Asavin Wattanajantra recently wrote a list of things he’d learned in his first 7 months as an IT journalist. Which pretty much covers it, but since this week marks my second full year working for Micro Mart, I figured I’d, er, shamelessly steal the idea and write my own list.

1. Free stuff is great. I utterly agree that we love getting free stuff, particularly when you don’t have to give it back.

2. You rarely get the free stuff you want, though, because everyone else wants it too.

3. PRs often have a radically different idea of what constitutes a “high-res” image than we do.

4. Nothing you’re actively looking for, be it story, specifications, or pictures, will ever show up until after the deadline has passed.

5. … but on a weekly magazine you can usually just use it next week, instead.

6. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

7. Anything that can’t go wrong - because it’s all sorted out, everything’s fine, everyone knows what they’re doing and there’s loads of time left! - will go wrong. Things that will easily destroy any sense of organisation: illness, injury, weather, trains, and babies.

8. Speaking of trains, somehow you still always manage to go through a tunnel at exactly the most inconvenient moment in a mobile phone conversation.

9. I will never learn to carry a laptop around. Those things are heavy.

10. Apple product launches are hypnotic (and people will re-fill your wine glass when you’re not looking, which adds to the effect). If Steve Jobs is enthusiastic about it, I will want it. The effect takes a couple weeks to wear off.

11. … admittedly, I’d still quite like an iPhone, though, so that’s not really worn off at all.

12. Just because a product is billed as the fastest/most efficient/quietest/smallest/etc, doesn’t mean that’s actually true. And even if it is, it’ll only stay true for about a week.

13. Making puns based around Flash Gordon references for stories about flash memory stops being funny really fast.

14. Getting noticed by Google News is awesome.

15. The more often you update your blog, the more attention you’ll attract. (Actually, I think I learned this one from just blogging, generally, in a non-work sense, but shhh.)

16. No matter what you write about, someone somewhere will disagree with you.

17. But hey, at least that means they’re reading!

18. I really don’t understand how or why to use Twitter, but I’m sort of trying. In between waiting for it to stop being broken.

19. The best sentence I’ve written so far is “Take these rats off my Internet face!” Context? Er, no. I’ll just let that one stand alone.

20. There can never be enough coffee.