freeg131: Philip Gamble

Because Alonso’s “victory” in last week’s German Grand Prix wasn’t quite controversial enough for me I broke the rules this week.

Instead of having a meal at the weekend I had a series of very loosely German themed sandwiches throughout the week.  Sadly unlike in Brimingham I don’t have a large collection of German meats a couple of minutes up the road at Aldi so I had to be content with slices of Sainsbury’s “German Salami”.  How generic.  And I just realised I ate it after its use by date.  Hardcore.

I think I am going to get this Rob Smedley t-shirt from unlap in honour of the moment and the most famous formula 1 race engineer:

Noticing that I had 7 pending friend requests on Facebook last week I decided I should clear out my facebook friends.

Of the 7 requests:

• 4 were spam – the first I have received on Facebook and all which appeared within seconds of each other.
• 2 were people I recognised the names of but have never met who presumably added me because we have some mutual friends regardless of the fact I know nothing about them
• 1 was a Game Maker person that I did not know at all well

Along the way I found out some rather interesting things such as the fact that you can very easily bulk harvest your friends e-mail addresses in text form and that my friends are overwhelmingly male (well I do Computer Science).

I conducted a very-mini purge removing 13 ‘friends’.  Without exception these people were people that I have not spoken to since I left school 2 years ago either in person or online and had never been particularly friendly with.  At the time it seemed like a good idea to accept all friend requests coming my way though now everyone is on Facebook I can be more selective!  From now on I intend to operate on a one-in-one-out policy so I don’t feel so bad about ‘unfriending’ so many people at once!

Also got an unusual message asking me to “tag a friend” which turned out to be me.  Can only presume this is the start of auto tagging friends in photos.  Hurrah.

The papers are constantly telling us that the economy is all messed up.  That students cannot get jobs when they leave University with debts and ridiculously high applications-to-graduate-jobs figures are being quoted almost every week.

Today joy of joys the BBC is headlining with “Students to face higher costs as graduate tax proposed” whilst a quote from today’s Guardian Online reads “It makes gloomy reading for those studying computer science and IT – they have the lowest employment rate for any area of study”.  Lucky us.

Natwest also sent me a nice letter saying they are going to stop paying me interest on my student account. I don’t know what the rate of interest I had been receiving from them was but it is the principle of the matter! The savings I have elsewhere are earning me something like a pathetic 2% a year thanks to low interest rates caused by all those people buying houses they couldn’t afford and inflating the prices so I will have no chance of owning one for the next 20 years or so.

So the parents of my generation not only got paid to go to University and benefited from vastly increasing house prices once they were on the property ladder they also get to retire at an age which is totally unaffordable leaving us to work longer and pick up the bill!

Grrr. I bet that if I do manage to save up to buy a house interest rates will magically be much higher then.  </rant>

Poor Mark Webber (and, I didn’t think I would write this, Alonso).

As normal I found myself getting bored towards the middle of today’s F1.  Vettel’s comeback towards the end of the race and counting the number of times Legard said “extraordinary” livened things up though.

Nice to hear Martin Whitmarsh’s stating the obvious response to a question posed by Brundle on his grid walk.  ”Will you be able to get anywhere near the Red Bulls?”  ”I imagine at the first corner we’ll be pretty close” (or words to that effect).  Reminds me of Ross Brawn’s response at the start of last season.  Red  Bull’s ability to self-destruct is at least keeping the championship race well and truly open.

• Sadly it hasn’t been updated for a while but one of my favourite ‘funny’ websites to visit is the Formula 1 parody news website The Runoff Area.
• As far as I can tell the “For Sure” championship counted last year by RealBrawnGP is not running this year.

Photo by ph-stop (cc)

Two weeks ago I started a summer internship at a company in London called 20:20 Media and Analytics.  It’s a mouthful but there are about 1600 other companies calling themselves “2020″.

Effectively it is the Search Engine Marketing branch of a large digital agency.  At the moment the Search Engine Optimisation and Pay-Per-Click teams are based in the corner of an office belonging to another department of the agency but next month they are moving to a snazzy sounding new office.

In my first weeks I have mainly been conducting “mini audits” of sites assessing the current standard of their SEO which in some cases is absolutely abysmal.  Although I must admit this isn’t the most interesting task in the world I do think I am learning quickly.   There are a large number of potential pitfalls and problems that sites may fall into and I think I have become quicker and better at identifying them.

I blogged earlier stating that I had suddenly reached a realisation that I must go out and actually do something that would be beneficial to me obtaining a future career this summer if I actually wanted to get anywhere. So I am obviously pleased that when I started applying for unpaid Internships at smaller companies the feedback I received was very positive.

I was ready to apply to a couple of job adverts I had seen on Gumtree and Monster but held off until after I had my careers appointment. The careers lady effectively said the only thing I had missing from my CV was an Internship so I quite happily sent off a couple of applications after that.

By the time I received an invitation to attend an interview with the second company I had already agreed to start at 20:20. It seems I am more employable than I thought. The Head of SEO has since said I am good enough for a full time role with them as an SEO Executive.

I have quite a few Computer Science friends who have either already started or are shortly due to start Internships at larger companies.  The kind of assessment centre/induction days places which I don’t think really suit me.  When I told my friends that I had secured an unpaid Internship a portion thought I was mad – some people doing year placements are on quite lucrative salaries – and others I know are receiving £3,000 or so for a summer of work.

I’m glad to be doing something productive at summer.  Though this makes me think I should have done something last summer too!