So it was true. Michael Jackson dies and no-one can quite believe it. Few will be surprised that he didn’t complete a full innings however but I don’t think there would be many that expected that this would be the moment that he would meet his maker…whoever that might be.

A couple of weeks ago I was chatting about Mr Jackson and his 50 date residency at the O2 Arena and we were all agreed that we couldn’t see him completing all the dates – that would be hard enough for a young man let alone someone walking around with hardly any body part he started out with.

It’s testement to his back catalogue and reputation as a performer that he could sell out so many shows, and I hear there were options for more, but his fragile physical and mental state would make that number of dates too much to take surely. I could be doing him a disservice but as he didn’t even make the first concert it would be hard argue otherwise.

Hello everyone.

It’s been a long time since I’ve updated this site but there’s been a lot going on in my life recently most notably the death of my mother at the beginning of May. She’d been in three different hospitals most notably Papworth having been taken ill on Mothers’ Day and then having a heart attack a couple of days later.

Mum had had arthritis for around 45 years so she was in relatively poor health anyway but she managed to pull through and gradually fought her way back to some sense of normality. Personally I was even thinking that she was becoming well enough to come home but a second heart attack proved too much for her.

There’s a lot more I could say about the last two months both personally and professionally but I think too much time has passed. I was pleased at how this site had developed but it’s been on hold for too long so I want to get things moving again so look out for news, views and information in the coming days.

Earlier today I posted a couple of questions on a forum on the topics of sibling rivalry and the definition of success. As both overlapped in interesting ways I wanted to compile a few of the thoughts down as a way garnering further opinion. Basically I want you to define in a few words what you think success is and what it means to you personally.

Some people may attach the word success only with money or power. Others may define it as living in a free country or being able to sleep in till lunch time. Here are some of the responses received so far:

• I’m not bothered by status and money. I like looking after others and having others to look after me. If I had that all my life and felt relatively happy, I’d feel my life was a success.
• I think success is achieving your personal aims. I’ve achieved none of mine.
• Success: an event that accomplishes its intended purpose. So relating to human terms, surely it’s to procreate… leave something behind once we’re gone.
• For myself, leaving this world, and being remembered would be a great sucess. Not sure how I will be well known… but hopefully I will.
• Success is the satisfaction of a job done well done.
• If you’re enjoying life and so are your family who cares? I’m not very succesful at most things I do, but I enjoy life that’s good enough for me. Some people get lucky, some are smarter it’s not about what you have it’s about how much you appreciate it.

One person went into a little more detail on their thoughts and I felt this was a pretty good summing up of a subject of which there is no definitive answer. What is right for one person is plainly not right for another. Also, success has no end point because there always another level to aspire too.

It’s not that easy. You need to dig deep within yourself and question your values. What are your strengths and weaknesses? What different things are important to you? Success has multiple pinnacles and not one ultimate peak. One success builds on another. Setbacks and mistakes also help to build success. At different periods of your life, success is defined differently.

Now it’s your turn. Use the comment box below to add your thoughts on the subject and tell us what success means to you. Remember there are no right or wrong answers but whatever yousay will a valued contribution to the discussion.

http://alphainventions.com/

Is this the most disturbing sweet on sale? Just think about how children will get the candy.

…and from the same company…

I’ve never known another time in my life when an air of depression seems to permeate every waking moment. Don’t get me wrong I’m contemplating anything untoward but it’s ever more difficult to shake off the gloom and despondency that attaches itself to what we do on a day-to-day basis.

The economic downturn is affecting most of us in one way or another and looks like being around for some considerable time yet. How do we get ourselves out of a rut wether financial, professional or even spiritual? Well, that may depend on your character and how much you want to but many are avoiding the real issues in their lives by looking for quick fixes and escapes which have no real benefit in the long term.

An obvious distractor is this computer. It is an amazing piece of kit but is it just facilitating time-wasting and procrastination from the stuff that really needs dealing with? Maybe you need it for your business but beyond that is it affecting your relationship with your family? Many I know spend their eveninings in separate rooms with their heads in front of screen and not talking to each other. With laptops and the Internet with online forums and social networking such as Facebook and Twitter, fewer and fewer people are engaging in real communication even if they may ’speak’ with more people than ever before.

At the end of the film Love Actually it has a scene where lots people meet up and hug with loved ones at Heathrow Airport in London. The backing track is by The Beach Boys and is called ‘God only knows (what I’d be without you)’.

