David Leigh

This weekend Dan Raine and Ed Dale have announced some amazing new tools for members of the 30 Day Challenge, which I would urge you to join if you are remotely interested in online marketing - and it’s completely FREE. The tools, which have been a few months coming, are designed to cut out the tedium of social bookmarking by doing it all for you automatically and will save a ton of time.

At the same time they made an enhanced version available to members of Immediate Edge and another great reason to join.

All in all 2008 is a great time to be an internet marketer - I’ll see you inside the 30 Day Challenge or Immediate Edge.

This morning I’m recovering from seeing The Cure at Palau Sant Jordi, where they played for an amazing 3 hours 5 minutes and performed 38 songs! Although there were problems with the drums drowning out everything else for a period, many of the songs were The Cure at their best, something akin to being run over by an express train.

The concert kicked off with a couple of numbers from Disintegration, which do benefit from the band’s stripped down sound owing to dropping keyboards from the lineup, but the highlights for me were the earlier songs. (more…)

Black 332 Bakelite Telephone

Originally uploaded by Old Telephones

At the end of last year my parents, who live on the Costa Brava, decided to take the plunge and subscribe to ADSL. They’ve been signed up to Direct Telecom for a few years ago, mainly because they have fantastically cheap calls and my sister lives in Australia.

They signed up for ADSL with Direct Dial and received the equipment, and waited the four weeks they were told it would take for Telefonica to connect them. Unfortunately on the final day my parents received a phone call from Direct Telecom telling them that Telefonica couldn’t install ADSL. Anyway, Direct Dial reapplied to Telefonica; another month later the same result. So my parent’s Spanish friend phoned Telefonica to find out what the problem was.

The answer; since my parents don’t use the telephony service from Telefonica, they wouldn’t connect them to ADSL, simple as that, clearly an abuse of Telefonica’s monopoly and illegal under European law. Last year they were fined €150 million - I hope the bastards are fined again.

I just looked out the window to see a fantastic sunset and decided to share it. In fact it was much more spectacular than the photo suggests, perhaps because it was taken on my trusty Nokia phone.

Barcelona sunset

The building work - just in case you were wondering - is the new Ciutat de la Justicia, the new law courts for Barcelona and Hospitalet and has been going on forever.

Last night we went to see Arctic Monkeys at the Espacio Movistar in Barcelona. The venue has moved since we last went there - it is a tent, after all - and is now behind Camp Nou.

 

View on Flickr

We would have seen them earlier in the year when they unveiled their latest album at Razzmatazz, but tickets sold too fast and we missed it - this time though we booked immediately.

The band are really good, they sound exactly like they do on CD, and it was great to hear those songs played live and see that they really can perform. It is a shame that they play such short sets though and 505 was sadly missing.

My main complaint though is about the venue. Although Razzmatazz isn’t the greatest venue in the world at least it is the real deal - a grungy converted warehouse with a great rock ‘n’ roll vibe. The Espacio Movistar - well, it does have good sound, but it has no atmosphere. And since it is expressly designed to be a music venue the layout is terrible.

I hate the way a corporation has got in on the act, I hate the bland security, and I hate the fact that I have to buy vouchers to exchange at the bar. When we saw Travis a few months ago security tried to stop the guitarist climbing into the audience - why? - and last night they were stopping people from sitting on the shoulders of others - what is all that about?

This weekend Barcelona celebrated the 75th Anniversary of the Circuit de Montjuic, with a lovely selection of racing cars from across the decades. We went to watch the cars in action on Sunday, including Emerson Fittipaldi putting his Lotus from 1973 through it’s paces, and Michael Schumacher’s Ferrari from last year was also there.

I don’t quite know what to think about the Nou Camp redevelopment plans, but the stadium certainly needs to be covered.

I’ve been to see FC Barcelona play numerous times and sometimes take a camera with me. This is from about 4 years ago I think and shows the view from the top tier.The advantage is that you get a great atmosphere and a good overview of the pitch. The trouble is you’re too far away. But it’s much better up there than in some areas and if you take binoculars you’re laughing.

The Nou Camp

Just back from eating a great Indian chicken curry recipe at Restaurante Namaste in Barcelona with Dan. Almost went to the wrong restaurant as there are 2 of the same name and only one shows up in Google, but we talked to the owner at the end about his website which turns out not to be indexed. (more…)

Now you may have started to realise and may have not, but I do like eating. To celebrate my birthday yesterday I took Miriam out for dinner at Sikkim, a place we tried three years ago and found the mix of cuisine which supposedly follows the route of Marco Polo to suit us perfectly.

Last night we booked, but on Friday and Saturday they have an odd system where they have two sittings, the first from 8.30 to 11 and then second from 11.15 to 1. I prefer to eat at around 10 when going out, so this didn’t really fit in with my plans for the evening, but we accepted the first sitting and arrived at about 9. (more…)

Last night I finally met Dan, one of the original members of my StomperNet SIMPLE team who also lives in Barcelona.

We should have met before, but I was hyper busy before the summer and cancelled a couple of times, so was glad to finally meet at Belly for the monthly Barcelona entrepeneur’s group networking meetup. Over a few beers we had a good chat about SEO and internet marketing, including StomperNet SIMPLE, the 30 Day Challenge and Immediate Edge. It’s always good to find someone who speaks the same language as you (I don’t mean English, I mean SEO) so I hope we can meet up a bit more often than once every 4 or 5 months.

Chicken curry anyone?