So winter is finally here, as my good friend and collaborator Patrick Wray would say “Mother nature’s icy claw” has begun it’s chilling embrace. I know I’m walking straight into a cultural stereotype by talking about the weather, but like all good Englishmen I find it almost endlessly fascinating. Is it just me or do there seem to be too many leaves still on the trees? I’m not complaining, it just strikes me as a little odd. I always seem to be surprised by the onset of winter, and I have a disease that I just can’t seem to shake off. It’s nothing biological, more a behavioural malady. Whenever it begins to get cold all the clothes I buy are only suitable for the summer. Then when the temperature starts to rise again I begin to fetishize coats and scarves. I can’t tell if I’m just very slow to react, or incredibly well prepared, like those people who buy all their Christmas presents in the January sales. Either way, I’m cold.

I finally feel settled in my not-so-new home, in fact I really like Brixton. It’s a real pleasure to walk through the market and move between the walls of sound emanating from the different stalls. It’s taken a while, but I’m a bit of a homebody you see. If I was of a more mystical persuasion I’d ascribe this tendency to my star-sign being Cancer. We Cancarians are supposed to be stay-in types, and also have a tendency to horde. It’s funny the things we believe, especially when like me you don’t subscribe to any religion. I often find myself inventing little superstitions of my own, while simultaneously flouting the rules of more established ones. One such ‘rule’ is my belief that if I say out-loud “I haven’t been ill for a while”, I will become ill within the week. Do you think it counts if I write it down? Hope not. Anyway here’s an image to prove how happy our little family is in our new home, look at those smiles! By the way, I’m the one in the v-neck whose head looks far too big for his body.

I’m beginning to look forward to Christmas at last. If I’m honest I’d been kinda dreading it. I like the festive season, but I usually make the trip home to see my family for the day itself, and although it’s lovely to spend time with them, it can be a bit boring. I come from a very small village in Oxfordshire you see, and as I don’t drive it makes getting about a bit tricky. All of my friends who will likely be in the area live in other villages or towns nearby, and of course no buses run on Christmas Day, even Christmas Eve and Boxing Day are difficult. So I end up being rather stuck and just eating too much. This mild depression was lifted however when I saw some Christmas lights through the window of a flat near where I live. They were cheap and tacky, but they reminded me how great Christmas can be, and I imagined all the fun that family will have. I hope they have kids in that flat, and I hope it snows for them.

A note on the development of this site. I’m at last getting around to adding content to all those pretty menu options on the left. Currently I’m working on filling in the portfolio section, and the gallery is working ok on non-msie browsers. I’m quite pleased with the gallery actually. It’s totally over-the-top, and a massive waste of bandwidth, but it’s fun. There’s still a fair bit to do, but I’m getting there!

Well I should sign off, it’s quite late and I should be in bed. I’ve been waiting for the trailer for “Brokeback Mountain” to download but it aint happening. Oh well, I’ll have to be content with the promo images for now.

Well fingers crossed, we think we may have found a house in London. It’s on the north side of Brixton and is a lovely 4 bed house. Hopefully we’ll know by the end of Monday night whether it’s all going to go through. I’m so excited! If we do get it then it will become ours on the 26th August. Here are some rubbish photos from the agents website.

UPDATE!: Looks like the house is ours. Hooray!

So it’s that time of year again, it’s WOMAD Rivermead 2005! I’m off tommorrow for what will be my last time attending as an employee of the Real World, WOMAD & Peter Gabriel trinity. Highlights will hopefully include a performance by Pina, one of my favourite artists on our labels. It will also be the first time that I’ve gone to WOMAD and not camped there. This time I’m going to be staying in a hotel! Hooray!

The dowside is that the weather forecast is not fantastic, my weather widget tells the story…

Well I’ve finally gone and done it. This morning I had a quick meeting with my boss York to tell him that I’m handing in my notice with my final day of employment being August 26th. I was absolutely terrified. I’ve been employed here at Real World as a Multimedia Designer for 6 years. It’s been a great time for me and I’ve learned more than I could of imagined. I’ve worked on online stores, digital music download services, fan forums, festival sites, album microsites, DVDs, E-CDs, video and animation, etc, etc.

I’ll come back to this post and add more soon as I can’t do this news justice right now. The long and the short of it is that I’ll be moving to london in the last week of August to begin a new life as a freelancer. Wish me luck!

Well if you’re reading this then you’ve arrived at my new and improved blog, or at least the start of it. This will be version 4 of my blog, and this time around it’s powered by WordPress. The previous blog used the venerable (but oft spammed) MoveableType, version 2 employed Geeklog, and version 1 wasn’t dynamic or managed at all if you can imagine something so crazy.

This blog as you can probably see will be part of a larger site featuring my portfolio, more free stuff, and fingers’ crossed a much more frequently updated blog.

So you may be wondering what that exceptionally pretty and colourful circle is doing down on the left hand side of the page, well that there badge is representing my pindex. What’s a pindex you say? In short it’s my personal political index, and, well why not click that juicy little badge and find out more. You can even set up your own, for free! Now you can’t say fairer than that can you.

Oh, and I suppose I should mention that I did all the visual design for pindices, including the candy drop buttons. I’m particularly keen on the info balloon that pops up when you hover over a badge on the main site. It took a fair amount of work to get it working on all the platforms required, but I learned some fun new code, and got to push pixels! It was also great to work with my old friend George Grinsted who did all the back end php and mysql trickery. His code was a joy to work with and made my job 10 times easier. Thanks G!

Visit the main pindices site

And just in case you didn’t see it, here it is again in all it’s glory. Wonder what I’ll be this week?

Oh dear, it’s been a while hasn’t it? I’ve been neglecting this little online diary of mine over the last few weeks so today I’ve decided to bite the bullet, get back on the horse, use several other cliches that I can’t quite draw to mind and get writing again. Not much has been happening of late, I’m reaching the end of an ongoing project at work, one which I’ll be very glad to finally get out the door. I can’t really show it to you yet, but as soon as it’s public I’ll post a link.

Some exciting news, I’m off to WWDC in San Francisco at the end of June. Crazily the cost of the flight drops to under half in I fly out two days early and spend the weekend there, so it’s cheaper to just get two more nights at the hotel. If I stay in the hotel I want to I’ll have decent internet access so I’ll be uploading photos and reports of my first trip to the USA. I’m not quite sure what I’ll do with myself, all alone in San Francisco for a whole week, so if anyone has any suggestions of things to do then they’d be gratefully received.

Apologies if you were looking for something that is now missing, I’m experimenting with a different blog engine, hopefully a more flexible one. The old site was Geeklog based, and a bit messy, hopefully this will be better!