But well drawn charts are always fascinating. Now, combine a chart with what is sometimes my favourite subject, me, and maybe I could do something?
I’ve always loved charts.
Yes. I know.
But well drawn charts are always fascinating. Now, combine a chart with what is sometimes my favourite subject, me, and maybe I could do something?
I’m often asked what I did, when. And to be quite frank, I struggle. Stuff’s based on various hazy memories such as “well I was wearing those pixie boots back then, so must have been 1985.”
I wondered if there was a really really simple way of visualising the key things I did in each year. I reckon recent years are more important than those long ago. And to signify my general decline a spiral is probably the best metaphor for my life. SO…! Here it is, what I did in my career, in it’s most primary elements.
I’d be really interested to know if this works for you, or if you think I’m just nobbing about. Comments, please!
PS. I know that the resizing’s gorn and made it a bit soft, but life’s too short to fix that – it’s just an experiment. Sorry.
I attended Barcamp Liverpool 2008 to join fellow geeks in a spot of technology appreciation at this ‘unconference’ at the CUC. Great venue, and great to be able to give an ad-hoc presentation on WordPress for News Sites in the Café
So… I’ve always meant to be a bit more active within the geek community. I tried a spell in the late eighties/early nineties with the British Computer Society, CompuServe and CIX but sometimes found it all a bit tiresome. There were too many who’d earned their stripes in the seventies on heavy iron and, I felt, even at that time were being left behind. Of course, I must say that that doesn’t apply to all or even a majority of the people back then. But there wasn’t much of a sense of fun. It was all a bit… serious.
Barcamp Liverpool 2008 Official Logo
But you know, technology is cool. Especially today when almost everyone seems to be a geek these days. So after a successful trip to Birmingham for the first WordCamp UK I thought it was time to get geeking up in my home town! Barcamp Liverpool beckoned…
And it was worthwhile. Sadly I’d been up at 3am in the morning in order to take Romana to the airport, so I was a bit out of it. But that didn’t prevent me doing a few things anyway…
WordPress for News Sites
I was asked if I wanted to do a presentation on WordPress by one guy. And I thought… why the heck not. Now, I know a lot of people at Barcamp know WordPress, so I felt the best approach was to be a little more specific. So… I decided to talk casually in the Café about how WordPress can be used for the purpose of building a news site. I covered the basics before showing off the Caribou demo. To be honest, it wasn’t a perfect talk – I’d had half an hour to prepare and most of that was spent getting the latest WP Trunk installed on my laptop, with everything configured and ready to roll, plus a quick list of key points. If I hadn’t had a client meeting for half the morning I might have done better. But still, at one point there seemed to be about 20 people paying good attention. Frankly I was surprised – I rambled and soon realised that the best approach was to get folk asking questions. I think people enjoyed it!
Video Interviews
I ended up giving a couple. I rambled. I was tired. Lack of sleep doesn’t help me. I kept my glasses on so as to disguise the bags under my eyes.
1 Minute Pitch
Instead of pitching something we’re doing I decided to pitch a new concept we’ve been floating around the office. I was nervous, shakey and tired. I can’t even remember much about it all to be honest. The other guys did better. They had stuff like preparation – I’d had about thirty seconds to think about mine! But it’s good to practice public speaking, so why not? It was a good crowd.
But Hey…
I had a good time. But overslept dramatically as I recovered from Saturday, so didn’t make the Sunday. I hope everyone had a great time!
Some of you may have noticed that this blog hasn’t been updated properly of late. Not much fresh content, no motorsport reports… in fact, not much at all. Here’s why…
My site isn't so desolate (nor beautiful) as this one in Sofia, Bulgaria - by niv at Flickr - credit and link at the bottom of this article
Some of you may have noticed that this blog hasn’t been updated properly of late. Not much fresh content, no motorsport reports… in fact, not much at all.
Well, there are reasons! First off, work. And more work. Basically, early on this year I realised that we simply weren’t making enough to get by, let alone to prosper. So it became time to actually knuckle down. I stepped up my networking efforts – getting out there and meeting people, letting them know who we were. In the end a chance meeting with Matt Wardle, formerly of Black & Ginger, led to us doing several pieces of work. In a way, that was the start of a path where we learned how marketing and building a small business actually works.
And so it started. In Spring I built the back-end to an activities site by B&G called Liverpool Active City. I don’t feel it’s as busy a site as it should be, given the budgets behind it, but our side of it works reliably, so I’m happy. That was followed by a frantic summer with Politics & The City – James (my colleague) coding late into the night, and me swearing and cussing over the SUN server that we got lumbered with. Not being a SUN OS expert I found there were plenty of traps waiting for me. We went live with hours to spare, and I even managed to arrive at the launch party. Late and bedraggled, of course, but hey….
We then deliberately avoided taking on large works in order to implement a new WordPress Themes Club. This club, known as Spectacu.la and with that as its domain name, was a massive project for us and involved lots of tricky work to build a secure, reliable and easy to use platform. The themes for it needed to be built too. That was James occupied, basically, from August to the end of November. In the meantime I did the smaller works (I’m not a web coder by nature – it drives me nuts) and that’s established a rather nice platform for us to hopefully monetise our WordPress skills in a non-consultancy, and therefore highly scalable, way.
And that’s led to us winning a contract with a FTSE250 corporate to replace one of their leading websites with a WordPress based site. This is a relatively large job for us – but it signifies the scale of interest in the WordPress platform we chose to specialise in. And you know… it’s going to be brilliant. We have James, who as a WP coder just rocks, and Mike Little is now working with us too.
