Ok – so I admit – I’m not only impressed by animation, I’m impressed by tech toys. And oscilloscopes have always been a source of fascination to geeks. Throw in a bit of nostalgia and look what I find…
Ok – so I admit – I’m not only impressed by animation, I’m impressed by tech toys. And oscilloscopes have always been a source of fascination to geeks. Expensive, complex and covered in switches, buttons and knobs. If there weren’t so many other toys fighting for quality time, and that time in such short supply, I’d buy one.
And being someone who did his growing up in the eighties, The Riddle is one of those songs that brings back huge and happy memories.
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!
Cuzco is one of those places – full of foreigners who got there and thought “hey… let’s stop a while longer” and then don’t leave for years. It’s vibrant, beautiful, friendly and prosperous. See it while it’s still relatively unspoilt.
If you like this shot, you may wish to check out my photoblog, which I’m now going to make a more serious part of my website, albeit with its own style specific to displaying large images.
As anyone who knows me can confirm, I’m always interested in the latest tech and software. So at the WordCamp UK at the weekend I was interested to learn about a new iPhone client for WordPress. And this is the result.. I’m blogging by phone.
Ok, so it’s not perfect…formatting is limited and the picture ends up browser sized rather than using a correctly sized thumbnail. But it’ll have it’s uses..both in journalism sites and for keen personal bloggers.
I’m also having a fiddle with WP2.6’s new image handling features, so what you see above isn’t exactly what the iPhone did, but close.
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.
The chaps at Cam-Trax have come up with a rather nifty bit of software that can turn practically any easily visible object and a cheap webcam into a game or PC controller.
I wish I could code that sort of stuff….
Now I’ll get back to working on SQL queries when I should actually be out partying…
I chanced upon a site listing the first 100 .com registrations ever made – and it rather startled me. I started my IT career in 1987, first working as a printer operator on the mainframes at ICI, before moving to systems operations in at the beginning of 1988. Later in 1988 I became a trainee programmer (my career never moved as fast as that first 12 month period!) and so I continued.
So when I took my first tentative steps in professional IT there had been fewer than 100 .coms registered. Today there are over 76,000,000 active domains and over 280,000,000 that have been deleted, according to Domaintools.com.
Things have changed markedly in this industry. 21 years is nothing. The internet has quite literally exploded around us. I started surfing the World Wide Web in 1993 and frankly there was nothing much there. It was hard to find sites, and performance was painful. Running your own site was difficult, and it wasn’t until 1996 that I first registered a domain – at-speed.co.uk with the intention of creating an online resource for motorsport news. It was a difficult but exciting experience, but I felt that it was too early – the Internet wasn’t really a mass market item yet, even though the potential was starting to be realised. I had bugger all money at the time too, so needed to go out there and get a better paying job. Interestingly I used to get e-mails from the UK Motorsport Index (which still has the same design as it did then!) complaining about our high budget approach being against the spirit of the web. I doubt he realised that we had absolutely no money and everyone contributed their work for free. One thing that was as true then as it is now is that good <> expensive.
So now where are we? We have applications delivered via the browser, high performance search engines that actually work, and we enjoy the power of a huge number of free social services. Many of these services are heavily funded and will require monetisation at some point, or they’ll close… that could be interesting. Google managed the transition from a giveaway to a fee earning service without ever charging the people that made it successful. Can the likes of flickr, Facebook and WordPress.com?
Time will tell… What’s certain is that the pace of change, so marked over my career, is probably going to continue accelerating. The next 21 years could be as equally fascinating…
I’m not going to be challenging for anything much this year, but on April 26th I ambled along to the Aintree Spring Sprint and took some snaps. A selection of them are available here. Use them as you like, but don’t remove the tag. If you’d like to receive a higher quality image, just let me know and I’ll mail it to you.