Fast forward this clip to 2:50. Makes me well up every time…

Love Actually – God Only Knows

This made me think about where I’d be if I hadn’t met my wife when I did because my life could’ve turned out very different. In early 1998 I had the chance to go round the world for a year but I bottled it but within a few weeks I met my now wife through the newspaper, moved in, got engaged and in July we were expecting our first child. If I’d gone none of these would’ve happened.

Subway - one of the attractions we visited in Grantham

I guess many will have seen the Crap Towns books but I wondered if anyone wanted to make their own nominations.

This was inspired by a trip I took on Saturday…

On Friday we took the kids to Stamford in Lincolnshire. This is a beautiful stone town and the place of my birth. We went because the fair was in town and it’s a great setting to see the rides right in the centre of town and on the meadows. They had a great time but I spent an absolute fortune! Anyway, I’d promised to take them on a train on Saturday and under normal circumstances I’d have suggested Stamford as it was quite close but I didn’t want another day shelling out for candy floss, plastic rubbish and two seconds of mild amusement.

So, to keep costs down, I suggested some other nearby towns. They didn’t want Huntingdon which left March, Ely, Spalding, Grantham and couple of others. They went for Grantham.

I tried to talk them out of it, really I did but Grantham it had to be so £18 later and bag full unhealthy ‘picnic’ snacks later we arrived. My God, that place looks dreadful these days. We were only there an hour and it rained. The market was on but it just looked so grim and depressing. The kids were well cheesed off but they got half a sub from Subway and book from ‘The Works’ for their troubles. A thoroughly miserable experience.

For that reason my nomination for crap town is Grantham. What’s yours?

I’m from an era when doing the League and FA Cup double was considered virtually impossible. Spurs did it for the first time in 70 years in 1961 and Arsenal did it again in 1971. By the time Liverpool did it in 1986 I was 17 and hardly anyone had won more than two trophies (if you count Europe) for a century. Unfortunately we have phrases like ‘double double’ and ‘treble double’ now so ‘treble treble’ is on the cards.

Liverpool ended 2001 with five trophies if you include the Community Shield and European Super Cup but even if Manchester United don’t win anything else you’d have to say this was best season ever by an English club. They have three in the bag, another all but sown up plus eminently winnable quarter-final and semi-final ties to come.

I can actually see them doing it now as they are well ahead in the league and as I’ve said have relatively easy paths to the finals of the Champions League and FA Cup but there are a few scenarios for non-Mancs to cling to.

I overheard a weird conversation on the bus yesterday. There were two lads of a school leaving age talking about school and education generally. One said he was going to go to university and the other couldn’t understand why.

“C’mon man! I can’t believe you wanna do that! I’ve done years at primary school and years a secondary school. I’ve had enough – doing anymore would be just wasting my time.”

OK, so there’s some part of that I can maybe understand but his argument for dropping learning floundered by what came next…

“I actually want to get into business and accounting.”

So let’s get this straight. You are a school leaver and you want to do accounting which, and I am no expert on such matters, requires years of study to qualify for or else you have not a hope in hell of making a career out of it. Business on the other hand is a little different because entreprenneurs have earned millions without a qualification to their name but even so…

So here’s an overview of last night’s web traffic experiment…

To sum up I promoted a fairly mundane blog post using Twitter and Alpha Inventions though I did use quite a provocative title merely calling it Web Traffic Tart. This basically meant that I was going to go for whatever traffic I could get by whatever means.

There was no specific targetting just a blast of social networking promotion. I was clear from the outset that the experiment was to last less than two hours so there’s been no activity in that sense for the last 13 hours.

Now, to give you some context the traffic on my ‘random thoughts’ blog hovers around the 50 hits a day mark or about 1500 per month. Last night, at just gone 10.00pm, it was at about 140 mainly due to my Tony Robbins articles which were being viewed by people who attended his latest event this past weekend.

I added a post to the blog explaining what I was doing regarding my mercenary need to traffic. I then added the post to Alpha Inventions, Twitter and then started reposting links to old general interest articles on topics such as sport, health, government and music.

The results just blew me away….

This blog is not a high traffic blog but it doesn’t do bad largely due down to three posts associated with self-help guru Tony Robbins. One is a review of Unleash the Power Within which I attended in 2006 while two others relate to the music used at the event. One of these looks at the event music as a whole while the other focusses on what is the signature song, Life will never be the same by Haddaway.

I always know when Mr Robbins has done an event because the site traffic rockets (relatively speaking). Now in the 21 months since I began this blog I’ve never topped 170 hits in a day but I think the 26,000 hits is more than respectable.

