Something different

For the last six weeks, I have been on a course with work and out of my usual routine of working shifts, something I have done for eighteen years. When I have previously attended courses these have lasted for anything from one day to one week. So the thought of working Monday to Friday 8am-3pm daily did initially make me wonder how I would adjust. Adjust I did and as I enter the last couple of days of the course, I can honestly say that I have thoroughly enjoyed the course and also enjoyed working Monday to Friday, having every weekend off.

If you work shifts then you will know where I am coming from. I am well and truly out of the routine of “living for the weekend”. Those daily rush hour drives into work that have you stressed before you have even started. The Monday morning blues, excitement of Fridays and repeat. I did think the weeks would drag and I would spend my days counting down the time until the weekend but thankfully that has not been the case.

Sure some mornings the traffic was the pits, other days everyone appeared to have stayed in bed and I enjoyed a simple drive in. It is strange how some days are busier on the roads than others, two days are never the same, I do wonder where do people go sometimes?

Having every weekend off with the family has been very enjoyable. Guaranteed weekends off allowed us to plan things in and that has to be one of the best things about working Monday to Friday. Shift work does allow me some weekends off but I do enjoy my days off in the week when everyone else is in work. So the roads are quieter as are the shops.

One regret whilst on the course has not been making the most of the time I have had in the evenings. Returning home by 3 or 4pm has allowed me plenty of time in the evenings to either exercise or do some chores about the house. I certainly would have liked to have exercised more in the evenings by either jogging or swimming but this course has been taxing on the brain.

You would think that sitting on your backside all day listening and learning with going for coffee being the most exercise you get all day would mean that you would be full of energy in the evenings. Sadly not.

Each evening all I have wanted to do is sit down, have dinner and do very little else. Some evenings I have been asleep by 10pm completely shattered after a day of doing very little. Some say, “the less you do the less you want to do” and I do believe that saying. I suspect getting up at 6.20am for five days consecutively has an impact as well as the amount of thinking you have to do which means you are shattered when you get home.

Before I know it I will be back at work and into the old routine, wishing I was back on the course having a laugh with my colleagues and finished by 3pm. I had better enjoy the last few days whilst I have the opportunity.

Why we blog

“If you do not get enough interaction, then just write for yourself. One day you will look back and be glad you wrote the blog.”

Sound advice and a lovely comment left on one my blog posts by an established blogger who also seems to be a genuine guy. For the last week or so since I started this blog I have toiled with what to write. One minute I have the laptop open and fingers poised only to think that whatever I write will bore the pants off whoever reads the post. I think Why should I write about one of my average days/weekends? Who will be interested? Then I shut the laptop down and resign myself to another evening without writing anything.

I am not awaiting the earth shattering post that will “go viral” or end up on the Discover page but sometimes you just pause before typing and wonder what on earth am I going to write about?

Mostly I write about my life and what I have been doing. I do not have a vault full of posts about blogging, advice on life, money or relationships, I have no niche. So maybe I should just get on with it and document my life, as dull as it may appear?

Blogging can feel a little overwhelming with so many posts written, you can feel consumed by it all. Will my little voice be heard loud enough that someone, somewhere will hear it and click read? Am I shouting out and not being heard above all the noise? Probably. That should not stop me though, like my blogging friend said, you can look back in time and be glad you wrote this blog.

So I will continue to plod on and do what I enjoy doing, writing posts.

Does this resonate with you as a blogger? Let me know what does bug you about blogging and why you write.

Loving it all

Every wondered what to write on your blog? Are you always thinking of an earth shattering post to write? Do you think that your week has been so average that whatever you write would bore the pants off people? I have thought that this week but then thought, does it matter? So I decided to write this post anyhow. After all it is my blog, so I will post what I want.

I am currently going into the last week of my six week course and it is going so fast. With working shift for the last eighteen years, I thought working Monday to Friday would be a difficult transition but it has been very enjoyable. As the course has gone on, the weeks are going quicker, as are the weekends. This time next week, it will be all over and I will have to plan returning to the real world and back to work.

I can safely say that this course has been the best one I have been on and the twelve strong group have been a blast to be with. It is fair to say that as a group we have got on really well and moulded together so much so that we have planned a meal out on our last day. We even have a whatsapp group now and hopefully when we return to our work we will keep in touch and help each other through our work.

Generally it has been a good week as I head towards the weekend. It is Friday evening, I am enjoying a well earned beer and settling down for some decent television. Tomorrow I will take my boy over to Lancashire for a football match. We have tickets to watch a game and we are both looking for some dad and lad time. A trip out, go to a new ground, have a beer and watch some football and I cannot wait. On Sunday we plan to have my brother and sister in law around for dinner.

That is the weekend planned for me, what does your weekend look like? Do you have any plans? Let me know.

 

 

An apology and explanation to you all

We have been here before haven’t we? Another new blog from me, a new request to follow your blog. This is something like the third blog I have opened in as many years so I have to ask, are you dizzy yet?

Over the years I have become disillusioned with blogging, whether that be boredom, frustration over lack of interaction and ideas or privacy issues. So much so that rather than signing out and taking a break, I have pressed delete and goodbye. Then as the weeks and months go by, that itch of blogging starts again and eventually I give in and scratch that itch.

Privacy has always been an issue for me. Do I open up and disclose so much about myself and my family? or do I make my site anonymous? All these questions have spun around in my head until I am dizzy and my head hurts. I want to be a real person online but get a balance over privacy. Anyhow, long story short, here I am again.

So apologies for messing you all about, don`t hold it against me and follow me for the ride. Hopefully I will still be around in the future.

