The Daily Blog

Template Goodness

3 Sep 06 13:32:00 +0000

I’ve started a little experiment to see if there is a demand for cheap website templates, the first of which is a little something I call “Burnt Orange”. It’s selling for £5 GBP which makes a nice change from my previous acts of kindness which have been more successful then I could ever imagine. Those templates are now relics of my previous style of designing, which seem so out-dated to me - it’s amazing how much I would change with those designs 1-2 year on from releasing them, although I suppose thats true with any designer and their past work.

On a personal note, it has been quite an experience developing a product to sell. I have written legal licenses, documentation, blog posts (!) and worked out how to plug the site into the PayPal to automate the delivery of the template once purchased - all of which took longer to make than the actual template!

You can learn more about the template on the product page, view a preview of it, and of course buy your self a copy for just a fiver.

The Great Switch

9 Jul 06 01:01:00 +0000

After months of drooling I finally buckled under the immense pressure coming from my windows frustrated brain. After weighing up which of the lovely Apple Mac family to get I settled on the 17” iMac, and I got to say - I’m in love. It took me about 3 days to find out what is what, but, short of Microsoft releasing good looking hardware and software in an impressive feat of engineering, I think I can now officially call myself a Mac guy. Make the switch; you (probably) won’t regret it.

Reboot notes

1 May 06 11:30:00 +0000

I have participated in every CSS Reboot since it was first started in May 2005. The old design of ‘my company’ website has been online since September 2005 and although I didn’t consider it a full redesign, because it only consisted of one page, it proved reasonably popular and was better than a splash page.

I am always trying out new layouts and experimenting with graphical ideas, but for some reason designing a website for Orange tape Studios was always difficult. The May 1st reboot gave me a chance to force myself to produce something, and the deadline actually helped me focus and get on with it.

The site as a whole has grow from a one page site, to a traditional multiple page site - this wasn’t to over complicate things, but rather a way of giving each major piece of information (who we are, what we do, stuff we have done, communicate with us) its own page. Similarly, the portfolio has moved from 3 simple links, to individual pages for each project so that a brief description and screenshots can be included.

By far the biggest change is to the back end of Orange tape Studios website, and, if you don’t speak geek that means how we (being me and my business partner, Andy) manage the content displayed on the front end, which is what your browser sees. Since 2004 when I got into blogging I used an amazing piece of software called Textpattern, mainly because it was free. It served me just fine for my weblog UK Thoughts for over a year. Skip to January of this year and I discovered Symphony, an XSLT based publishing system and haven’t looked back since - it powers this weblog and now Orange tape Studios.

Hopefully the reboot will be a success for all involved and I will post some of my personal favorites’ once I have had a chance to look around.

Sennheiser PX 200 headphones

20 Apr 06 18:13:00 +0000

After a frustrating search for a decent pair of headphones to replace my worn out pair of Apple headphones which came with my 4G Apple iPod I have finally found a decent replacement.

I actually bought the AKG equivalent of the PX 200’s which also have a neat folding design and a sturdy plastic case, however I cancelled the order with Amazon as they gave me a 3+ week estimate for the delivery and I just couldn’t wait that long to listen to my iPod without two functioning ear buds. Plus the PX 200’s come with a 2 year warranty.

Unlike with Apple’s headphones which can’t handle bass after only 8 hours use and buzz annoyingly throughout Kanye West track’s. The PX 200’s sound is very clear and after wearing them in for around 5 hours the bass becomes more defined and it easily handle bass heavy tracks. Even though they do not claim to have “NoiseGard active noise compensation” like the PXC 250’s they do a surprisingly good job of blocking out annoying people and sounds - but that could just be because the are a closed design headphone.

The closed design creates a good seal around my ears, while at the same time it’s not like having your head in a vice. There is also a good level of padding which make these the most comfortable pair of headphones I have ever used and do not become painful after 10 minuets like in-ear counterparts. They also are very light at 65g and as I said before fold up and fit into a very sturdy PVC case. It is also worth mentioning that the joints for when they fold up are metal and very well engineered so I cannot see them breaking within the next 5 years of use as least.

I had to go with the white option so that they matched my iPod, but they are available in black and silver which is a nice touch so they will match with other mp3 players on the market. Overall worth the £30 spent on them.

Buy from Amazon | Official website

Explanation

10 Mar 06 17:04:00 +0000

If took a while, but The Daily Blog finally starting to work again after some time offline while I redesigned (as you should be able to see), as well as updating the admin side of things to Symphony 1.1.03. I was having some problems with Symphony as some bugs were left in the release and I did some stupid things like corrupt my SQL database...lots of geekery, but it’s working now.

I have a lot on my plate at the moment so posts will be more than a day or so apart - and certainly not daily. Just wanted to let you know.

