http://www.acidsmile.co.uk/blog/ en acidsmile@acidsmile.co.uk Copyright 2010 2010-08-21T16:41:11+00:00 http://www.acidsmile.co.uk/blog/entry/another_holiday_gone_another_year_starts/ http://www.acidsmile.co.uk/blog/entry/another_holiday_gone_another_year_starts/#When:16:41:11Z It’s a couple of days since my return to the UK after spending 2.5 weeks in Greece with my family and friends. Today I managed to sort out through the few hundreds of photographs I shot on my phone while I was there and as a result I am feeling very homesick. This feeling only exacerbates the weird mood I’ve been since I’ve come back. While every other return to the UK has been marked by homesickness, this time even my own home doesn’t feel like home. I feel like a stranger in my own flat. My bed feels strange, the smells in the house feel odd. Either a very bad case of S.A.D. or maybe a sign that my time in the UK is coming to an end. Time will tell. In the meantime here are a few photos of the places I hang out while home as well as a couple I shot on the train on my return for contrast. Enjoy! View pictures on flickr 2010 - Greece - HTC Desire - picture this 2010-08-21T16:41:11+00:00 http://www.acidsmile.co.uk/blog/entry/its_been_pretty_darn_long/ http://www.acidsmile.co.uk/blog/entry/its_been_pretty_darn_long/#When:16:21:48Z It’s been a while since the last time I managed to find the time and more importantly of all the mood to write in this blog. Pretty darn long really. Life has been full of surprises, some good, others rather awful. However it’s a Sunday afternoon, I’m listening to my favorite essential mix (Blame Feb/10) LOUD, I’m having the 5th frappe of the day and feel like I’m melting, due to the unexpected heatwave that has hit Britain. I cannot focus on work at this precise moment in time and I thought I’d seize the moment and share some loose thoughts with you all. I love, love, love a summery England! Nearly as much as Greece. 2010 - loose thoughts 2010-05-23T16:21:48+00:00 http://www.acidsmile.co.uk/blog/entry/life_lemons_and_lemonade/ http://www.acidsmile.co.uk/blog/entry/life_lemons_and_lemonade/#When:20:56:09Z When life serves you lemons make lemonade goes the saying and these days life does taste like home made lemonade. Some times overly sour, sometimes overly sweet. On occasion sour but with the grains of sugar crunchy between your teeth. Some things are going extremely well, others very badly and in some cases I have no clue what is going on. Days merge into nights, weeks change and suddenly it’s the end of February and I’m wondering where two months of my life have gone and what have I done with them. 2010 - #p52 - loose thoughts - ramblings 2010-02-24T20:56:09+00:00 http://www.acidsmile.co.uk/blog/entry/chicken_alexpiration_date/ http://www.acidsmile.co.uk/blog/entry/chicken_alexpiration_date/#When:21:08:04Z Coming home tonight the last thing I wanted to do was cook and it was something I was dreading all the way home. I had the sort of day where a server goes down at 17.10, twenty minutes before the end of the day. Anyway I could not avoid the task as I had accidentally defrosted chicken breasts for enchiladas that never happened and had to be used else I would have to throw it out. So I cooked. Along with the chicken I also had peppers, chorizo, tomatoes and cheese that would expire, also mostly part of the aforementioned fajitas. The only other requirement was that it had to be something that required no attention and cooked fast. 2010 - #p52 - food 2010-02-17T21:08:04+00:00 http://www.acidsmile.co.uk/blog/entry/working_from_home_vs_working_at_the_office/ http://www.acidsmile.co.uk/blog/entry/working_from_home_vs_working_at_the_office/#When:18:42:08Z Today I took the opportunity to work from home, something that I don’t do very often, but absolutely had to be done in order to make some significant progress in what I am currently working on. Like every other time I do this, I woke up early, had my morning coffee ritual and then started working. Since then I managed to zone out and focus at the huge task list at hand without significant interruptions. I finished at 5.30 this afternoon, having probably done about twice the amount of work I get to over any other day. 2010 - #p52 - loose thoughts - work 2010-02-12T18:42:08+00:00 http://www.acidsmile.co.uk/blog/entry/thoughts_on_paid_for_content/ http://www.acidsmile.co.uk/blog/entry/thoughts_on_paid_for_content/#When:06:25:14Z Over the last few weeks I have been thinking a lot about paying for content. When in November Murdoch announced that he was planning to block access to his publications via google I laughed out loud a little. His argument at the time was “The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it – steal our stories, we say they steal our stories – they just take them. That’s Google, that’s Microsoft, that’s Ask.com, a whole lot of people … they shouldn’t have had it free all the time, and I think we’ve been asleep.” 2010 - #p52 - random thoughts 2010-01-27T06:25:14+00:00 http://www.acidsmile.co.uk/blog/entry/your_personal_site_a_mirror_to_your_soul/ http://www.acidsmile.co.uk/blog/entry/your_personal_site_a_mirror_to_your_soul/#When:11:53:22Z “A person’s website or blog is a window to their soul” as the web 2.0 proverb says. For people like me who build sites for a living it might occasionally become hard to get in touch with our soul, especially when we see web building1 as something to be sold for money. /shudder An old Greek proverb says “Show me your web home and I will tell you who you are”. Well it might actually say “your friend”, but if you are in our field shouldn’t your personal web space be your friend? I for one think so. Then why so many of us don’t treat our sites that way? 2010 - #p52 - loose thoughts 2010-01-19T11:53:22+00:00 http://www.acidsmile.co.uk/blog/entry/changes_on_the_horizon/ http://www.acidsmile.co.uk/blog/entry/changes_on_the_horizon/#When:12:37:02Z For the last few years this site has been hosted on streamline.net’s unlimited package which was up to recently a very pleasant experience. Great support, nearly no downtime etc. etc. I have been so happy in fact that I have referred them to many friends and clients. In the past year tough I have noticed that although the company seems to be up-scaling, their service didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, support is still great and overall the service is not bad. That’s only when the site is under normal circumstances though. A couple of delicious link-backs or one twitter referral and then site performance goes downhill. Server time-outs, 500 errors and more goodies out of the error bag. 2010 - site changelog - loose thoughts 2010-01-18T12:37:02+00:00 http://www.acidsmile.co.uk/blog/entry/why_i_3_my_job/ http://www.acidsmile.co.uk/blog/entry/why_i_3_my_job/#When:12:31:59Z In the about section of this site I say: “I am a web designer by trade and self confessed geek by personality. I spend most of my waking hours in front of a computer, whether it is my mac at work or my mac at home. I like coding and designing and trying to organise the display of information, not only in a way that looks good, but in a way it makes sense. This might be a side effect of the “information engineering” part of my university course back when I was young and impressionable. I really enjoy taking a site map and a photoshop visual and breathing life into it. I love the challenges and overcoming obstacles, to reach the end of the line to a finished website or application that “works!” Thus quite often I can be seen at work doing my little victory dance in my chair, when a little bit of code is working like expected, swearing if something isn’t, or lovingly stroking my monitor cooing “my baby” at a finished project. [Thank god I work with fellow understanding geeks and they haven’t committed me yet, although they all consider me crazy]” 2010 - #p52 - loose thoughts 2010-01-15T12:31:59+00:00 http://www.acidsmile.co.uk/blog/entry/fluid_web_typography_a_guide/ http://www.acidsmile.co.uk/blog/entry/fluid_web_typography_a_guide/#When:11:52:27Z That’s the name of the book I found waiting for me at my desk, on my return to the office yesterday morning. The timing of it was perfect since having gotten up and commuted in the snow, after 26 days away from the office, I was seriously starting to get the post-holiday blues. This belated present by Mr Jason Cranford Teague, or @jasonspeaking for the twitteristas of you out there, more then cheered me up. 2010 - loose thoughts 2010-01-07T11:52:27+00:00