off.

Flat flooding moved in less than a week and the water drainage pipe from the kitchen “sprung a leak”

by which I mean became detached from another pipe, which oh by the way is in the middle of a wall and completely inaccessible by anything less than a hammer!

Moving house is expensive, really expensive! Now I’ve only had the misfortune of moving from rented to rented accommodation so I dread to think how much worse buying/selling a house would be but still . . . We have to pay a deposit up front, on average about 1.5 months rent, referencing fees just so they call your previous landlord, do a credit check and call your employer to check your income. That’s another few hundred quid! Then on the day you move in you’ll have to obviously pay the first months rent! All of this has to happen before you even your previous damage deposit back, assuming you’ve been good and not wrecked it. Once you’re in, you then have all of the fun and games of paying all the final bills at the place you’ve left while setting up all the new bills at the new place.

Well the last month has seen some upheaval in my life, namely that I’ve had to learn to live alone for the first time, or rather fully alone as I have lived in shared houses and student digs previously but this is taking that to a whole new level! I keep thinking of things I need to buy that would never have normally entered my mind like ironing boards, chopping boards, toilet cleaner haha the list goes on and ON. Not only have I needed more things I’ve had to budget for things more comprehensively than ever before, not only is it rent and food but Council Tax, Water, Electric, TV Licence. Phone, Internet, Mobile, Car, again that list also goes on and ON.

So it’s hardly surprising then that over 3m young adults still live with their parents according to the Guardian article which equates to about one in three men and one in six women aged 20-34 still live at home. I consider myself lucky in that I was one of the last group of students to go to university under the old fees system before it changed as this means I’m a Graduate with a relatively small student debt, I’m lucky enough to have found a graduate role after university in at least a related discipline to that I studied, I have a car and a bike and earn a decent enough wage (above the national average at least  http://www.payscale.com/research/UK/Job=Marketing_Executive/Salary) and yet I’m still really tight on cash despite only living in a 1 bed flat in a relatively cheap area of the country. I dread to think how those either less fortunate or similar can make ends meet those areas of the country such as London where the cost of living is so much higher whilst the wages are only marginally higher.

Well it’s a new year and it’s time for a new set of good-intentioned, if slighthly over ambitious, resolutions. First up is to get back to my grass roots and play with some of the up-and-coming new web technologies so that I feel a bit more “in the loop”.

This leads me onto my title, Pinterest, quite a pinteresting one that A bookmarking site where you pin up images from sites across the web, organised by topic or theme. This thriving new social network seems to have taken the Internet by storm, driving a great deal of referral traffic to websites in a very short space of time.

This new service offers great opportunities to any business who can create sufficient graphic content to catch the eye of would-be customers. It would also appear that a great number of its early adopters are female which has lead to a big lean towards fashion, arts & design and the crafts.

The site has caused some controversy however as the images posted essentially violates copyright unless the poster owns them, which kinda defeats the whole idea of the site. Furthermore hidden away within the T&C’s are some statements which basically clear Pinterest of any potential wrong-doing and essentially make any legitimately uploaded images fair game for them to use.

Well Google’s first half decent effort at a first shot across the bow of Facebook has finally appeared in the form of Google+! http://plus.google.com/

I believe the most apt description of the service offered by Google was given by Natalie Messer over at Messer Motorsport ”Like Facebook, Twiter and Windows Live all got smashed together!” Google has made no effort to hide its intentions of taking on Facebook as it is clear to see right from the outset that there are many similarities to the worlds most popular social network, they’ve taken all of the key elements of the service without taking any of the applications or baggage many have become accustomed to.

It has all the key features you’d expect, a live news feed or stream about all of your friends latest updates, Photos, Profiles, Friends, Friend Groups (although a unique take on it with “Circles”). In addition it has several new features that go beyond the current offerings by Facebook and the like, these include Hangouts (The ability to have  a live video conference-call type meet with your friends), Sparks (These are Google giving you a live news stream about topics of your choice, kind of like a custom RSS feed right in your live stream.), Integration with other Google services as we’d expect such as pictures from Picasa, Videos from YouTube, Google Talk, Google Buzz and of course Google Search.

The worlds newest Social Network is currently set to invite only, invites available here (http://bit.ly/o9cAbw) as the run through the rollout of key features such as the recent new addition “Games” and other Beta testing but I am sure eventually they’ll make it public for anyone to sign up!

The integration with other Google services is both good and quite worrying at the same time, as it really highlights how deeply these networks integrate with our daily lives without us even realizing it.

If your anything like me your probably starting to get really peeved about having to update your “status” on half a dozen different social networking sites, in which case, read on…

It looks like the social networking sites themselves have seen this coming however and have been going to some efforts of late to offer interoperability between them, i.e. updates your status on Facebook and your Windows Live Messenger Status updates too, which is a big step in the right direction. It’s a big step but still only a step, as like me you will probably find one or two sites updating the other isn’t really enough, we need one status box that updates the lot, boom in one go.

There have been many stabs at creating an application that can do this such as Tweetdeck and posterous but none really do it that well to my mind. Alas I haven’t the time to create some groundbreaking app that can solve this problem so I thought I’d find a way to link them all into some kind of social media chain whereby I update my status at one end and they all update each other.