And of course, there’s the re-design of this site. Over the years it’s accumulated a lot of content and I felt it was time to use a theme suited to this – breaking things up into sections and providing easier navigation options.
So, that’s a big part of why I’ve been quiet. Motorsport has taken a back seat, as have most of my other interests. The business is now on a far stronger foundation, however, with a good, regular income stream and finally a little bit of money in the bank. And while travel has taken a real back seat this year, in spring we’re planning a trip to Mexico. Watch this space!
I was reading a BBC News article about a teenager who was stabbed and nearly killed. Horrific enough in its own right, but it was the following comment by the Metropolitan Police that annoyed me:
“We take any crime reported to us seriously and we will investigate everything fully.”
Here was a young man, nearly killed, and the case was dropped far too readily by the police. The statement says nothing. They didn’t investigate everything fully at all.
It’s rather like me, when I get a parking ticket (which I appear to have a lot of right now), saying that “I check local parking regulations and react accordingly in full.” and saying nothing more. It’s putting up a smokescreen against the reality that by and large I have to accept responsibility when things go wrong. Organisations have to do this too. By issuing these sorts of bland statements they do nothing but reduce respect for themselves. It’s sad, dangerous and won’t help to put an end to the dangerous crimes that happen every day.
Although by and large violent crime has dropped since I was a teenager, there are appear to be rises in certain areas and amongst the teenage age groups. It’s still important these crimes are taken seriously.
Interestingly, when I reported the theft of a Satnav system from someone’s van (and had a number plate for the perpetrator) it was taken very seriously and statements were taken quite promptly. So I suspect quality of response varies markedly from area to area. It’d be nice if organisations that have made mistakes stop giving bland responses like the one above, however. It would just annoy me a little… less.
When my bed shakes enthusiastically I tend to assume that something’s going well… but this time I was woken by the clatter of a radio wobbling on the sideboard at 1am this morning.
When you wake up to an earthquake you don’t really understand what’s happening at first. There’s a bit of noise as things move, and it’s rather odd to feel that all has gone wobbly. It lasted for about ten seconds, but there were no alarms going off, nothing crashing to the ground… as the tremors slowed I realised all was well. I went back to sleep before waking at around 3am. Curious, I ended up whipping out the phone and checking BBC News. Sure enough, the North East of England had been hit by a substantial quake measuring 4.3 (or 4.6 depending on the report at the moment) on the Richter scale.
This morning I wandered around the house checking for damage but there’s nothing visible – not even any new cracks in the plaster.
Would have been great to have been up St John’s tower though – bet the DJ’s had something to say!
2008 kinda started on a low today… We we’re doing a spot of leafleting for Romana’s French teaching today when I walked up one drive and saw a tabby sleeping near the back of a car. I dropped the leaflet off, walked back, but noticed the cat seemed rather still.
So I went back, knocked on the door of the house, where they said, simply “He’s not ours!” So I asked if they knew anyone who might own it as it seemed very sick. The old chap did make a cursory trip to a neighbour, who wasn’t in. But I was a bit shocked when he explained he’d seen the cat on his drive earlier in the day. Ah well, some people don’t like animals and don’t care, and I mentioned as much to Romana. A shame he got aggressive on over-hearing this (maybe I meant him to) but he was a daft, small old man. He even got himself wound up to the point that he threatened to knock me out. Riiiight.
Anyway, I left him and his equally callous wife to it, wrapped the cat in my jacket and jogged (well, coughed and spluttered – I have a cold) back home to get my car.
While I was gone other people in the area got talking with Romana and they tried to find if the cat had an owner nearby, but there was no joy, the cat had no collar (and later we found, no chip) so it was hard to see if he was owned.
We got him, smelly, cold, and barely breathing to the nearest open vets. He had very little sign of life except when we picked him up when he’d miaow quite pathetically So he wasn’t dead, but he was in a really poor state.
At the vets his body temperature barely registered, he was anaemic, full of fleas and in poor condition. He was quite young though, and not badly injured, so almost certainly very sick with something. He was nearly dead. They felt the best decision for him would be to put him down humanely. He was almost certainly a stray, but even if not, you could see the vet felt that trying to help him could just be prolonging the poor cat’s misery.
The picture above shows him still alive, but poorly. Bless the little tyke – and at least he didn’t die cold and alone on a damp driveway. He had people looking after him at the end.
So it’s been a bit quiet on here of late. In part it’s because of the extra work being put into the business and house of late. I haven’t been sprinting so much, and I’ve been doing a lot of playing with technology.
What else has been happening? Well the Elise has been sitting in the rain, doing nothing. I’m rather ashamed about that, but I’m trying to get into my head that it’s time to start using it more. With less track time in the past year than at any point for five years or more, I’m feeling rusty and slow. Not only that, but driving a fast car is losing its appeal. Time to change that. Soon.
I’ve also been fiddling away with some other experiments, some of which have shown on this site – for example, blogging from a Nokia N95 (or many other Symbian phones), Facebook connections and so on. That’s meant that I’ve been rather diversified. Which could be bad, could be good. Personally I just think it’s a sign of learning and progress. There’s a lot going on in the world and if our company, Interconnect IT, is to succeed in its ambition of being a technology led company, we need to understand what people are doing with technology, what they want to do, and how they do it. We also need to understand their problems, the hurdles they face, and so on.