Social media, be careful who is watching.

For years I have struggled with where I sit in the online world in respect of privacy and social media. Having a Facebook profile for a whole decade, a Twitter account for 9 years as well as occasionally flirting with Instagram, Snapchat as well as WordPress blogs, I could never decide whether I am happier being open or private.

Although we hear of cyber attacks on major companies on an almost weekly basis and our personal details such as email addresses, names and date of births being stolen and sold to the highest bidder on the dark web, that has not been the main reason for my dilemma

Having grown up as a teenager without mobile phones and the internet, it has not always been like this. Today’s teenagers and early twenty something’s have grown up with a mobile device glued to their hands and know no different. So I remember a world of privacy where you never took a photograph of your meal or your alcoholic drink. When I was growing up, you took photographs on a non-digital camera and upon your return from holiday took the photographic film into a photo developing shop and waited a few days to see whether all those holiday snaps turned out ok. Many times you threw several photographs away because they were either blurred or too dark due to having no flash. None of today’s problems of re-taking the same picture over and over again until you are happy with it or struggling to decide which filter you prefer.

Here is my issue. Recently I conducted some open source research on a couple of people, all legitimate as part of a training course I am on and with the people’s permission. I had to conduct research on brothers who owned a company to see what information I could glean from the world wide web in a couple of hours. The task was to find out about their company, their clients, the brothers private lives, where they live, dates of birth, cars they drive and so on.

What you have to understand is that Google is not the only place to find things out. Google only searches the web pages it indexes and thinks are useful. There are many other search engines that do slightly different searches. This is why I could not understand why people asked Google to delete what information it had on them for privacy. Google is just one skin of a very large onion, take that information away and you can still find articles about yourself on other search engines. So using a number of different open source websites that are open and free for all to use and all perfectly legal, I set about investigating the two brothers.

All the information on their company website is straightforward and supposed to be in the public eye as it is necessary to promote their company. As is the information held at companies house, where all companies and their directors are listed. It was when I delved into the world of social media that I became alarmed at just how easy it can be to find information out about you.

Both brothers were on LinkedIn but you require a LinkedIn account to view profiles so a blank was drawn there. Facebook is similar but with an account (who doesn’t have one?) you can find people easily. Yes some people have their privacy settings well tied down, yet you only have to find one of their friends who have an open account and you can snoop about a bit better.

Twitter is where I found out the most. One had a closed account (sound advice) and I could not see anything of their profile, tweets or followers, etc. Yet the other’s was wide open. Now, the brother who had an open Twitter account was not tweeting every five minutes or openly giving much away. Yet all I needed was a bit of patience to trawl through a few hundred tweets and I established he enjoyed an outdoor life cycling, camping and running. He regularly drove on a specific motorway because he would tweet his displeasure at being stuck in jams on it. I established he had two young sons, found out their names and ages as well as what schools they went to.

I found a picture of his car and private registration plate as well as his age and date of birth. Well he did tweet out when it was his last day of his thirties, it doesn’t take much of a mastermind to work it out.

It is scary to think what information I established in a couple of hours.

When I went home that night it made me think about my online profile. I cycle and record my rides on a sporting social media account which shows the routes I take. The site in question had to install a feature where you could anonymise the area around your home address so it was not obvious where you lived. This was due to a rise in thefts of bikes as people could see online where people were living and using expensive machinery. I posted these rides on the sporting app as well as Facebook and Twitter (on an open account) so people could see what bike I had and roughly where I lived.

I would post pictures of my pets and display their names, be careful if you use your pets names as passwords, it is not difficult to work out a password from that. All those times you go on holiday and let your friends know your are sat by a swimming pool hundreds of miles away, letting everyone know your house is empty and free to break into! Many insurance companies are not paying out if you claim on a break in as you let the world wide web know you were not in at the time.

Apart from Twitter, many social media sites, do not remove the Exif Data from your pictures. What is Exif Data? It is all the information about the picture you have just taken. So the device you used, your co-ordinates (location) where it was taken, etc. So if you take a selfie or a picture of your dinner and post it online, people can establish where in the world that picture was taken in two clicks and find you home address.

Whilst it may be fun to post, tweet, take pictures, check in to places online you need to realise what imprint you are leaving online. Your posts do not delete forever you know? Whilst you may press delete, the meta data can remain, it is just over time, it gets buried a little deeper in the onion of the net as more data is added on top. Yet it is not impossible to locate that deleted post.

Another couple of sites helped me find many tweets in the world and I could even find tweets posted in my local area. All these accounts that were tweeting were on open accounts but these people were having conversations with others, blissfully unaware anyone can legally eavesdrop and read them. So a tweet about going on holiday can give someone a clue which property may be empty for the next week.

Going back to Facebook, how often do we write on our profile where we live, who we are married to, what we do for a job, etc. Would you tell a stranger all that information? No.

In a world where we share things without thinking and at an alarming rate, we seem to have forgotten who our audience is. So next time you tweet, post or snap just remember you may as well be shouting down a loud hailer in the middle of your town centre all your private business to whoever fancies listening.

Welcome to Ian`s journey

What is this blog about? I hear you ask. In a nutshell, my name is Ian and I created this blog to scribble down my thoughts, have a place to look back on memories and generally log my life. It gives me a space on the world wide web where I can be me and put down my ideas and thoughts. It really is as simple as that. I have been blogging for a number of years now and you may have read my previous blogs, Northern Natter, Lancashire Lad and Bob`s dairies. However, those are no more and all my posts are scribbled down here. The picture above is of one of my dogs, Trudy, as she surveys the West Pennine Moors that separate Bolton and Blackburn.