This is a bit of a belated message to say that I am gay and am running away… okay so I lied, I have left The 9rules Blogging Network to go it alone in the blogging world. I just want to say thanks to all of you that have found me from the 9rules site and to those that have been my extended family for the past couple years, I know I haven’t been as active of late and I still consider 9rules to be some of the best content available online, passionate words everywhere and I guess a catalyst for me leaving.
Tyme, Mike and Scrivs, I thank you all for having me as part of your network and perhaps one day you will have me back once I have time to channel my thoughts and passions into my blog again on a regular basis.
It’s been a pleasure getting to mingle with my peers, people that I look up to and that I have a lot of respect for, not only that I’ve made a few good friends with whom I stay in touch.
Time waits for no man as I have said before and it’s time for this man to move on. You’ll be pleased to know I am not going anywhere though so it’s a pointless statement, all I have done is retire from the commitment of writing as a part of 9rules.
I’ll still be writing and I hope that you will continue to stop by if and when it takes your fancy.
Take care folks and you’ll see me about. Got about 700 things I need to do on this site but until then I have 700 things to do on other things which I am afraid to say take precedence over entertaining you lot..
Watch this space, I think Tyme said it beautifully when she told me “don’t be a stranger, that very much goes out to you lot too!
Just want to issue a quick apology for unavailability of the site over the past few days, apparently someone out there has had a rougher time than me due to a transformer catching fire in a data center where 3 of my sites are hosted.
Check this out…
Network outage affecting several servers
Posted May 31 at 18:22 CDT by Richard Cooper in Downtime - 0 comment(s)
Issues at one of our data center are causing downtime on several servers. We are working to resolve this problem as soon as possible.
Update: Today at approximately 5:45 p.m. CDT, a transformer in one of The Planet’s Huston datacentres caught fire, requiring them to take down all of the generators on site on the instructions of the fire department. This is one of six data-centres used by WebFaction. All servers hosted at that datacentre are currently offline.
The difference between Webfaction having issues and a Fasthosts cock up is that I still trust Webfaction and know they didn’t hand out my passwords or some stupid shit like Fasthosts would do.
I just hope the poor souls that had to deal with it are getting a week off after a week of no sleep.
Anyway… that’s the why the site has been down, please excuse me if the site is a little wobbly over the next few days but I hope that is now service resumed.
I’m a heavy smoker and I hate it, I’ve enjoyed smoking for many years but I hate the fact that I do it and even more so now that I have kids.
Smoking is a crap habit, it wastes my money, it ruins my health and it jeapordises the future of my family.
I have had relatives die of cancer, I have a history of high blood pressure and heart related bad stuff in my family… is it worth tempting fate?
I just went onto google to go and have a look at images of lung cancer and nearly puked up, it is a very scary thought to die a horrible painful death, it’s a worse thought for my wife and kids to have to watch that.
For years I’ve had a love affair with smoking, it has been my crutch and also my burden, it’s given me space to think and be creative but what benefit is creativity at the expense of death. Seems to me that there’s actually no point if you look at it honestly…
My three year old daughter is shit scared of the fact that I smoke and that it could kill me, I’m scared that it could kill me, I’m also scared of the fact that if I stop smoking I could die of lung cancer anyway so why bother.
Today I haven’t smoked, hearing my daughter on the phone asking if I had been smoking is a potent thing, I don’t want to let her down, Caroline hasn’t smoked since she got pregnant and she also nags me on a day to day basis.
It’s time for it to stop. I know I have uttered words to do with stopping before, I just hope that this time I manage to keep it going…
Don’t watch this video if you are of weak stomach but if you smoke, time to wake up and smell the coffee, we are not just killing ourselves but the people around us to…
How many times have you thought, “Wow… what a great idea, I must put that on my to-do list?” but have never followed through? I wrote a while back about maintaining focus and I guess this ties in a little bit and definitely follows on, this is the topic of “Pulling the trigger”.
After putting on The Highland Fling 2008 - The browser and beyond, I knew that I had to write a post about how wonderful the day was and how much it meant to me but I also knew I wanted to write something other than a carbon copy of what people were expecting.
Back in 2006 when I had the concept for doing the conference it scared the crap out of me, it was something that I had never done before, it was outside fo my comfort zone but I still went ahead and did it. I pulled the trigger!
Many times since I started working for myself I have had ideas rush past me and I have never acted upon them, I didn’t pull the trigger, I didn’t reap the benefits from pulling the trigger either. Although I don’t regret much in my life I do regret not having acted on a lot that has been on my mind, that said there is still a lot there which I do plan on acting on.
I was once told that an idea means nothing unless it has been put on paper, recorded in some shape or form otherwise it will be forgotten. Very wise words indeed. I envy designers and their fascinating mood boards, I miss the frenzy of a brainstorm in an agency environment and I wish I kept a digital scrap book to act as my idea sponge. I think it is really important to find a way of storing these waves of ideas that rush over us, a net for catching all the cool thoughts we have. I’d maintain a wiki but they bore me and to be honest I find them confusing as they grow arms and legs and then before you know it they have turned into a monster.
