Quit your day job. Go on. I dare you.

Haven’t been blogging much this week. All of a sudden things are really busy. The town is going in to full mental mode. The skiing has started, the punters have arrived and the people who live and work here are all entering their busiest period. It’s funny – because they all work so hard over the Christmas week, everyone is very ‘Bah Humbug’. For once I’m the most upbeat, christmassy person around!

Of course, Going shopping in Carrefour on the Saturday afternoon before Christmas was probably a mistake. It looked like this at the checkout:

Henry Scheniewind has been running avalanche awareness talks all over the alps for several years, and last night saw the start started a regular Tuesday Evening slot in Chamonix. Helped out by my friend Louise Alexander from Mountaingirl www.mountaingirl.eu

I first saw the talk several years ago in Val D’Isere on a chalet ski holiday. At the time it was the first time I’d seen anything of the dangers of avalanche and it opened my eyes. Now that I live here in Chamonix, the dangers of avalanche accidents is very real indeed, and it’s great to see Henry and the team in Cham spreading the word.

www.henrysavalanchetalk.com

Of course, the fact that Louise is organising the whole thing and that I met Henry last night and had an initial chat about promoting the talks on Chamonix Valley, which would be a perfect partnership to our strongest content, the avalanche safety section; www.chamonix-valley.com/avalanche-safety…. that’s all good too.

The time’s come to start bringing in a bit of business. I’ve had a really fun, and useful 2 months working on my projects, mainly Listings Lab and Chamonix-Valley.com, but there are bills and rent to pay.

I’m fairly good at getting new work in, though. Phase 1 has been to prepare a resume website. This is basically just a decently designed site which acts like a CV. I’ve uploaded the first version of that, www.listingslab.com and it’s ready for potential employers to look at.

There’s loads more to do on it, but it stands alone as it is, tells people the kind of developer I am, and shows them some of my past work, so although making it better is an ongoing process, it’s time for phase 2.

That involves a mail shot. I few years ago I spent a couple of weeks stripping a well known job-site’s email addresses for recruitment contacts in the flash world, and have a database of around 1000 contacts. I’ll spend a few days loading that database into my bulk-email program and also topping it up with some fresh, targeted contacts that I’ll dig up from the internet. My target companies are advertising/design agencies in Geneva whom I’m hoping to convince to employ Listings Lab Ltd from Chamonix as an outside contractor.

Once the emails are sent, we move into phase 3. With this scatter-gun approach there is generally a big and wide ranging response. The emails look so targeted that the person on the other end doesn’t realise that over 1000 other people have received the same, and I’ll spend a week just dealing with the response by phone, email and Skype these days. Most of the response will be not what I’m looking for, and I’ll try to develop the contact for another time to raise Listings Lab’s profile in the industry and politely bow out.

With luck the campaign will produce 3 or 4 strong leads into work that IS what I’m looking for, and then I’ll carefully try to narrow these down into one or more projects with achievable goals and timelines that a) won’t affect my skiing time too much and b) will still allow me plenty of time to develop Chamonix Valley whilst c) paying the bills and the rent.

What happens during this process is that you start to get a bit carried away. Talking business day in day out for weeks, you loose a little perspective and have to be careful not to say yes to the wrong things. You’ve got to resist the temptation to be more of a geezer than you actually are and bite off more than you can chew.

Picked up Mark the Seppo at 9am, and Brian the Seppo at the Vagabond roundabout 10 mins later before driving up the Valley to the Grande Montets for the opening day of the season.

Amazingly there were no queues at all, and we were straight on the access chairlift (the telecabine being still out of action while they install a new cable)

I wasn’t expecting much. There hasn’t been much snow yet this year, and only a few of the lifts were running, but amazingly it was a great day. There was plenty of powder to be had if you were brave enough to risk trashing your skis on the rocks. The conditions weren’t wonderful…. But they’ll do fine for now.

Following my mates down into the Lavancher bowl at the end of the day, tired and starting to ski badly because of it was – on reflection- a bit of a mistake. Threading a path through car sized boulders wasn’t so hard because those are the rocks you can see. Got there in the end, though and we called it a day.

It was a really great start to the season, and on Sunday….. well …. I can’t remember ever having such comprehensive muscle ache. Even this morning (Monday) I’m still limping around like an old codger.