Not much to report this week really. We've been preparing for our holiday, making sure all the work that's on is finished so that we can get away and actually relax, not needing to think or worry about work. Thankfully I also have all potential issues covered with the help of my Mum and a couple of friends who can sort out any issues that may crop up. The more prepared you are, the less likely you'll need your preparations to come into effect! Well that's what I hope anyway.

We've also had some fun and games with working out the insurance for the holiday. Standard travel insurance covers a reasonable amount but not for single items (about £250 per item). So we're having to rely on a mix of our travel and house insurance to cover everything, considering our cameras aren't exactly cheap. I've had to decide to leave my laptop at home as it wouldn't be covered at all, and that's not a risk I'm prepared to take. So instead I've been 'pimping' up my PDA with various software to allow me to do anything I need to in an emergency, as well as a RAW file viewer to view photos off our compact flash memory cards (I'll post up about the specific software another day!). We've also bought a portable storage device to allow us to download all of our photos (as this is what the laptop was primarily being taken for).

I've been checking on the weather reports and it looks like we could be in for a nice bit of weather. It seems that when the sun is out it's out in full, so hopefully someone somewhere will be nice to us and give us some decent weather for the week. Even a few days would be nice! If I can find a free WiFi point (or depending on how much it costs at the hotel) I'll try and get a couple of photos online.

So, besides a bit of packing, purchase a few Euros, all I need to do now is learn Italian

A good business opportunity doesn't come around often I don't think. I've had a couple of opportunities which I've taken up instantly and they've come through for me. Maybe I'm just a bit too cautious and I could have had a few more on the go had I taken some risks. But at the same time I don't want to set things up, or buy something or into something and not actually do anything with it. In the past I've stumbled across a potentially good idea, had someone build the site, put in a few hours on improvements and we've made over $1k from it. Another was luck that a friend was selling off a couple of sites, I grabbed one, added more products to it and, whilst I've not made a massive amount, I'm in profit on it.nnLast week I was also pretty lucky when a fellow AISer offered the chance to make an investment into a new site selling a very cool product (I say this after having a good play with the product and seeing what it produced!). This person I have the upmost respect for, so getting the chance to buy into his idea was a bit of a no-brainer. I'm not going to release details of the product for sale yet until the site is up and ready, but watch this space as there will be an offer on for all my readers

There's just 8 and a half days to go until we get on that plane and fly off to Rome for 8 nights Excited? Yep you betcha! I've emailed everyone who needs to know so that I don't get bothered whilst we're away. I have a fellow freelancer (and talented PHPer) to hold the fort if anything problematic crops up along with my one and only mum to deal with all the phone calls and emails. You know what, I bet nothing comes through at all!! Still, all avenues covered means I can relax and not worry. Next job is to learn a bit of Italian!

This week has been a week of low motivation. I'm either still getting out of holiday mode from Christmas, or already getting into holiday mode for Italy We took an afternoon off this week to go over to Liverpool finally. After having a brief look in the shops for clothes for the holiday we then took a wander out with the cameras. There's a competition going on for photos which has been set up by a shopping centre called the Met Quarter along with the Tate gallery (the Liverpool Tate, not the London Tate ). The idea is to submit a photo taken at each of the 4 pitstops, however with light running out and bad weather on its way we only managed to hit 3 of the 4 stops. However the last stop was by the Albert dock (top photo) so we took some night shots down there as the colours reflected in the water were just great to see. I also had a a bit of fun trying to do a few 'light trail' shots, with the few cars coming past (see left).

Well if you're in the UK that is, or Australia, or a few other dropped countries. Apparently Google's strict changes in AdSense Referrals means the income earnt has dropped back to where it was about a year ago, however that makes no difference to anyone outside North/South America and Japan, because regardless of whether you referred someone yesterday or a couple of months ago, if they don't make their $100 before the end of the month you won't get anything, regardless of whether they make it within the 180 day period.nnNice eh. You can read about it all at JenSense.nnFrom what I can see, if you had referral button on your site it just won't display now, as mine isn't.

So the new year is here and it's a good time to wipe the slate clean. I've emptied out our savings account to pay off the final house moving costs and started the account back at zero for the start of this year. Of course payments have already come in from a couple of places which already gives us a total of £80+.nnLast year we made, including bank interest, £1526 (figure is pure cash in the bank, not virtual figures in accounts such as ClickBank). So I only have one New Years resolution and that's to beat that amount.nnPlans for the year (my to do list):nFinish off Travel site before we go on holiday in 2 weeksnFinish off improving/upgrading product selling site, plus bug the designer for more products to sellnImprove couple of existing template sitesnGet my 6 year planned shopping site on the gonPost more nnMost of that shouldn't take me long to do, it's just getting the motivation to do it. I'm hoping to take at least one day a week to sit and do this work, so providing I stay a bit more focused then it's achievable and I still get to keep my spare time.nnEdit: Just to add, £1526 translates to an average of £127 a month (give or take a few pence).