I came back to Stockport today and it happened to be my brothers Parent’s Evening at my old school! The last time I was there was 5 years ago, and a lot of the teachers have unfortunately left! However, there were 5 of my old teachers that were there and that actually recognised me (although I haven’t changed much!), and it was great to catch up with them!

It’s off to Derbyshire tomorrow for n0shit hosted by Phil Campbell, will be the first time I’ve been down there and the first time we’ll have met in person. Can’t wait, I’m sure it’ll be an awesome night!

To celebrate hearing the good news about my new job, my lovely girlfriend decided to treat me to a nice Italian (meal). Since Abbie was paying I thought I’d go for a nice chicken fillet with garlic sauce! Was delish! Abz had spaghetti seafood with little baby squids… Yuck!

Just about to watch Man of the Year (Robin Williams) to round off a very nice evening with Abz! :)

I find it hard to keep a blog sometimes (microblogging via Twitter is far less painful!) , but there’s a little project I want to do that should hopefully give me something interesting to write about. I want to take a photo a day for a year. I know that it’s nothing new (jeez, hardly anything is new nowadays,) but it is something which I think will be good for me to aim towards. I think the ideal time to start this will be on April 13th*, which will give me enough time to get the site prepared for it, and it coincides with Abbie having endured 6 years of being with me (poor girl!)

Good news about University. I have two more assignments (each 2,000 words) and then I am officially finished, done, and through with education. Don’t get me wrong, I love learning, we learn new things everyday, that’s our nature. I’d just rather learn things in a less artificial environment, and start learning practically.

I feel this year will be a challenging year, entering the real world where you don’t get financially bailed out 3 times a year with a nice student loan. Getting on the housing market seems damn near impossible with the current conditions, I just hope that things start to calm down and even out sooner rather than later!

*Edit - How can this be in the past? I meant to write May 13th, stay tuned.

In amongst finishing off a few client projects, I am drafting a redesign for this site… there’s a sneak peak here if you want to see how it’s coming along.

Twitter and Flickr will also be integrated into the new design, and maybe if I get serious about vlogging, I might have a bit of Qik or Bambuser integration, but that might be a long way off yet. If all that just went over your head then I’m glad because I did it on purpose (Because I’m mean, and the only way a geek can have fun is to bamboozle people with stupid phrases.)

Twitter is a short blogging platform (140 chars) used to update your status. Very much like your Facebook status, which is why mine are integrated.

Flickr is a photo publishing service, where I keep the majority of my photos organised. What I like about Flickr is that there is a great community of people, and a great platform to get your photos more widely recognised. There are thousands of groups of enthusiastic people, all with one common interest, photography, and some with niche interests such as wildlife or photos of UFO’s.

Qik and Bambuser are essentially the same. They are a live video streaming service which you can do straight from your mobile phone. However, you best make sure you have a WiFi phone otherwise you might get hit with a £250 phone bill (It’s happened once, and never again!)

Look out for the new design in a couple of weeks time!

1. The eeePC is so hugely in demand that ASUS aren’t able to meet the demand of them. Currently only 30% of the people that want one actually get one delivered. I have been waiting now 4 weeks for one since I ordered, and there are still no guarantees about when they will be delivered.
2. The eeePC 900 is coming out in a few months time. The main difference being the 9 inch screen, and higher resolution which will make the eeePC easier to work with and more productive. Also at very similar size and weight it will be better for on the go entertainment such as watching movies when travelling.

Hopefully I’ll get over the disappointment of not getting the initial eeePC, but maybe it will be a blessing in disguise; as they say: patience is a virtue, and the newer eeePC will hopefully be a far better purchase!

Normally you can just turn these on by going to the Task Bar and Start Menu properties, then selecting them in the Notification area. When I have tried this these options have been grey and I’m unable to change them. After digging around I have found a solution for this bug. If you have also experienced this problem I will explain how to remedy this with a few screenshots.

The problem as highlighted above is that the System icons do not load up. We first start by opening the Task Manager, either by CTRL + ALT + DEL, or by searching for “taskmgr” in the Windows search bar.

Once we’ve loaded this, we want to kill the process, “explorer.exe”. As shown below, right click on that process and choose to end it.

As this process is critical to the operating system, we need to run the process again, simply by clicking “File” in the top left, and choosing New Task (Run…).

We then simply create the new process “explorer.exe” and click OK.

Then, as if by magic, your icons will be restored in their rightful place and you can then check them and uncheck them as you would normally in the Task Bar and Start Menu properties.

Unfortunately this bug hasn’t been squashed by the Vista dev team in the new release of SP1, but hopefully there will be a permanent fix in the future for this.

I absolutely hate Threadless Newsletters because I love Threadless! Damn them. They sent out a newsletter saying that they have extended their sale and within 15 minutes I had bought 1 t-shirt for myself and 1 for my girl!

Two t-shirts each $10, and $8 for the shipping. Coming to a grand total of £14! With exchange rates like I love the demise of the American Dollar because it means that I get original t-shirts which very few people in the UK wear. If you are from the UK, don’t check out Threadless because that means that I will be slightly less cool as you will end up buying something from their awesome range!

If I can I like to take the chance to kill two birds with one stone (Metaphorically speaking, poor birds.) As part of my assignment I have to design a portfolio website, and as this site is in need of a branding/positioning makeover then it seems like the perfect opportunity.

At the moment it’s just a plain ole’ blog powered by Wordpress. Don’t get me wrong, I do really like Wordpress, but it simply doesn’t beat my favourite CMS which is still relatively unknown. For my needs, Website Baker has always remained the number one tool, it’s simplicity, and as I’ve got to know it inside out; it’s power.

In combination I want to maybe add a more interactive point of view with video media, and will definitely be integrating Twitter and Flickr into the site. I’ll be working on a concept over the next few weeks, and hope to release something fresh. I’ll also be tackling the issue with the growing mobile Internet users, by also adapting the site for mobile content. I’ve recently experimented with this on a client site, and it’s been a great success so I hope I can reproduce similar results!

Also in the pipeline is a new media company, a venture with a great American counterpart, and another personal venture targeting the lower end of the market. Obviously these are secret works in progress but will be discussed more here once released!

Well, I’ve order my brand new eeePC! Due to high demand it will take another 4 weeks to get here, but I really can’t wait! I love the simplicity, the size, the weight, and the specs of the little laptop and what’s more it only cost £220! Now I’ll be taking that where I go, partly to show off, partly because I can, and mainly because I can do everything on it that I would with my normal laptop!

I’m sure there will be a longer blog post about it, and maybe even a little review when I have time. Right now I’ve got some business cards to design for Debbie at Wedding Bakes, and then I’ve got a long list of client edits for Bishop Maginn High School! That will keep me busy for a few hours!

Of all the places, I really didn’t expect Preston to suffer from an earthquake! It happened at 00:55 and lasted for about 8 seconds. It shook the floor, and I could definitely feel it on the second floor where I live. I couldn’t actually believe it, but I looked out the window, and there were quite a few other puzzled faces peering out of their windows across the road.

There was also the obligatory car alarm going off, signifying the end of the earthquake! Probably measured 0.01 on the Richter Scale, but then again I’m fortunate enough not to live on a fault line!  Well that’s tonight’s exciting news over!

Edit -News travels fast (thanks Facebook - you have one use at least), and apparently this wasn’t just limited to Preston. People as South as London felt this tremor, which must mean that it was actually fairly large to shake most of the UK. Hopefully it wasn’t anything like a nuclear bomb, and just a harmless earthquake!

Edit 2 - Just found out that the magnitude of the earthquake was a whopping 4.7!

It is often said that good coders write code from scratch and that great coders reuse code. If that’s the case then it appears I’m a great coder. I have about 4 or 5 different xHTML/CSS layouts which I am constantly reusing because they are just solid, cross browser layouts which can be modified and tweaked to suit most designs.

Most designs follow similar principles; a header, 2 or 3 columns and a footer. Therefore there really is no need to reinvent the wheel. As well as being time-saving, it is also a matter of consistency and ensuring that the quality and backwards compatibility is built into the templates.

This ability to manipulate templates really comes down to separating content from style and harnessing the power of CSS. Being able to keep underlying xHTML code exactly the same, and to change the design through just CSS is something that even today, some designers can’t grasp. All too often I see in-line styles where it’s not necessary and this makes updating a site very laborious, tedious and time consuming.

To see what I’m getting at, a great project by Dave Shea called CSS Zen Garden was started to really flex the muscles of CSS. Although this project is relatively prehistoric in Internet terms, it still attracts a lot of attention. This is how the web should be built, with semantics and accessibility in mind, however there are far too many Web Design companies that just don’t care about the ethics of the work they do, just so long as they get paid.

Today however, I can reveal the true identity of “The Stig”. Photo’s of the Stig have been published, and thanks to the use of flash photograph his eyes were visible. Out of all of the candidates which are a possibility for the Stig, the only person that this can be is Ben Collins. He is a highly acclaimed driver, although relatively unknown outside of the racing circles, but he is an awesome wet weather driver.

Williams the bookmakers have Ben at 8/1 that he’s the Stig. Russ Swift is currently the bookmakers favourite, being 2/1 on, but there ain’t any crows feet on this Stig. Obviously I can’t be held liable if you make a bet and it turns out to be wrong, but you can make your own judgment, from photo’s online!

When dealing with clients and speaking to prospective clients I have always found that they appreciate being told technical details in a way in which they are able to deal with. Take hosting for example. The client doesn’t need to know that their website will be on a server located in the Gnax datacenter on a clustered Linux server running the latest Apache 2.2.8 version, with PHP 5.2.5 pre-installed.

The clients do however need to know the principles behind how their website is run. I’ve found that simplifying hosting into an analogy of a house really helps clients to understand the workings of a website a lot better. In effect the server just acts as is a place to live, it is where all the files reside, and when someone knows our address (domain name) they will come to the house and we can show them around. Every once in a while we either have to clean the site (maintenance) or we have to do some D.I.Y (server downtime) which prevents people from coming in to look at our house.

