Awake too early
I woke up this morning before most of the cron jobs on the servers I maintain. That's much too early for my liking. I've had a busy week, and a busy day and weekend ahead. Unfortunately that leaves me with little time to write in my journal.

At least the training centre where I'm teaching today has half-decent coffee.

On an unrelated topic, there's now a Table of Contents of all my journal entries, which extends way back before I started using the system on use.perl.

Just looking at the advertisements
Normally when people purchase a magazine, they do so for the content. Ads usually get glanced at, and sometimes will invoke a reaction from the reader, but they're rarely the reason to purchase the magazine in the first place.

Yesterday I was working with Jacinta on an advertisement for Perl Training Australia. Neither of us are marketing geeks or have great graphical design skills, so we decided to see how other people advertise. We went through a number of magazines that we had received recently, and just looked at the ads.

It was only afterwards that we realised that despite spending considerable time examining those magazines, neithre of us had actually read any real content. "That was a magazine on business banking? Are the articles any good?"; "I don't know. I didn't read them either."

I believe that our final, full-page, colour advertisement looks acceptably swish. It will be appearing in next month's Builder magazine.

Lemonade III
In order to use the (literally) buckets of lemons that are dropping from our tree, we've started Lemonade III. We've learnt from our earlier attempts, and expect the final product to be quite drinkable.

Unfortunately, the yeast seems to be having trouble starting. We're using a champagne yeast, and it may be having problems with the pH of the solution, which is quite acidic with all that lemon juice. We've given it a kick today (a cup of warm active yeast and sugar), but if it still doesn't take after a few days we may need to change yeasts entirely.

Advertising Overload
Our traditional forms of advertising Perl Training Australia have been simple, direct, and relatively cheap. A few words and special discounts to usergroups and professional organisations, talking at conferences, regular networking, referrals from satisfied clients, occasional appearances in the media, a steady stream of traffic from Google searches. These are effective, and rarely require any sort of financial commitment on our behalf. They've done a pretty good job of getting us clients.

However recently we've been spending real dollars to expand our circle of influence. The sponsorship of OSDC isn't because it gives us a warm feeling by helping an open source conference, it's because we expect to get bookings from it. Some developers may have never heard of PTA before. Some of them will know about us, but may not have known that we have a range of courses by Damian Conway open for enrollment. Entirely different developers may know all that, but have never actually heard Damian speak, and the conference will give them a chance to encounter that first hand. The sponsorship is an investment, and we're hoping for a good return.

Today we were contacted by a developer-focused magazine that's running a feature on training and certification. They had a full-page colour advertising space opposite the feature that they desparately needed to fill due to a last-minute cancellation. Normally we'd never even consider taking our a full-page advertisement in this magazine, the cost would be oppressive, but since they were so eager to have the spot filled by close-of-business, we negotiated an acceptable deal.

So not only are we sponsoring a conference, we're running full-page colour advertisements to 7,100 developers and IT managers, and we're appearing in a different magazine talking about why Perl can hold its own against Java, C#/.NET, and C++. This is just for the month of December, when we'll also be presenting at the conference, running corporate training courses, and taking a week off to go diving. Crickey!

Ascidians
I've been putting some of our underwater photographs to good use by creating wikipedia articles on Sea Tulips and Solitary Ascidians. Both rather rather strange looking sessile filter-feeders, but apparently they're reasonably closely related to each other. To make them extra strange, they use vanadium in the transportation of oxygen.