Foggy

Posted: Sun 4 February, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Animals | Leave a comment »

The weather here has been utterly manky – we were going to go to the beach with Hound, but the visibility was so bad, it just wouldn’t have been worth it.

Instead, we went to Knettishall Country Park, which we’d heard about, but not got round to visiting.

Anyway, Hound is now happy, having run round like a prat for 1½miles, including diving in and out of the waterway on the walk. In short, she had a great time, so all told, very successful.

Clocks

Posted: Sun 4 February, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Domestic, Weirdness | 3 Comments »

Since moving, I’ve been sleeping a lot worse than I was in Bracknell. We had a new clock in the (en-suite) bathroom, and I knew that when I woke up, I could hear the poxy thing ticking, which then kept me awake.

Anyway, about ten days ago I finally lost the plot with the poxy thing, and moved it out of the bedroom.

We’ve replaced it with a (thankfully silent) water-powered digital clock (don’t laugh – it’s an interesting idea) and since then, I’ve slept a lot better.

I hadn’t realised just how much that ticking was keeping me awake, but it’s obvious now that it was. I’m just glad we’ve realised, and been able to change the situation. Plus it means I’ve been able to catch up on some much-needed sleep.

Upgraded

Posted: Sat 3 February, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: D4D™, Geeky | Leave a comment »

Blimey, that went smoothly. Most unexpected, I have to say. All took less than an hour, which is a lot easier than it was when I was working betwen the 1.0 and 1.5 versions, for example. Colour me impressed.

So, I’m now running on WP2.1, and will see how it all goes from there.

Making Things Simple

Posted: Sat 3 February, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Cynicism, Thinking About..., Web Development, Work-related | Leave a comment »

Over the last three weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of work on a new site. The basic premise is that it needs to be very user-friendly, easy to use, quick, smooth, and useable. I’ve got my own ideas about a lot of this, and on the initial development work, I’ve been applying quite a few of them to what I’m doing.

One particular thing that drives me crackers when I’m using a website is – to use the example of on-line banking – when I have to go through a seperate page to ‘select an account’ when I’ve only got one account. To me, if that’s the case, I’d far rather that the system had some logic, and effectively figured out for itself (OK, was programmed to ‘realise’) that if I’ve only got one account, I don’t need to select that account, it’s fine to go straight through to the account details page.

Anyway, I’ve been working to a similar kind of idea on the site, and while in theory it’s simple, it actually turned out to be (in some ways) a real pain. Yes, the logic is also simple, it’s just that it does take a couple of extra steps in order to get it to work.

But when it does work, it’s really nice, and makes life a lot easier.

Why is it, though, that making things simple to use can be incredibly complex in the back-end, whereas making things really complex and obstructive is actually dead easy?

New Media

Posted: Fri 2 February, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Own Business, Photography | 1 Comment »

Had an interesting conversation today with a media company up in Manchester.

Following on from the photographs I did for a charity up there back in November ’04, they now want to use those photos in a TV advertisement. I’m not quite sure what they plan to do, but it’ll be interesting to see once they’re done.

Oh, and yes, I still retain copyright on the images, and I’ll get a copy of the TV ad as well to add to the portfolio.

I have to say, I’m really quite chuffed about the entire thing…

Upgrading

Posted: Fri 2 February, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: D4D™, Five Year Plan (now Ten), Geeky, Getting Organised | 4 Comments »

So, the time has finally come.

Over this weekend, I’m going to be upgrading to WordPress 2.1 on D4D™. Yes, I’m nervous about it. Although I’m not going to go the whole hog and re-rationalise everything at the same time, as mooted a while back when I considered removing the older sections of the site ( to a deafening silence and dearth of comments!) but that may well happen over the next couple of months too.

If I’ve been really organised, I’ll have used a trial site in order to check things out and see what it all looks like, getting the templates in order, making sure I don’t end up with a fucked-up abortion of a site for two days.

If I haven’t been organised, then it’s going to look like a dog’s dinner here for a while as I go through and fix the problems as/when they occur.

Should be interesting, if nothing else.

Handwritten – an Update

Posted: Thu 1 February, 2007 | Author: | Filed under: Customer Services, Cynicism, Security, Technology | 1 Comment »

About a week ago, I wrote about the cashpoint (ATM) machine with the handwritten notice on it – which (to my surprise) garnered no comments at all.

Anyway, walking past the same pair of machines today, I noticed that this time the same one was out of order, but had up the machine’s default “Out of service – please use another machine” message on the display. No handwritten sign was in evidence at all.

I wonder if anyone’s noticed yet that they lost money last week?

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →