Eek! My last day of work for Real World Multimedia!

In theory this is the day we get the keys to our new home.

mmmmm… men’s chocolate!

These arrived via my kind friend George who returned from Sydney via Tokyo recently.

I’m not quite sure what qualifies them to be named “men’s chocolate”, but they are quite nice. My flatmate Peter is telling me that google say’s that these man chocs come in other flavours too, including giant.

Someone send me some!

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…

Tonight I’m going to be enjoying a Thai meal with some wonderful company. It’s a goodbye dinner for two people who are leaving the design department here at Real World, Derek Edwards and Clare Yates. It’s a sad occassion as Del and Clare are two of the loveliest people to work with. However I’m confident they will both go on to great things, so I’m excited for them too.

Oh, and as of today it’s less than 1 month till my final day here at Real World Multimedia!

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!

My friend George is on an epic journey to the other side of the world! I’m not being dramatic either as he’s on his way to Sydey, Australia. He’s currently in Osaka airport and has been posting some photos of his journey, you can check them out via his blog.

Hopefully George will get a chance to post more pics when he gets to Oz, that’s if he doesn’t give it all up to join a community of wild kangaroos and live as one with nature.

Well I recieved my first letter ever fro m The House of Commons yesterday. It was from my local MP Don Foster, who I’d written to about the latest insane proposal from the government for ID cards. It was very nice, and fro mwhat he’d written he had obviously read my letter so that me smile. I LOVE the headed paper and envelope, they have that yellow parchment colouring, very swish.

On a diferent note a big thanks go to my good friend George who turned me on to this Nouvelle Vague album called, Nouvelle Vague. It’s been popping up everywhere on TV ads, shows, and recently Glastonbury. So if you’ve not yet heard them, check it out, it’s the sound of the summer.

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?

So Jaron has moved quickly (considering), and he’s blocked my IP, or he’s having problems with the site I’m not sure which and don’t have the time today to look into it.

Here is the hilarious and absurd message I get….

“Your IP address has been blocked — FOR A REASON!

I regret to inform you that for one reason or another, you violated my terms and conditions for accessing my site and therefore your IP address has been blocked. Blocked IPs can be reset automatically (after 30 days) or manually by me. The latter option rarely ever happens, so you might want to sit pretty for a little while more.

Also, please note: E-mailing will not help your cause, and for every 10 times you visit this site while blocked, the counter will reset back to 30 days. Of course, that’s me just being nice. For every 20 or more times you visit, your IP netblock owner will be determined and a complaint e-mail automatically despatched to the abuse e-mail contact on file.

NB: Don’t piss me off. Trust me.

Thanks for visiting, though, and I hope your access is restored soon.“

Now I’m no psychology graduate, but there’s some worrying clues about Jaron’s mental state in that text I think. Trust me.