Social Data Flow

Well it’s fiddly to setup but now I can post once in Twitter and it will change my status on:

• Facebook (http://apps.facebook.com/twitter/)
• MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/my/settings/stream/sync)
• LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/settings/) but only if I put #li in my status on twitter first
• Yahoo (http://pulse.yahoo.com/) and
• Windows Live Status updates after Facebook takes my status from twitter (http://profile.live.com/Services/)
• Google Buzz takes updates from Twitter too (http://www.google.com/buzz)

A word of warning however, if you use eBuddy, either online or on the iPhone app, it changes your status to something along the lines of “- on eBuddy for iPhone & iPod Touch www.ebuddy.com/iphone” which then forwards out to all the other services which is undesirable to say the least. As a precaution I’ve gone through and set all my Windows Live Services to receive status updates from other services but not to send them out to them, just to be on the safe side!

Well I’ve been reliably informed by a fellow blogger that the point of having a blog it to actually post things news to me right! :p

Anyway . . .

The last 6 months of my life have been quite interesting (from a “my life” point of view) having been working full time in an actual Graduate role doing at least partially what I was trained to do (even if I did kinda warp my degree into what I wanted to do woops.

Also started driving seeing as I passed my car test back in April and the weather has taken a turn for the worst pretty much ruling out the bike as an option.

Like 40,000 other students who graduated from university last summer, I am still trying to land my first full-time job.

As a stop-gap, I’m is working for free for a clothing company doing marketing. It’s just something you need to do at the moment to get experience.

The government is eager for others to follow in My footsteps and sees internships as a means for new graduates to earn valuable vocational experience which I completely agree with.

Eighteen months ago, the Department for Business Innovation and Skills set up the Graduate Talent Pool, a website for England that is currently advertising just under 9,000 intern vacancies.

However, approximately a third of these posts offer only expenses including my own at Orchard Clothing, even though they can last for six months or longer.

There are concerns that many graduates from less well-off backgrounds, as well as those burdened with thousands of pounds of student debt, cannot afford to take advantage of these opportunities.

Graduate exploitation?

Concerns have also been raised that companies recruiting unpaid interns, like myself, are actually breaking the minimum wage law.

As we are expected to work full-time office hours, Monday to Friday, with a list of specific duties.

The legal definition of what constitutes work includes having set hours; being engaged for an extended period of time and being given a defined role rather than just observing.

The law says anyone who is “working” must be paid the national minimum wage – for anyone 22 or over it is currently £5.80 an hour.

Recruiting graduates to work for free for periods of six months or more has led to accusations of exploitation.

The TUC says it is concerned about the number of unpaid internships advertised on the Graduate Talent Pool website.

It has been successful in getting some advertisements taken down that it believes breached rules on the minimum wage.

Matt Dykes, a policy officer from the TUC, says more needs to be done to stop graduates being exploited.

“This sends out entirely the wrong signals to young job seekers and to employers, appearing to condone the practice of not paying people for the jobs they’re doing.

“Much more needs to be done to ensure employers know that these kind of internships are unacceptable.”

David Lammy, the Minister for Higher Education, told 5 live’s Donal MacIntyre programme: “If there are things going on, we want to know. We will take down those employers off the site, and it is important young people recognise and know their rights.”

Well I’ve started creating my own Unofficial Cotswold Bikers Nite website at www.bikersnite.org using HTML5 and CSS3 where possible to make a modern, standards compliant website that can fulfill all the needs of the community including a gallery (@www.bikersnite.org/gallery) and a forum (@www.bikersnite.org/forum) and eventually a blog (@ www.bikersnite.org/blog) but thats in the works. In an ideal world it would be nice to be able to get the bikers nite organizers to write this once its setup too.

I’m going to be updating this blog with further information on the site as it goes up and detailing any issues or problems I encounter and how I resolved them.

After months an months of neglect at the hands of an otherwise occupied intern I have now moved my blog from blogger.com onto my own server using WordPress to power it. Experimenting with the themes as you can see but eventually I’ll make my own to match the website.

I’m also working on a Coppermine powered gallery and a phpBB forum, obviously I don’t really need these things on my site but it’s a learning curve so its all valuable experience! Also I plan to use them in a possible future Cotswold Bikers Nites Site as and when I get round to Contacting Sue Shaw who coordinates them.

Well, it’s 2010 and been a good three months since I’ve bothered to update this blog but mostly because its taken me that long to find something worth writing about and a nudge from a fellow blogger

Well I finally had some luck and found an internship in the field I’m interested in through the “West Midlands Graduate Internship” scheme which is pretty good really. I don’t get paid! I know a graduate on a salary of £0! and yet I really don’t mind. I’m much happier since I started doing this than I was being at home bored, gets me out the house as they say and besides they let me claim my JSA and pay my expenses anyway so it really isn’t all that bad

Either way I’m now working for Orchard Clothing in an effort to optimise their website and drive in some more sales through some internet marketing and search engine optimisation as currently they don’t even rank on google unless you type in “orchard clothing” lol which is completely useless! Work is steady but slow going but I’m enjoying it all as they have no IT staff so I’m having to do a bit of everything at the moment.