My lastest mucking about with Photoshop, this time I have been learning to paint using the pattern stamp tool using the impressionist setting. Good fun and although I am no expert yet, this is my first ever attempt at it, I’m sure there’s more to it but I thought I would share none the less.

I haven’t time for a big long post about it all but I am holding to a promise I made to Roan and post some of my doodles.

The Zombie

The Birdie

Let me know what what you think of them, I’d love to get your feedback, I think this is my new hobby as it really has just been fun from the second I picked up the pen.

Cheers

Well that was fun, Vikings meet Sci Fi with predictable yet fun results… screw the nay sayers, I say watch it!

I can’t wait

Not a normal strike though. No, Scotrail have decided on a brilliant new method of pissing folk off, it’s called the 90% method!

By telling customers that they will be running “most” of the time they cause more confusion as nobody actually knows when to get a train. If you are going to run a 90% service at least have the decency to let us know which 90% it is going to be.

I don’t care if you strike, fair play to you, if you feel you are getting a bum deal then I wholeheartedly support your endeavours to put things right. I’m in your corner but there are certainly some terms and conditions attached like don’t fuck me about in the morning, strike or don’t strike, partial strikes show a lack of balls and are a major inconvenience.

I’m on my train now but I have been in a cold waiting room for over an hour, I’m late for work and pissed off. To top it off I am going to have the same problems coming home so I’d just like to say thanks Scotrail, you’ve done it again…

Next time please send me an email to warn me and tell me which trains to get to cause least disruption. Failing that, just don’t bother doing a partial strike and go the whole hog and do a proper strike, at least then I can plan to work from home.

Anyways, rant over and this officially my first post using the WordPress application for the iPhone.

Take care folks and happy travelling!

Here’s what it said about me…

Slow-moving – Web Bears like you browse the internet at a leisurely pace – just like real world bears who like to take their time over things.

Solitary – Like real bears, Web Bears tend to be solitary animals. Your results show that when you are looking for information, you are less likely to use social networks or other sites whose content is created by its users, preferring instead to go it alone.

Adaptable – Web Bears are highly adaptable multitaskers, able to do several things at the same time. Real-bears are also very flexible, particularly in their diet, and will eat fish, insects, salmon and even scavenge in human refuse for new sources of food.

I’m interested to know how you get on so please leave a comment if you find the time.

Hat tip to @briansuda for this one.

More posts coming shortly folks, I am currently in heavy development!

Now for those of you that know what ModX is, your are about to slam me because ModX can be used as a framework, I do realise this but I have never quite got my head around using it in that way, maybe it doesn’t lend itself to that otherwise I wouldn’t have picked up another tool.

Over the years I have worked with a variety of web programming languages however I have always had a desire to go deeper into PHP but because I have been using publishing tools, they have made it easy to shy away from. WordPress is just bloody good at what it does, once you have used it for blogging I fail to see a need for any other tool. It does however have it’s limitations when it comes to a far more complex site.

ModX is a great CMS, through the use of what they call template variables it has the ability to rapidly customise the data entry and display. Really powerful stuff but because I was working inside their CMS area I always felt a little limited even though it is easy to use and customise a site, I have used it for a few sites now and will most likely use it again. My biggest frustration with it and the primary reason for not rolling it out on this site was that there was no automatic hook or quick hack to get it to play nice with my WordPress stuff. I could go ahead and move my blog into a sub folder but I am not convinced I want to do that yet, from what I have been reading, Code Igniter plays very well with WordPress and this is a huge plus.

So why am I enjoying CodeIgniter? Good question! Perhaps it is the tinkerer in me wanting to take full control of my code base, the more I read about CI (as they call it), the more I like it. I have dabbled with many content management systems over the years and also tried getting into the various flavours of the month such as Django, Ruby on Rails and CakePHP but the learning curve has always got in the way of productivity.

CI seems to be straight forward, yes it does have a learning curve but it is isn’t intimidating me, I have found myself reading a bucket load about it, and what’s more I am finding it fun and am already thinking of how and where I can use it.

Do you have experience of using CodeIgniter or other frameworks? How did you find them? Why do you use them? Where do you use them? When do you pick one tool over another? I will write more on these questions at a later date but for now I am interested in what you have to say…

Quite an interesting process and it made me start to think about what I want to be doing with the site and how I might start to organise it. Some of you will notice this re-design has never ever been completed for a number of reasons, I make no excuses about it but I will do something about it.

I have dabbled in many things over the years from coaxing you all to play asteroids and pacman, stuck my toe into podcasting, made you all reel with bad jokes, tried to inspire others, written about my life and family, written about my goals, acheivements and passions and generally really enjoyed running the site. I’m curious as to what parts of my blog makes good readers like yourself come back? What features did you like, what would you like to see come back?

It’s a funny old game blogging, I think I lost my way a little when other priorities entered my life, predominantly work and families. Not that this is a bad thing but it blurred the lines a little bit, when I first started this blog I did it for fun and for my passion of the web, I ask myself now what will this site do? who is this site for. Soul searching questions indeed!

Oh dear, I can feel a long rant coming on about web sites serving a purpose, solving a problem etc etc but I am going to quel that monster for the time being. This is just me checking in, seeing where things take me, re-drawing the lines to see what picture forms. It’s just as well I design sites on an Etcha Sketch.

So folks, I leave you now to go and solve some stupid IE 6 issues at work, I’ll be back with more on that in a bit but until then hold tight and I’ll catch you all soon.

Feels good to be back already

The original

My modified version

I really enjoyed visiting this design earlier tonight which is why I thought I would share with you lot.

Cheers!