Fantastic video that’s quite moving in parts.

2010 has been a funny year for me. Both brilliant and depressing. I’m looking forward to wiping the slate clean and starting again in 2011, and I can’t wait to see where that takes me!

My New Years resolution for 2011 is to continue to learn and develop skills in Software Testing, hopefully gaining a promotion in the process, and to develop my identity within the Software Community. My personal new years resolution is to try and get better an answering emails, texts, comments, IMs and DMs as I’m terrible at replying to people!

Twitter is a fantastic tool for exposing your opinions, ideas and products to as many people as possible for nothing. Lots of businesses use it to keep in contact with clients. An example of this is the very people that host this site Liquidweb. We follow each other on Twitter, and I’ll admit, they are pretty awesome!

I’ve recently increased my number of followers five-fold! I’ll be honest, that that’s only from 18, to around 60 followers, but it’s still quite a significant increase. There are a number of articles out there that all have great advice, but here are a few tips that have definitely worked for me. They may not all be relevant to you, so you may want to pick one or two at a time to work on.

• Find a niche – Before I found my niche, I was Tweeting about nothing in particular; what I was doing that day, what I had for dinner, how I was feeling etc. My niche is Software Testing. After starting my Software Testing Blog and Tweeting about Software Testing related issues, I’ve seen a massive increase in followers.
• Send messages – If you stumble upon someone who you like, send them a message telling them you like their Tweet/idea etc. You never know, they might follow you back or Retweet you.
• Be relevant
• Be personal – Offer people an insight to your day to day life. Post pictures/videos. If you have a Blog or any other sort of webs site, give them previews of posts or exclusive content. This will force your readers to become followers if they are loyal.
• Be short and snappy – If you’re short and snappy, you’re more likely to be Retweeted by one of your followers. Being Retweeting potentially exposes you to thousands of people with similar ideals.
• Retweet other people’s Tweets – If you like someone else’s Tweets, Retweet it! The good thing about doing this is that you’re giving other people the full credit and recognition for their tweet, but you’re giving something useful/funny to YOUR followers.
• Tweet often, but not too often – Tweet when you have something to say, don’t Tweet because you haven’t said anything in a while. Tweeting rubbish because you haven’t Tweeted in a while annoys your followers and they will stop following you if you annoy them too much
• Don’t Troll - No one likes a Troll. Don’t Troll people or conversations.
• Use humour - People are more likely to keep following you if you make them laugh. Tweet links to videos, pictures or funny articles.
• Use hashtags – Using a hashtag in place of a word. For example, if you tweet “I like #testing Linux”, instead of “I like testing Linux”, puts you into a conversation and anyone following the “#testing” hashtag will see your Tweet. Even if you’ve just watched a film, put #film or something at the end. If you take away one tip from this article, take this one. This one has proved the best one for me.
• Ask questions, for advice or opinions – Ask for advice from your followers or ask for their opinions. Start a conversation!

I hope this proves useful to someone. I’m not promising millions of followers, but these are sure fire ways to increase the number of followers!

I think I have a virus on my laptop and I have no idea how to get rid of it. It’s been acting up for a couple of days now. I noticed that I keep getting random tabs opening themselves in Firefox which go to one of those sites that bring up a pop up and won’t let you close it unless you click the OK button. Clicking cancel just brings the message up again, and pressing the X does the same. If you click OK, it brings up a download box. If you click cancel on that it starts the whole thing off again. Stupid thing. Then Windows Host Service crashes and makes my PC look like dog shit.

Doing a system restore hasn’t fixed it. That’s usually fixes 90% of the problems I have like this.

I’m trying to get as much stuff off it as I can and I hope to reformat it at the weekend. The thing is though I’ve got about 100GB of stuff on this hard drive and it’s going to take forever to copy over my Wireless network. Suppose I could always start things off copying then watch a film or something? That’ll pass the time.

So that’s my weekend taken care of then! Yay!

I really want this week to be over. I’m mega busy at work at the minute, but I know that it should all be done and dusted by Friday. So that’s kind of an incentive enough for me to battle on with it. My last job was like this all time and it drove me mental because it was never ending! It was just a constant barrage of shit, whereas at least now I know there’s an end to it I might talk about it more on [ESC]ape Testing on Friday, although I have two possible posts in mind already. One is about how outsourcing can’t possibly benefit an organisation and the other is about the Software Testing job market. I’m thinking the latter is more appropriate, but I’m still undecided. I may carry on writing both anyway and queue them up.

I’m working on quite a few posts at the minute as I’m hoping to go on holiday pretty soon. I want to take a break from Blogging for a bit as well just to give me a break and to recharge my batteries, but I don’t want it to affect any of my sites. So I’m writing loads of things now and queuing them up. When I do go on holiday, it will still look like as though writing stuff on my usual Monday, Wednesday, Friday (A post here and on [ESC]ape Testing) schedule when in fact I’ll probably be passed out in a pool of beer and Pringles!

I couldn’t be happier with the response I got from the article I wrote for my Software Testing Blog on Friday. It’s great when people you know and who’s work inspire you to do what you do give you such positive feedback and agree with your views. I took me the best part of the week to write and it’d gone through so many re-writes I was planning on ditching it! But it’s great that people seem to really like it!

Click on the picture above, or click here to go and read that article.

Had a really great weekend this weekend. I went out for a run with my Brother around Wollaton Park. We’d planned out a mile route around the lake, which started off on concrete, but then turned into off road, almost muddy surface. I managed to do it in a better time than I’ve done it before. The fastest I’d run a mile in is 13m20s, and managed to do it in around 12m30s, which I was really pleased about. It turns out though that we did about 1.1 miles! So it makes that time even better!

Quite a healthy day, right? Yeah it would have been if we hadn’t have stopped off at the pub and the chippy afterwards

I need to get back into the Gym again. I haven’t been in around a month. Although I still managed to do a mile, I could definitely tell I wasn’t as fit as I have been recently. I’m going to try and go this week at some point.

Ooo… and don’t forget to send me your suggestions for Sci-Fi Sundays!