The Highland Fling was set up to help inspire people, to bring together like minded people and help them forge new ideas, relationships and plans for moving forward in what they do every day. I have encountered a wide variety of hurdles in doing the event but I have always done my best to get over them and move on. To do this I had to decide on what I wanted to do about it and pull the trigger!
Pulling the trigger is a final act, once you’ve done it you have commited (hopefully not an act of homicide), you’ve made a final decision, you’ve said to yourself that you are going to do something and you’ve crossed the line, there should be no turning back.
Perhaps this article is not really my follow up to the conference, I’ve been a very busy man over the past three years and I’m wondering if this is an introspective look at where and when I pull the trigger.
To be honest I think I have using a sub machine gun of late, I organised The Highland Fling whilst working on contract and dealing with my own clients at night, having house rennovations done and to top it all off I got married 3 weeks ago on Friday and I’m now down in London contracting.
Pulling the trigger? I think I just fired a cannon!
One thing that I’ve realised of late is one of the reasons I haven’t been blogging much, I fell into a trap where I felt I should be writing about certain things instead of just being myself. I presented myself with a mental hurdle which prevented me from writing about whatever came into my mind, free thoughts for the public.
I’m glad I’m over that hurdle now and look forward to pulling the trigger on a more regular basis.
The world is a crazy place, fast moving, high intensity, non stop action for all of us but do any of you actually know what is going on? I have been working away from home for the last 2 weeks and have had a little time to step back and take a look at the chaos that ensues around me, and chaos it is… especially in the big smoke that is London.
Blistering heat, commuting and agency life are some of the things that I have had to deal with on a day to day basis which is the complete opposite from normal. For the last 2 years I have sat in the cave that is my office, devising my plans for world domination and trying to make a bit of cold hard cash but now I am out in the open and taking deep breaths of life.
Fat men on motorcycles, pushers crying “BUY WEED”, hostile beggars, tens of thousands of flip flops, sweaty undergrounds full of nobody talking. A far cry from my cave!
So what is going on? I read 3 papers a day just now, I think they hand them out for free just to try and switch us on to things we don’t really care about, or are they trying to tune us into what they want us to think? A potent question. I like the concept in the film Pi where patterns can be found anywhere and that there is order to chaos, it’s all in the numbers.
The cool thing about the film is all the religious connotations when a Jewish mathematician gets involved as he is also looking for answers through numerology and number sequences in The Torah. It ties in with a book I read a long time ago called The Bible Code which is essentially all about the original Hebrew text version of the Bible being like a giant word search that contains everything that has been, is and could be.
I am not a very religious man but have enjoyed a good few conversations about the chaos that is life and where we are from, where we are going, what’s going on…
Ever since getting Sky HD, I have been watching loads of programs about the physical aspects of biblical topics, real life tie ins with what I have been told over the years. I find it fascinating to see evidence to substantiate these stories of great things, conquests, sacrifice and mystery.
I had a conversation the other day about all of this and Paulo put it in one of the most amazing ways I have ever heard. He placed a big box of wine on the table in between us and said “This is religion”. At first I thought he was taking the piss but then he went on to say that no matter which way it is looked at, nobody can ever have exactly the same perspective of it. Even when the box was turned so that I was looking at what he had been looking at and he vice versa, there was still no way that we were seeing what the other had seen. Such a simple but clear way of putting it.
We talked about the universe working on different frequencies and that we are just antennae picking up signals, we talked about M-Theory and Multiverses, I played devils advocate and brought up aliens… A really enjoyable and deep conversation, the type of conversation that I miss having now that I work so much and don’t really get out.
So, the rat race is on, I don’t think any of us really know what is going on, we all struggle day to day to get by, some of us believe what we are told, some of us think outside the box, some of us give up and kill ourselves, most of us strive for something, some of us couldn’t care less.
For me, I have a family to look after now, my life got difficult but having a family made it a lot more simple, I have focus, I have written before about maintaining focus which is another topic but it does cut out the crap in your life and allows you to just get on with it.
Unfortunately I consider myself to think outside the box, so although I think I know what is going on, I know I am probably wrong and that there is so much more out there to discover…
I’ll keep you informed should I find any answers but until then, if you think you know what is going on then please do share…
It gives me great pleasure to announce that on the 25th of April 2008, I married Caroline Simpson, the girl of my dreams. We are now Mr and Mrs White!
Kudos to Roan for the cool pic, you can see a few more pictures over at his flickr page . I’m planning to set up a dedicated site for stuff to do with the wedding so watch this space.
Here’s to my beautiful wife and our future together!