As I write, with just two hours left before midnight, traffic is in the mid-140s but I wondered if I could by artificial means kick it beyond 170 and even above 200 which is where you guys come in. I shall be posting a link to this post on Twitter and Alphainventions and a couple of other places to see what happens. If you use Twitter why not follow me, retweet my message and see how many hits we can get in two hours.

Will be interesting to see how rapid the growth is. Whatever happens I will report back the results once midnight has passed.

In a quick scan of some old football statistics I noted that a few great players had faced each other at the opposite ends of their lengthy careers. This set me thinking about how far back you go with a minimum number of individuals. Of the current set of Premier League players Ryan Giggs is one of the more celebrated and is approaching 18 years at the very top of the game. Mental recollection told me that Peter Shilton would’ve appeared in one Giggs early matches and as he had made his debut in the 60s I knew Sir Stanley Matthews would have come into the equation too.

Using these three names to kick-off I started my research…

Now, will Sepp Blatter listen to reason?

Yesterday I read a great article from Martin Samuel, a journalist with the Daily Mail. In his piece he challenges Sepp Blatter’s view that everything bad in football these days can be traced back to the English Premier League.

As I read the article I found myself  saying ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ all the way through and not in homage to Meg Ryan in ‘When Harry Met Sally’. It’s about time this topic was discussed – he dug into the facts and presented them eloquently which leaves little room for argument.

Blatter needs to be sat down and forced to read this article then not allowed to leave the table before he admits that you can’t solely use the English game as being all that is bad in football. He simply cannot make such rash genaralisations though I have to admit I’m not surprised. He and Michel Platini have such venom towards the Premier League it’s just sickening. Jealousy perhaps?

True, we do have problems in the game here in terms of bringing English players through, but the English League and the country as a whole are ivery unusual country in their make up. We have Great Britain and the United Kingdom but the four countries have their own identity too. Even though the Republic of Ireland is a separate entity, many of its stars cannot help be part of the British sporting system either to some extent.

We were late to international transfers and foreign managers and scandals were far more prevalent elsewhere than here for many years. I remember the surprise of Josef Venglos being appointed manager at Aston Villa and that was as recent as 1990. We also haven’t gone down the naturalisation of foreigners path like some and I don’t believe we ever should.

Cheers Martin. Let’s hope that we can get a more balanced view of this subject from UEFA and FIFA in future though I’m afraid I’m not holding my breath.

We had the company’s Christmas party in December at Down Hall in Hertfordshire. This, I’ve just discovered, is where Jade Goody is getting married today to Jack Tweed. It’s a lovely venue and a great place for a wedding – it’s just such a shame the circumstances. There will be a lot of tears this day and I wish them all the best.

Whatever our thoughts on Jade’s brand of celebrity which came via Big Brother, you can’t help but feel fer her and her two boys. She’s only 27 and so young to be going through anything like this – I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. Have a fantastic day Jade!

Anyway, my visit to Down Hall was for an office party and I really enjoyed it but I did leave with a bit of a dilemma. There was a casino with a roulette and Black Jack table. It used fake money of course but from our initial £400,000 between us, me and my wife did pretty well all evening. I had a run of 10 straight wins and Jo won £350,000 on a single spin.

Another guy was playing Black Jack and didn’t win anything all night. However, when he got to the very last game, he threw his entire remaining cash in, got Black Jack and won £1.2 million! Thing is, there was a prize for whoever ended up with the most money. Who won? We did with £1.25 million! What did we win? A Nintendo DS with Guitar Hero worth about £150.

Here was the dilemma…

Later he told me that he found another £200,000 in his pocket which he didn’t realise he had. If he’d declared it at the time he would have won. We won overall on the night because he declared less so it’s his fault really but it still feels bad as I shouldn’t have the prize at all.

In the scheme of things little things like this amount to zip when you think of what Jade’s family is going through.

It was a white out here today and I ended up working from home as did the rest of the office. In the UK the place collapses with a light frost but because we all had good home connectivity there was no necessity to be in work.

I was supposed to be in a meeting Slough which is about 90-100 miles from here. The buses weren’t running, trains were running a skeleton service and the main London to Edinburgh road (A1) was down to one lane so it was cancelled.

That means I’ve had three long trips cancelled in two weeks: One in Rochdale which is near Manchester in the North-West was called off because their company employees were all sick. Tuesday this week I had a PR training course which was postponed because hardly any delegates could make it due to bad weather and now this.

Let’s see if it’s any better tomorrow. Mind you they say there’s more snow on the way so we’ll see…

Here is a mix I put together using several Joy Division songs in a Beatles Love style recording. Basically it uses mainly instrumental sections from familiar tracks from their albums Unknown Pleasures, Closer and Still plus the singles, Love will tear us apart and Atmosphere.

Joy Division – Chilling (Ambient Mix) 16.38

On accessing the page please add the three letter code into the box next to the orange download button towards the top right of the screen. No site log-in is required.

I’m actually rather proud of this and part of me hopes that there someone out there with some sway that will pick up this idea as a concept and prepares a complete album in this fashion. Everyone talks about Ian Curtis but the sheer power of the music is just incredible. Martin Hannett must take as much credit for this as the band.

I plan to make a video for this at some point to add to YouTube. If you want to beat me too it please feel free to create one of your own.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it…let’s remember one of the last truly great moments in rock.

I have just started a communications blog that focuses on marketing, PR and design and would like to invite guest authors to contribute. Unfortunately I am not in a position to pay for material at the moment but you would retain all rights to anything provided. My site would essentially be your opportunity to showcase your work on the topics listed.

Presently, everything about the set up of my site is free to the point that it uses free hosting, free software for video and podcasting and has a free contact email too. The target market is those seeking to communicate a message on a budget whether a small business or as an individual.

Those accepted will be promoted as ‘Guest Writer of the Week’ which means you will be given a special biography section and contact links as a way as spreading your reputation. I also plan to include guest designers, photographers and media professionals as well.

So there you have it. This is your chance to spread YOUR word – let’s hear from you!

http://orbellcommunications.wordpress.com

Please send me a PM or email me through the website to find out more.

The autumn is a time where many people begin to notice a change in their lives. The nights start to draw in and the days become a little cooler. This time of year heralds a new academic year for many, young and not-so-young alike, seeking to expand their minds and meet new people. This is the perfect time to consider coaching and to take yourself to the next level.

I have gained the Coaching Academy’s Certificate in Personal Development Coaching and though it is not my primary career I feel well placed to offer you a sounding board that may help gain some clarity in your life.

The first 10 people that email jeremyorbell@hotmail.com to register their interest will receive:

• A completely free and confidential messenger session of up to 60 minutes duration to discuss an aspect of your life you wish to improve, your personal goals and if desired, a personal coaching plan
• Up to 4 x 30 minute free messenger coaching sessions pre-arranged at times to suit both parties
• Unlimited email coaching for a period of one month

This is an absolutely free no obligation offer. The only thing you have to lose is time but you could have masses to gain. Why free? Why not? Sometimes you just want to help people without the need to line your own pockets. Can’t be more honest that – I just want to help people gain a different perceptive on their current situation.

Out with the old and in with the new? Not if Becks has his way!

I wanted to post a few thoughts on David Beckham who looks to be joining Italian club, AC Milan, in January.

A lot has been said that Becks shouldn’t be in the England team anymore especially as he is likely to be just a bit-part player mainly due to the emergence of players like Theo Walcott, David Bentley and Shaun Wright-Phillips. This is probably true but he still a great passer of the ball and deadly from dead-ball situations so a very useful player to have on the bench. Is that enough to warrant the hoohah that surrounds the man?

The MLS season for Beckham at LA Galaxy is now over and he faces three months on the side-line. England coach, Fabio Capello, has already said he would only pick players who are match fit and playing well so that means David will miss the scheduled friendlies against Germany, Slovakia plus one other still be arranged. If this happens he will find it very difficult to regain his place.

The obvious solution is for him to go on loan to a European club. He trained at Arsenal in January for three weeks but this time his club have agreed to a loan deal. Up step AC Milan.

I think I’ve essentially missed the point of blogging. Much of what I write is observational, some of it is to designed to educate or at least offer a personal view point of a subject but I think the way I structure it just plain wrong.

I’m always impressed how people can keep coming up with material day in and day out when there’s not really a lot else to say. Maybe I take it too seriously. Maybe I want to be seen as a some kind of life guru but if my posts vary from tales of blind dates with Italian rabbit breeders, getting into sticky situations with drunk Glaswegian Eric Cantona lookalikes, song lists for Tony Robbins events and charity fund raising techniques I’m a bit all over the place.

Maybe I’m just putting too much pressure on myself. Maybe I should just lighten up and just say what a crap day I’m having and not tell anyone what I think of the format of the Euro2012 football championships. Unless you are Ukranian or Polish or Michel Platini, no-one really cares anyway.

Why do we blog? Do we still get some absurd pleasure with seeing ourselves and work on screen? Is it a bit like being on the telly? It’s not 1996 anymore so shouldn’t you all be trying to do something a bit more useful like my ironing?

Answers on a postcard or in the helpful comments box below.