1st May Elections

What are the current councillors, candidates in the forthcoming elections, doing to create jobs in the North East?
Sure we have plenty of jobs in the North East – mostly in Public Sector. What about commercial jobs? Connectivity is the most important feature in the new knowledge age (goodness knows manufacturing is moving out!).

Transport – prices keep going up, there’s many times more growth in transport in the South East. Would it be a good idea to link North airports with the London airports by high speed, and cheap links? There’s no more air space over London, and if company execs land or take off in Newcastle (or Leeds, or Edinburgh) they’ll do business here on the way past. Surely it makes sense?

Broadband – I’m a knowledge worker. Luckily I’m a specialist. But the Broadband is so bad here that I can’t work from home when I rely on the internet. If I can’t work from home I may as well go to client site, and surprise surprise that means outside the North East – I might as well move house to somewhere else (and take my votes and spend with me) as so many of my friends have been forced to do.

It has to be worth investing in communications to bring jobs here

Slugband

Holding back on broadband? Only getting 512kb/s? What does it mean?
A company in Shotton Colliery has to close its doors (and terminals) because the web training packages won't download fast enough to use; it opened to train broadband engineers! Doctors across Co Durham can't use the flagship "Choose & Book" package - part of the £10bn Connecting for Health programme, in front of patients because it runs too slowly!
People are leaving the North East to find work because 1- there are few knowledge jobs here and 2- they can't work from home because broadband is too slow. Perhaps now it's time to change?

Local Elections 1 May are fun!

I've been looking at the choice of candidates for the forthcoming elections. What fun!
Candidates list themselves as "Local Conservatives" - is this an attempt to distance themselves from the "National Conservatives"?
6 candidates give Durham University addresses (4 Conservative, 1 Lib Dem, 1 Labour). Is this because they are University lecturers with too much time on their hands, or because the parties have had to resort to cradle-snatching?
Which raises a far more important point. How many democratically elected candidates have actually done a real job, have seen what it is like in the real world? How many have had to live within their means, instead of doing a Derek Conway and taking public funds for members of their family (but of course, he was "underpaid as an MP" so he deserved it)
It seems they go from studenthood to parliamentary researcher to candidate to member of parliament or other council with no real work in between. And they can shortcut the system by fighting a few losing elections whilst they are still students! We pay for all this!

Take a day off

Take a day off

Been working hard? It’s easy to lose sight of where you want to be, and get caught up in the moment.

I’ve got “Zero Limits” by Joe Vitale and Dr Hew Len in the car and as i was listening one of the contributors reminded me to reflect:

Take a sheet of paper and write two headings, one on the left and one on the right of the paper.

The first heading is “what am I doing to BLOCK the success I want in my life right now?” and the second is “what do I need to do about these blocks?”

I want big success – in every area (relationships, material, physical, spiritual, contribution). What’s blocking it?

The answer, even as I was driving, came back clear and strong – ‘you’re working too hard’. Working too hard, surely I have to work hard to achieve great success, whether that’s working on my fitness, my relationships or my earning power?

Well, work the process, write it down, see if there’s anything else (there wasn’t) and fill in column 2 “what do I need to do?”. Again an almost immediate answer “take a day off”. Now I have academic qualifications as long as my arm (and no, I don’t have the arms of a chimpanzee) but I have been studying intuition lately, and one of the things that teaches is to take action quickly. So I’ve booked today off and I’m just goofing around catching up with a few things, and I feel better already and we’re only half-way through.

Perhaps this afternoon ideas for increasing wealth will pop into my now uncluttered mind?