Companies and beyond

Today was an interesting day, on the clock, racing up O'Connell st to the Companies Registration Office before closing time (4:30pm) typical civil servants, it had closed 10 minutes early for no reason, the joys of having to form companies up on deadlines, this post really is about the bureaucracy and thick red tape that surrounds all Irish public offices, weather it be applying for the dole or for me forming a company.

Forming a company in Ireland is vastly more complex and dissimilar compared to our neighbour the UK.

The standards are the same but with differences in the UK one doesn't need to file a Memorandum or articles of association or require a solicitor or legal representative to stamp the forms, yet the final thing is the cost, it can cost just a few pound to set up a company here in the UK.

The reason i'm talking about this is due to the fact most people cant get work in this era they are either going for the unemployment of venturing into self employment.

one of my companies has a product, Speciality a service which solely incorporates companies in a retail environment similar to shelf companies, its funny how daunting it was for me with my accountant setting up my first company and now i do it solely every day as a living as part of my companies.


I feel that the government should give Schemes which actually work to help newly self employed or soon to be greater support, they say its out there but to get a grant of an enterprise board takes more paperwork then setting the company or a standard business plan up and takes about 6 months to get it, the company could be bust by then,

Especially with the on-line sector which is the only recession proof area in Ireland, as on-line retail continues to grow and traditional retail slumps there is very little support for a newly incorporated company to get going.

What do you think is needed for a stable business to grow in terms of support and a mentor?

I'm back!

After months of simply being busy and not writing I though I'd come back!

my life has been very hectic with my work ans personal life over the last few months, I'm now single again, new companies already and as usually with time there is simplly not enough during the day or night!

college is going well although it's  taking a lot of time from my scheduled.

recently I've been out with my friends a lot.

I have to say I have great friends although gte fact that I don't publicise this blog  they realistically won't read it!

I look forward to writing for you and giving you an engaging posts..

anything you would like to talk about or ask please feel free :)

Paul.

back soon!

hey guys! having a mad week or two at college. so struggling to work and do projects.

will be back to regular posting in a few days!

College v Business balance!

Today it's monday! up at 8am, Breakfast in bed for the women! now back to work!

What's hard with me lately is the balance between business and work! I am curretnly doing a project for two modules, The first is a ruby on rails project which is esentially and e-commrce shop, yet putting it together is hard since its complicated! the other project is for a standard HTML site.

even thought its stuff ive done before since its one of my actually companies i want to make sure it's pollished.


How do you guys find balancing projects, hobbies, college, Whatver it may be with work life?

TechCrunch - Yet another Great Techie Blog

Tech Crunch! A great blog about all things technology and more especially towards the Internet, Quite similar to Engaged but you get very different reviews which makes it intriguing.

This particular article talks about the size of the new Galaxy note phones, Personally i moved from iphone to the samsung Galaxy s3 and i have to say i love the size of the phone, since a phone is not just for texting and calls anymore you need a device where you can comfortably see and interact with the web on.

Here is the link!

http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/06/how-big-is-too-big-samsungs-new-galaxy-note-said-to-sport-5-5-inch-screen/

Student Pilots Loose Coure Fees

A Pilot Training school Based in Waterford Called PTC has been reported to have have cancelled a contract with Flight school in Florida called Florida Institute of Technology, Apparently students our out of pocket financially and in some extremes quite severely.

When i heard about this i was devastated to be honest, I can only imagine the how the poor guys feel.

There was some big hick ups regarding money with the school i went to due to an external company who sent us there just like PTC, I wont get into the details of it but needless to say it was messy and luckily enough i was only marginally effected in terms of money.

I Strongly believe these companies should not be limited in liability and should be guaranteed instead, Potentially these students  we are talking about their life is ruined as i know myself i had to pay back the am mount flight training costs and its not cheap! Imagine having to pay that back with no joy or future prospects in the industry to pay it back either,
Student pilots face loss of course fees

 
It just Makes me sick to hear this.

What Do you guys think??

Aviaiton clips i took! Tell me what you think?

Back to flying 

These are all videos i took while i was flying myself around northern ontario! I love them so check them out! Remember to turn down your speakers as these are small planes which are very noisy and the camera also records the sounds!!

They are all different, from low flying, Night landings to Spins and stalls!

I like Comments so tell me what you think?

Communisim in china

An interesting read communism in china

It shows how completly different things are !

http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/2012/07/02/the-red-iceberg/

Great Tech Site!

One of my big passions is technology,  Here is a site engadget that review in a blog style format.

top quality site for anything to do with technology, Just been adding products to my wish list from their site! Check it out

http://www.engadget.com/

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis

Here is a great site as the name suggests about global economic trends! very researched, well thought out and excellently rendered.

Today was one of the good days!

