Hi there,

So the last two weeks have been busy! I enjoyed a tasty Sunday lunch made even more delicious by the fact it was free from winning a prize draw.  On Friday I spent a day in London at the Courier Live event picking up some great advice and tips on small business, followed by watching the musical ‘Come From Away’.  It was an amazing show, brilliant choreography and storytelling. If you get the chance to see it then I really recommend it.  

On to the difficult second album (well newsletter). This edition I have included some slightly longer articles and a video for you to delve into.  I wonder if you did anything for Halloween? We have one teen in the house who still likes to get involved so we had lots of 'trick or treaters' all very ingenious with their costumes.  The holiday/celebration - whatever you want to call it - has become more popular in the UK over the last few years, and whether we welcome it or our neighbourhood was full of tiny ghouls and monsters, very excited about being out in the dark and trick or treating with their parents.  There was certainly a sense of community and good spirit (sorry about the pun!)

Brain Food

We're all attached to our phones, that’s just the way it is now, and there are a few neat tricks we can use to make them work better for us.  There are ways of being more intentional with the technology and leveraging it for ourselves. This article from Coach Tony is full of great tips and hacks.  It says it's a 75 mins read so, if that's a lot for you to fit in, he has laid out 3 different ways to read the article depending on what level you want to get out it.   

Job interviews - does anyone actually like them?  Then the dreaded question ‘Tell me about yourself', where to start?  This piece from The Cut helps explain where to start and how to think about your answer.  

Mainstream media likes to throw headlines at us about doom and gloom - but is that whats’ actually happening?  If you love an infographic like me you'll like this, it shows the actual causes of death in the USA from 2016, then compares it to what is reported in the media.  So for example, terrorism actually accounts for less than 0.01% of deaths, yet takes up 35% of media coverage.  Really quite fascinating.

Clever tools

I’ve been using gmail for years now, but have always felt the webpage is too cluttered and busy.  Turns out the guy at Google who designed it felt like that too! So when he left Google he made a Chrome extension to ‘fix’ it - a bit like a director's cut of a film.  Since downloading Simplify I’ve found my inbox much more ‘zen’.    Give it a go and see what you think.

Removing backgrounds in photos can be a pain, some people like clicking about for ages, not me.  This fab little web app does it all for you.  Just upload an image and bingo - they remove the background.  Such sorcery!  Give it a try, it might just save you tons of time.

Ok, so this is a big one, Travelsites.com literally does just that, it lists the best sites for booking flights, hotels, cruises, train tickets, plus currency exchange, ride sharing and much more more.  Very neatly organised with tonnes of categories.

Fun stuff

Warning - this is a bit addictive. This interactive site allows you to scroll back through the years, you can select the month and it will play the most popular music from that era. Beautifully designed site from The Pudding - these people are experts at this. Best with headphones, does work on mobile/tablet, but the bigger your screen the better. Nostalgia here we come.

One Rothko Per Hour does exactly that. This webpage shows one Rothko painting, then each hours shows you another one. Put it on the big screen in the background and create your own art gallery. This is the type of web I love - simple and built for everyone.

This one is for the book and bookstore lovers. A short film from Max Joseph (he makes his own films and helps edits You-tuber Casey Neistat’s films). Max wants to read more, so he goes on a mission to find out how, which includes visiting some amazing bookstores.