All too often (and it’s very easy to do) technical folks forget that 99.8% of the population have no idea how a website works, and nor do they want to. It’s this that keeps people in work on the Internet, but at the same time those working in this field have to recognise that being a geek will mean that what you say will go straight over a clients head. This doesn’t lend itself to a good client relationship, and so therefore a more human approach is always favoured.

This touches on the principles behind communication. Communication is a two-way process, consisting of a speaker and a listener. It is always the role of the speaker to ensure that the listener understands the message. That art of communication is tough to master, but simply knowing the target audience and tailoring applicable communication methods to them plays a vital role in ensuring that the listener fully understands the message which is being communicated.

Although upgrading Vista from XP about 6 months ago was initially a pain in the ass with compatibility issues and the like, as soon as updates came out, I have loved working with Vista ever since. It is a beautiful creation, and to me just far more intuitive to use than a Mac. I’m not saying you should buy Vista, I am simply saying that it works for me and my needs.

That’s what I love about competition as a consumer. We are free to choose between XP, Vista, Leopard or even Linux. I think this is a broad enough choice for all people needed an operating system, and I don’t understand the need for fierce fanboy rivalry which I see so often on the likes of Digg.com.

I mean this morning when I was about to start work, I turned on my laptop and managed to tidy my whole room, make my bed, sort the bins out before I had to enter my password on the login screen. I mean what other OS allows you that kind of personal time to do other things! I can’t wait for the Vista SP1 to be rolled out in a few weeks time. Apparently it fixes a lot of the bugs which I notice on a daily basis, and is a welcome upgrade!

Now I’m up and running, I suppose I’ll have to get on with some work!

There are many people that talk about xHTML and CSS code with a passion (myself included), and that only perfectly valid code is the way to build a website. If you want my honest opinion, the only reason my code is always valid is to shut up the critics that only base critiques on whether it passes the nice Validator Test over at W3C.

On the odd occasion, the Validator can be a good way to spot a mistake, but in no way does it guarantee cross browser compatibility or in fact make it work in future browsers. In fact, more often than not, perfectly valid code will never be cross-browser compatible, and that is the most frustrating part of what I do. What is the point then in having these standards? At the end of the day, a website user doesn’t care how a website works, so long as it works for them!

I guess it just comes down to some people’s mantra, or work ethics. When I create the code I do, I firstly ensure that it is cross-browser compatible (for the consumer), and once I have succeeded I then start to work on ensuring that the code is also valid (for my ego). Obviously the consumer comes first, but as the perfectionist I am, standards are imperative. It also shuts those small-minded critics up!

To me, what is far more important is the accessibility and usability of a website. There are people that like to think that valid code means these two things, and they couldn’t be more wrong. Semantics and logic are the key to these issues, which is something I’ll be talking about in the not too distant future!

Choosing a home for a website is possibly the most frustrating thing you can do on the web, it’s in effect like choosing a new house, but combined with moving to a completely new town. Sometimes you can do all the research in the world, but nothing can prepare you for what it’s actually like to live there.

I have been a firm believer in Dreamhost, and had a great time with them. Although I have experienced very little downtime with them, I have noticed that things have been getting pretty slow lately, and decided I need a more reliable host, not just for myself, but for my clients. Their recent billing issue fortunately didn’t affect me, and the way they handled it was the reason why I love Dreamhost. Their transparency, urgency, but mostly sense of humour is definitely what has kept me there, and support has always been great with emails being answered within a couple of hours.

I have read a lot about A Small Orange, who seem to be a very reliable and trustworthy host. Although they are less transparent, and don’t appear to have as much of a personal touch I think that it is about time to actually try out another host. However I do not want to be reliant on just one web host, especially since I will still be in a shared environment, so I think that I will configure the DNS settings so that they primarily point to A Small Orange, but also have a copy at Dreamhost. This way, hopefully my websites will always be available, even if one host is experiencing problems.

I haven’t purchased an account yet, but hopefully I will test one of my domains there in the near future to see how the transition goes. If all goes well, then hopefully I will have a new home!

As you can see I love colour! Once I get some spare time I will be redesigning this site to compliment my new business cards, I know it should be the other way round, but I just fell in love with these when I got them!

You can see in the photo below that there was a printing error on 6 of the cards (look closely on the left hand side!) Thanks to this, Moo very kindly sent me another fresh pack so I ended up getting 200 cards for the price of 100. I thought this was a nice touch, especially that they acknowledged the fault before I even got chance to get in touch!

If anybody wants any of these just get in touch with me anyway you can think of (I love email!) then I’m sure I’ll be able to send a few lots out!

I’ve also been putting together the foundations for a website for a friend of the family who wants to start selling Wedding Cakes online. It’s coming along great and just needs content in there and it’ll be finished!

Also been chatting to a great guy in Atlanta about a new project which needs taking care of. A high school over in America, needs their website redeveloping so that should be an exciting couple of weeks working on their website and integrating it into something a lot more worthy than their current website!