As the title sugests Today was one of the good days! A very good day in fact.,

Not the fact that Hugo Boss in Dundrum Town centre

where having a 70% off sale on everything, or that i had a great lunch at the Port house there also (Great Spanish tapas and wine) or anything typically joyful at all!

The Reason is  I formed a new consulting company which in related to my existing Company providing complete businesses services., What is different about this project is the team! We got on board a great team of people with excellent and valued experience!

One of the members is a fair bit older then me from a very different high level background in the UK! Essentially it Bridges the gap for us to enter the UK market which is a big leap as assuming this goes well we shall be offering cross boarder services and then mainland Europe.

My point is i'm young theres no doubt about that, but i am still looking for people i can work with to learn from, Experience is not to be under valued especially in this day and age,

Sure some of the older generation that would have done great in the boom years may be struggling more then the newer generation entrepreneurs but that is only due to the fact that many aspects like traditional retail is dead,

Not the fact that the skills these ex high level high business acumen professionals lack.
There is a new learning curve in some aspects for this generation i am talking about, Specifically a a bigger leap for the non IT industry professionals due to having an obvious transferable skill set which matches the online domain.









Hence there is  so many young entrepreneurs or "Wantrapanures" (as described by  friend recently that used that term). 

Currently my consultancy specialises in SME sector businesses and we provide direct investment to SME's, We get very mixed result's when we are looking around and essentially cherry picking businesses for venture capitalists and private investors and it can make the game quite difficult finding great old skook businessmen with no detailed knowledge of the e-commerce world Vs techies with a non business skill set,

To make any business grow, online or offline it requires more then just IT skills obviously, Hence many businesses fail out right or fail to grow at the most.

Or what skills do you think the new age businesses professionals lack compared to the pre IT generation? they say face to face sales is completely different then it was and the Internet certainly changed the game in relation to sales!

My question is this time how do you guys feel about the balance between experience and ambition in this new e-commerce world,  Especially in the Irish market......?

New ventures and near horizons

Some of the ventures I've started on in the past have been successful and some not,

but never a waste of time, I've learnt so much from business deals  and companies that went belly up, in total I have 5 current businesses which I own or partner in, times are though and I hear the majority off my friends in business and not being quite negative about prospects in Ireland.
I currently believe that Ireland still has some great potential for entrepreneur; fair enough with the economy down things are slow but there are still lots of people in This country with  money and are willing to spend.



Consumers aside the amount of sme  start ups is still growing which gives the business to business sectors strength.

Ireland's property market is at hard times but its safe to say it is still undecided about growth prospects or not.

No doubt the euro is on tough times and I still think property will hover or else drop.

the way Greece and Spain are at the moment doesn't help the euro situation either at all, but nether do we, If i had allot of money right now property would be the last thing invest in. due to Geo-political issues such as potential war with turkey and Syria which Is essentially on Europe's front door?

An interesting Read on the Turkish f16 jet shot down by sierra, From the guardian news paper in the uk.

What do you guys think??

Client Side @NCIRL

Well among the other modules i talked about previously i am studying a client side module here at NCIRL.

I have to say i find it quite interesting, Especially the scripting aspects which were are currently studying, More to the point JavaScript and JQuery next. I like how dynamic and the fact my imagination is the limit when using JavaScript, It brings the page to life and adds all kinds of actions.

I am redesigning a website for an existing business for my project for Client side module.

Here is a brief diagram of Client Side Scripting.

For my new site i have designed it in XHTML, CSS and i am currently deciding weather to use pure JavaScript or JQuery instead...

I am coming from more  a content management system background so HTML/CSS and scripting is still relativity new to myself!

Back soon!

Hi guys I will carry on with my story this weekend. I just moved house from one part of dublin to around 20 mins away! since we had alot of stuff in the place i had to rent a van which ended up taken nearly a week of hard labour to move! noting takes it out of you like moving! so the last few days were stressful to say the least. :)

Web tech @ NCIRL General Jist

My experience Studying The higher diploma in web technologies in national college of Ireland.

My objective here is to write the general jist about what i learn and why i need it for my modules in college!

I started studying the web technologies a few months ago, April to be precise, So far ive found the coure really interesting, Its by no means an easy course, especially when you have to work 3 businesses and other ventures full time and go to college in the evenings but i still love it!

We started off doing three modules, the first was Server side technologies which as the name says covers all server side aspects, the focus on this module is more frameworks such as rails beneath programming languages such as ruby,
We started off learning Ruby, Ruby for me was new as i had not done any serious programming before at all, Just messing about or maybe editing something via a guide such as sever side scripting

for SEFs on my business post,  That as an example i got an error and had to figure out what the problem was by Google, researched what i needed to do and then how to do it, In that care it was a simple script rewrite for the sever i was using my hosting on (Zeus with register365).