As the clock counts down to The Highland Fling 2008 - The browser and beyond, things are heating up at my end. Bags have arrived, some nice books have been delivered curtosy of Friends of Ed and Sitepoint and everything else is in the pipeline.
I’m getting really excited, last year was a blast and the topic this year is going to be an excellent discussion point. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone on the day and getting to meet some new folks and catching up with others I haven’t seen for a while.
As some of you might notice, this place has had a bit of a rennovation recently, I had a little bit of a hosting accident, I was sorry to hear that the company that had been so kind as to host my site for over a year went bottom up. The end result was that I had an SQL dump and no imagery so had to think on my feet and come up with something new… and quick!
18hrs later and I have new site and design up and running but I know it is still a little rough around the edges so please bare with me as I work out the kinks. I certainly welcome any feedback on the new design.
So what lies next? Buckle up and go for a rollercoaster ride again…
During some time out this weekend, I had the opportunity to watch an awesome film on my newly acquired Sky HD box via the Sky Anytime feature, that film was Seven Swords.
It’s certainly a while since I last got to sit down and enjoy some Martial Arts on screen and this was no disappointment, what I would consider to be an epic in it’s own right with a tale of love, betrayal, heroism and magic swords. What more could you want from a film?
The thing that caught my eye with this film was the beginning (sort of what happens to me with books, I either switch on to it immediately or not at all), a bunch of downright evil looking barbarian types (think Mad Max) start slaughtering the innocent with a multitude of insane weaponry. Umbrella’s that remove heads, wierd farming devices that remove limbs and all out madness ensues which leaves a poor village decimated, and that was only the beginning!
Now I know what you are thinking? A bit different from your last post huh? Well yeah but it is time we got down a dirty and I do love a good Martial Arts flick! You can’t have insane weaponry without some poor soul catching the sharp end and you know the good guys always win right? Good, so lets move on…
The general gist of the movie is that some emperor dude has decided to kill everyone that practises Martial Arts as he sees them as a threat so he has hired crazy weapon wielding nasties to go out and kill them all. The downside for the nasties is that little did they know there were awesome warriors hidden in a mountain that would come and kick their behinds with cool swords, shame on them for not anticipating it!
I could rabbit on for a while about the cool cinematic’s etc but really what I want to do is throw you straight into the action so you can experience some of the uberness and then go watch it for yourself. I know there have been some folk slating the film but quite frankly they are wrong, this is a great film that I would recommend to anyone.
The time has come again for another day of some learning and entertainment at The Highland Fling 2008 - Web Standards in Scotland. After such a fantastic day last year it was always going to be hard to not follow through with another event, the hard part for me was coming up with a suitable topic but my trip to dConstruct last year was all that it took for some inspiration from Tom Coates’s session.
Tom blew me away talking about things like recombination of information in his talk “Designing for a Web of Data”. I think a good way of highlighting his track of conversation is to paraphrase his session blurb from dConstruct.
But what happens when you’re pushing into web apps or social media? What happens when an absence of heirarchy makes left-hand navigation redundant? What do you do when design practice blurs into URLs and data structures, and where your service breaks the frame of the browser and starts appearing in hardware, in desktop applications or on other people’s sites?
Very potent words and an even more potent presentation, he left my mind in a spin and I knew right away on what and why I wanted to do The Highland Fling 2008. I could have walked away saying to myself what an awesome show but I really wanted to explore the topic and find out more about it, to spread the word about stuff that really inspired me and made me think, to pay homage to our future online (or not in some cases) and to allow others to think outside the box a little.
So, there lies the why of the conference, perhaps I should tell you more about the day. The theme for the conference is “The browser and beyond”, I did consider going purely with “Outside the browser” but I figure that we are gonna still be building in our beloved browsers for a while yet. Last year Drew McLellan talked at the conference about preparing the content on your website so that it can act as it’s own API, providing meta data that can be used by people for other services, in a lot of respects The Highland Fling 2008 is an extension of that topic.
It worried me initially about stepping away from talking about XHTML and CSS but I know for a fact this is going to be a very interesting day, I have also mixed up the format a little to encourage more open discussion about what the future may hold.
The details
In the world or modern web development we can no longer consider the browser as the end point of our product which is our content. More and more devices and applications are being released that can access our information and more importantly do not even require a browser to do so.
For The Highland Fling 2008 we’re bringing into focus how the landscape is changing. API’s, desktop apps, ambient devices, mobile and much more are helping us break out of the browser and potentially reaching an entire new audience as a result.
How do we embrace this, how do we take our existing skill set and transpose it into new mediums? How do we expand our skill set? What is our skill set going to be? Where is it all going?
The Highland Fling 2007 focused on the topic of progressive enhancement which is not only at the very essence of best practice web development but also at the heart of bleeding edge web development. This year I want to focus on where we are going and what the future holds for us all and the information we care so much about.
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