Final Destination 3

24 Feb 06 21:50:00 +0000

I saw Final Destination 3 last week and I think it wasn't bad. Just as we had our tickets checked one of the staff says to the other "Don't let anymore in screen 8, it's jam packed" - poor them I remember thinking as I walk into what I later find out was screen 8…and what a surprise, the only seats left are at the front.

I can't possibly imagine who thinks you can possible sit through a 2h film with your head titled as far back as it can go; surely they could take a row out or something. It's the same thing as airlines which give you absolutely no leg room if you get a cheap ticket.

As with the previous 2 films the idea is that the entity ‘death’ has a plan for everyone and that there is someone who has a premonition that they and a group of friends is going to die (Wendy played Mary Elizabeth Winstead), therefore giving them the chance to escape their fate - only to be picked off by the Grim Reaper at a later date. Final Destination 3 lures you into a false sense of security so you think you know what is coming next when out of no where a carefully choreographed chain reaction of events leads to someone gets a nail gun in the head...or any other horrific way of dieing you care to think of.

Even though I left with blood-shot eyes and neck pain I quite enjoyed it and I think it fits in with the other two films in the series.

Just the music please

15 Feb 06 06:30:00 +0000

I have been hearing rumours that Apple may be developing an iPod which will be a nice big screen that you can interact with, of course that means another step away from video and towards the ultimate portable movie watching device - already it sounds pretty complex. It seams to me that the iPod is becoming less and less about the music and more about the battery draining features.

I still can't make my mind up about whether or not I like Apple, because since they ripped Konfabulator and more recently shipped the Intel iMacs 2 months after the newest iMac G5's came out in November, I have lost a lot of respect for them. I do think they have a really strong brand and I love Steve Jobs's presentations.

My current 4th generation iPod is just over 1 year old and I don't use any of the features on it such as calendar, contacts and games - judging my friends new iPods the video feature looks pretty pathetic (to me anyway) and it isn't helped by the battery life which seems so much shorter than the older iPods.

If my iPod broke tomorrow I wouldn't buy a new one, I would go for Sony's NW-A3000. Far cooler in my opinion.

Flickr, Symphony and a photoblog

8 Feb 06 22:00:00 +0000

At the newly launched Overture there is an article called "Integrating Flickr", this is something I have been wanting to do but lacked the XSL knowledge to do it. Now with the basic template in place I thought I could experiment to try and do something different with the code.

This is what I came up with - all it basically does is pull all the data from any Flickr RSS feed you give it, manipulate and change some things, then outputs the results where JavaScript takes care of the switching between images. At the moment it is just displaying the latest photos uploaded to Flickr by everyone.

Any feedback you may have would be nice.

UPDATE: Download the source files. If you have any questions please ask.

I don't get paid to think

2 Feb 06 19:06:00 +0000

More and more I find that people have the attitude of "It's not my problem" when it comes to their job. Usually it is not the big brand-orientated company employees as much as you would have thought, because the company knows that the slightest slip-up can bring tons of bad press and damage their image - so the staff undergo lots of training to make sure they are nice to customers.

I think the ever-increasing reliance on technology doesn't help the problem. Take the other day for example, I rang up My Favourite Magazines (note the ridiculously long web address) to enquire about a lost edition of T3 Magazine- the answer was "Sorry, the database is down until February sometime". Not totally their fault, but very annoying that absolutely nothing could be done without the database.

Even more annoying are foreign call centres, which take jobs away from people, and put money into the economy of whatever country the call centre is based. It sends the message to me that the company doesn’t really care that much about customer service, but would rather cut costs.

Apple and Google are just a few new high tech companies which are changing this old fashioned way of doing things. Work hours are much more flexible, the environments are fun and colourful - all this leads to happier, and therefore more motivated employees. Let's hope other companies see the successes of this new attitude to working and rethink their "we have to do it, so let's do it as cheaply as possible" attitude to customer care.

The 'new' NHS vision

30 Jan 06 23:28:00 +0000

The National Health Service or, to those outside of the UK, is the free healthcare system offered to every citizen of the United Kingdom. For a long time it has needed more and more extra money to bail it out of difficult situations (lack of doctors, MRSA etc), to no obvious positive result in my opinion.

The most recent development the Labour government have come up with is to start up community hospitals to bring patients treatment closer to their lives, so it becomes much more convenient for them. Having once worked for a short period in the estates department of an NHS hospital myself (as an intern) I found that the general feeling of the workers and most senior management is that their are way too many unrealistic and impossible targets which needed to be achieved, otherwise funding would be cut in an attempt to make people work harder to get the funding back (yeah, I don't see the logic either). Some very high up managers I talked to believe that the care of the patients was being adversely affected by the constant pressure put under staff to work harder.

These latest changes are, as in the case of most of the governments schemes are done with the best intentions and we will have to wait and see how this works out 'in the end' - I say that because there always is a debate going on about either transport, education or healthcare because of the political gain that sorting it out will no doubt bring.