Looking at that script rewrite it made no sense to me but i searched for the relevant parts and changed what needed to be changed to make it work!, since its now coming up to the end of June we've been at this course for nearly 3 months so its great to say when i coincidentally looked at another rewrite script on another server having a basis of all this made me at least know what needed to be done without much research.

I went a bit off topic there but basically what i like about the programming element of this module which everything is ultimately about is that it is straightforward, i might not have a clue but like any language it can be translated so i can find the answer.

So we started learning ruby as i said, we started off at basic tutorials such as learn ruby the hard way, I have to say the guy who wrote it wasn't telling porkies as it was the hard way, I read a Chris pine book a few weeks into the class about learning ruby which seemed to adopt an easier straight forward approach which made it "click" and then i at least understood the concepts. The problem now is that we then moved on to git-hub
 which is server where you can essentially sync, push and pull code off while you are working so it can be tracked who made and did what etc., We have been told its a great tool but we spent so much time on that I've forgotten most of the ruby i spent weeks learning prior, I guess you don't use it you lose it right?.

So now we finished up with git-hub and that that, we use a program called ruby-mine to do our work in and then










push the projects to git-hub, Next after that we have started to learn the basics and fundamentals of Rails.

Rails is a framework which you install on the server for ruby, it basically takes for granted that you need certain basics so instead of spending weeks writing a site in ruby you can do it in rails in a night then edit it and carry on working in ruby, so it gets you up quick assuming you need a certain standard which most users would, it was created by this guy Called DHH.

How i started in business

After all flight school was done, I came back to Ireland. due to the nature of aviation getting your first job can be hard and i would have to do a conversion to a European licence, Since that costs about 20k plus a ryan air type rating of 27k i decided i would work for a bit in between.

So i started looking at what i can do and applied for jobs, I got some great interviews for jobs which i would have considered pretty dam good but i just didn't seem to get any of the interviews that i had done! i was back a few months and was starting to get pretty annoyed about the lack of work and this is when the recession just hit so i was talking to a close friend who was involved in business all his life and we decided to start up a  new company, We started on our aspects and what we can contribute to the project together.

We started off with the idea which inspired us, An I.T assurance concept for residential and business consumers, I'm not going to get into the specifics of the business including names of any of my ventures.

We started working on the project first with the services / product we want to provide, At the time here there was no comparable service in Ireland, it was pretty exciting going through all this, i was shocked by how much work was involved, we literally spent 8 hours a day (even more some times) for 6 months planning out the company model, strategy and services etc..


After the core parts of our business were discussed  we started thinking the name which took a while! registered the website and incorporated the company, looking back all this was quite intimidating but since i do it on a daily basis its quite the bore.

After it was incorporated we worked on all the legal work for our contracts, we set this company up on a low budget so every cent counted, then we started on the website when we felt all the work was done which included a comprehensive business plan,

A must for every one who ever ventures into business, some say with the age we live in with technology it's not required but i disagree, you need to be calculated and have the numbers add up, you need to be running your business on more then just a good feeling or belief that your idea will work, At the time i was an expert at all aspects of computers bar web design and programming. When i say expert i mean i never went to college doing anything like this it was always the practical usage that gave me skill and understanding of I.T, Growing up i had a strong interest in computing and all technology related and used to regularly buy magazines like Pc Format every month, Boy that was geeky!.

The website took about 2 weeks to set up, we originally hired a web designer to do it,  he was cheap ish but still at a price that reflected some quality, We met him out at a nice hotel and spent about 2 hours discussing our needs and what we want, he gave us an ok looking site but we wanted it to be tinkered with so we would talk to him about it and it just wasn't getting done, he didn't seem to be able to do what we wanted in terms of little things like moving a menu slightly or changing some colours which aroused caution. then he couldn't do any of the functionality of the site we required and said that's that, so we left him at that, got our deposit back a few weeks later and that is when i ventured into web design, I really didn't have a clue where to start, we found out he was amateurish and using word-press

which was not as common at the time, he was also just using themes he got so he couldn't edit them, I got the mentality why were we paying him to install Word-Press, a theme and uploading content as it was something we could do ourselves, i didn't have a clue about word-press or how it worked but we gave it a shot, After learning how to install it on the server and uploading content and page structure it was as simple as finding a theme, I was shocked how cool some of the themes and ascetics can be on word-press, I was a good start to learning.

So the site was up, It was noting special but it was just temporary, the phones started calling and there was door to door sales taking place gaining clients, things were looking good, a few months later tragedy happened.

My business partner was going through a bad time and i found out his head "wasn't in the game" which for me personally and professionally was devastating, i tried to motivate him but no joy so it was left as it was, I knew Lot's about computers but i didn't have a clue looking back on the business side of things so it fizzled out a bit but stayed active just about.

