About Better Than Therapy and Mark O’Neill
What can I tell you about me that won’t bore the pants off you? Well, I am originally from Edinburgh, Scotland but I am now living in Würzburg, Germany, with my long-term partner Monika.
I moved permanently to Germany in February 2001 but before that I worked in many industries including the Scottish civil service (mainly the Education Department & Justice Department), banking, insurance, tourism, sales, journalism, call centers, marketing and publishing. Between 1994 and 2000, I would also make frequent trips to Europe where I would live and work for a while to get a change of scenery. I worked mainly in tourism / seasonal jobs such as hotel and restaurant work, but I also did bulb packing in the Netherlands, grape picking in France and English teaching in Poland.
I have been writing on and off since 1988 and have been published in many publications. I have also done work in Scottish youth radio as a presenter and reporter.
I attended journalism school in England from 1992-1993 and so I am proficient in journalism skills including shorthand, media law, touch-typing and investigative journalism. As part of my journalism training, I worked at various British newspapers and news wire agencies having stories published and gaining valuable work experience. Highlights included making a television programme with the BBC and appearing on BBC radio & Scottish radio.
I now write this blog and I am also the managing and publishing editor for Make Use Of . I am also a contributing writer for Google Tutor, Geeks Are Sexy , Search Engine News, and NowSourcing. I have also had a couple of posts published on ReadWriteWeb. For two years, I was a columnist on Auctionbytes covering eBay and e-commerce related stories.
If you would like me to write a guest post for your blog, just send me an email and we can discuss it. I am also always on the lookout for more paid work so if you have anything to offer, again just send me an email or instant message.
As for Better Than Therapy, well it is the eventual creation of a blogging experiment which I started back in 2004. It’s gone through many titles (the first title being “One Egg McMuffin Is Never Enough”) and many themes. I eventually settled on commenting on internet / technology issues but I want to stay away from things like “how to get rich on the internet” because I am convinced 99.9% of these blogs are complete fakes and time-wasters. I also won’t bombard you with pop-up adverts and relentless advertising. I have Adsense and one other advert and that will most likely be it.
But now I want to gradually move away from solely commenting on internet / technology themes and comment on other topics. So as you can see, Better Than Therapy is constantly evolving into whatever I want it to be.
The old Better Than Therapy is located here at Blogger. I kept it there to maintain all the permalinks and comments. It will always be up and available for anyone wanting to read it. I am always cannibalizing it for post ideas though so maybe one day I might just end up taking it down altogether.
As for the title, many people have asked me why the blog is called “Better Than Therapy”. The short answer is that I have epilepsy and manic depression and back in 2002, my health deteriorated so badly that I was forced into therapy sessions. But after 22 sessions and a lot of money later, I realised that therapy was in fact useless (Freud has a lot to answer for!). What actually made me feel better was coming home and sitting down at the computer to go online. I would see the new websites springing up, new technologies, new innovations and I would be lost in that world for literally hours. For me, computers and the internet really are “Better Than Therapy” so when it came to changing the blog title once and for all, there really was only one title in the running.
I hope you find this blog useful and sometimes interesting. Please email me if you want to ask me anything, complain, criticise, whatever. I’m a big boy with a thick skin so if you have anything to say, then say it. Email me, IM me, or leave a comment on the blog. You won’t upset me or annoy me. As a former journalist, debt collector, tax office clerk and writer, I’ve heard the worst that people can say! So it takes a lot to shock me nowadays! 
Oh and feel free to take a look at my other site - Camelot Online (named after my fascination with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table!). That site is always in a state of flux as I never know really what to do with it. At the moment, it’s mainly used for handling my email but I am also planning soon to set up some databases on it to show my huge stamp collection.
Have a great day and thanks for reading.
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