About two months later i had a great idea for another business as i seemed to have gotten bitten by the business  bug, It was to do with animals, This time things were harder in setting it up due to having nearly zero budget and having to do all this on my own,

The more i thought about the previous company was even though things happened and it didn't get to be what i wanted i essentially learned a business course in 6 months with all the work that we put in, especially i learnt allot from my mentor, nearly every one involved in business has some sort of mentor.

So when i went to start my venture i applied the same skills, I got a great book called "starting a business in Ireland workbook" off my mentor which was a great asset, it had every single practical aspect of business covered in the book it was great for reference for things like employment contracts to marketing etc,

With that i started my business model which i had previously done on scribbles and now put all the information and compiled a professional business plan, I was pretty happy with it but it took allot of work, especially on my own, when it was done it was a huge relief, i started getting the website up and done all the legal work, contracts are surprisingly simple once there is a good base.

The website it took a while making the graphics in illustrator but i used a content management system called  "Joomla",

Joomla was great it had a word-press feel to it but had professional components and modules you install on it to add any functionality. the sites i required with it were basic in terms of functionality but looked good, I used Photoshop to make themes for Joomla manually and then converted them with on-line tools such as Photoshop shop to CSS on-line, It made the website process easier as i didn't know any HTML or CSS code properly at the time, Let alone PHP for the forms and such.

Anyway the site was up after weeks of working and tinkering with it, I used Google Adwords to bring traffic to the site originally which worked quite well.

Then Analytics to see what worked and what didn't so i could optimise it all.
I started getting my first clients in, Things were nerve racking at first for few months, especially meeting clients but i got the swing of things, the great thing about working in companies is being able to bounce ideas and much needed motivation off each other, one of the hardest things about being self employed is motivation and time management, it can be hard to get all that is done in the day, i often do my work and come home and sit at the computer for hours doing accounts, on-line marketing, graphics and such, it never ends but i love it all the same.

That's the jist of how i started in business! let me know what you think?

Getting through the days!

P.S i Blog on my Samasung Galaxy s3 which has terrible predictive text, So if i get any really really bad typos or such please excuse me! i will get back to fixing them!

We started flying and studying on a daily basis, with the hot weather the we always ended up flying everyday. It was hard but fun. Soon after we started all theory. We went off and then done exams which were required for our licences. It was hard going as the theory seemed harder then the flying, all this is condensed into a year and a half !

I have just realised I don't want This blog to be solely about flying so I'll just go into the aviation side of my story a little bit longer.

After many hard days of flying in the summer the winter finally came, oh it was a winter for me like no other. It started to snow around October just on Halloween night actually. I remember coming home with from the bar with my friends stuck in a blizzard, seeing all the girls who took dressing up for Halloween seriously in the form of playboy Bunny's and anything you would think off turned into sexy version of it, they done it very well I must say. Dublin has noting on Canadian girls dressed up at Halloween night while gagging themselves full of shots of yager to start with. The joys off being a 20 year old pilot with no responsibility, how things have changed!

There is lots I'd like to share about my exploited adventures while training but since this a college blog I'll keep it down a bit. Along with the winter came i dressed as the Michelin man or however you spell it. Constantly At least -20 degrees Celsius and having to wait for a bus to take me 45 mins to the airport every day.
The part that got me was having to dig the planes out of snow and every extremity being numb and burning at the same time, when your skin sticks to the metal while refuelling, I don't mind the winter but dam that was not fun.

After about 20 fuel primer's, so much the engine might explode the plane started. The false hope of the heater working in that temperature was worse then being teased by Megan fox (personal favourite). I remember one time taking off and being so cold.

I had a bottle of water in the back and with in 7 minutes after take I reached back for it to find a block of ice I'd have to chew to get a drink! The frozen bottle was very important as  in a 5 seater plane they  don't have toilets and it matters especially on 4 hour flights in the middle of nowhere. Good times all the same. It was all worth it I loved flying that much.

I am going to leave this post with some Pictures Above and below that contain good moments and scenic shots from my time in Canada!

After My first Solo There is a bad tradition of flower and water the second you leave the cockpit!

A beautiful snow settled day in northern Canada!

The Twin we used!

The lakes begining to freeze! brr..

Flying over remote semi fozen lakes before christmas!

Myself Flying! After a rough early start.

a 45degree climb

Climbing after departure

Comming in on final!

Canadian summer night!

Landing and taking a photo at the same time!

When Pilots get bored! we take Photos!

A huge platinum mine

In Sweltering heat beside a dash 8

The ice breaking up!

This is from the cn town but it is airport is Toronto island Airport which i flew into before.

If you have any questions about flying dont hesitate to ask!