go ahead, snoop around…

We have a hallway! How cool!

Moving house puts a strain on everything. About a month ago it started putting a strain on the finances, and about 2 weeks ago it started putting a strain on our relationship. It’s difficult because we’re both so lazy when it comes to house stuff, we literally finished packing about an hour ago, and there’s still stuff that’s not boxed.

I hate when my girlfriend and I “war” - we don’t tend to properly row, we just have length bouts of passive-aggressive violence where you’ll assume that everything’s ok, then one starts being patronising or flippant and the other makes it worse by being nonchalant or sarcastic (not necessarily respectively)! It looks now like it’s about to blow over, which is just as well as this weekend’s going to be hectic enough as it is. Not that anyone’s actually reading this, but I don’t know how long it’s going to take to get our internet all transferred over, so daily photos will be taken but not posted straight away. I can always use work’s, or go sit outside the Apple Store like all the cool kids do, though!

iPhone 3G is awesome, too - everyone should get one. I love using the Google Maps thing to tell me where I am, even though I already know that I’m sat on my sofa.

This is Richard. He’d better hope he’s able to get an iPhone 3G in the morning. He’s been outside the O2 Store on Above Bar Street in Southampton since 8:30am today and, for the life of me, I don’t know why. I guess it’s a pretty good anecdote.

The store opens at 8:02am tomorrow, and CPW opens at 7. I’ll probably be down there 6:30ish and just get one from wherever I can. An ex-Apple Store worker wandered past whilst I was chatting to Richard, and showed me the new firmware, Monkey Ball in the flesh and a cool-looking Carling mini-game. ‘Citin’!

Update: Spoke to Richard this morning whilst he was queuing outside the O2 store (I foolishly went to CPW, but we won’t go there today!) so I thought I’d update this post so he can see it *waves at Richard!*

Today, I want to talk about work. I like my job. I love to learn new things and be met with new challenges, and in my job that’s my daily bread. I like to challenge myself, too. Every project I undertake, I do better than the last one. That’s not to the discredit of the last one, because it was as good as I was capable of at the time. I challenge myself to get the job done with less code, smaller files, less-to-no repetition. I hate to compromise, even though the web frequently forces me to do so. I even hate to compromise when the compromise is better than what I was initially aiming for, because I had to forego something that was unachievable. I don’t like to admit that I had a bad idea (even though I can, and I consider it very important to be able to).

I think I’m good at what I do. I take a lot of pride in my work, and it shows in the enthusiasm with which I present myself and my work.

However, with each project I finish, I become more aware of and frustrated by the limitations that are inflicted upon web-workers on a day-to-day basis by certain aspects of the web. The problem is split about 70/30 in my eyes between users who use and insist on using antiquated software and the software itself. Looking at it from this angle, it would be easy to say that users are 100% of the problem, but I don’t think it’s right to let certain vendors get off scot-free, being substantially arrogant to release ridiculously sub-standard software.

The crux of this small point (I could go on but, as I said, all my midnight oil is gone) is that there are a lot of developers who have a real passion for user experience, right down to the stuff that you don’t even think about, and we do it as a hobby even when we’re not getting paid!

This is why I’m not obnoxiously telling you that you’re an idiot for using a Microsoft web browser - as a user, the majority of the reasons I want you to switch aren’t important to you, I’m simply asking that you try one of the amazing alternatives that are free, faster, easier to use (everything new involves a learning curve) and created by people who actually care about your experience and aren’t just putting a browser out because being seen as having a large market share is important for their image as a software giant. A couple of weeks ago, 8 million people downloaded Firefox 3 in one day, and I’d really appreciate it if you did the same, it would definitely make my life a load easier to be able to drop support for barely-capable browsers.

If you try and don’t like Firefox, definitely take a look at Opera, another amazing browser.

You’ll thank me for this later.

Black bunnies are really difficult to shoot, especially this shiny one! Because of the varying directions her hair grows in, odd shadows fall on her face, and parts of her go really shiny when there’s any lighting involved. That being said, she’s absolutely hilarious and can’t get enough of parsley so I thought I’d take some photos of her.

I also had a go at an HDR of a church I took a photo of on Saturday on the way to the pub, I think it works.

Awful Monday today. Just awful. Disturbing phone calls at midnight, back to work after a long weekend, wild variations of configuration on development and test servers, javascript misbehaving, Postfix on OSX not picking up \r\n in headers; preferring \n and missing the early pre-order of the iPhone 3G, Charlotte’s car started driving funny just before I landed on our drive. Get out of the car and I’m greeted by this lovely flat tyre. I wasn’t even going to begin to deal with this in the rain, so it will be ignored until tomorrow night.

I’ve just reminded myself that my car doesn’t have any petrol in. Tomorrow could be fun too.

I love Sambuca, and I love Jelly Beans. Naturally, Jelly-bean Sambuca should be excellent. The ingredients for this concoction were part of my birthday present from Charlotte’s parents. Now there’s just the 5 days of painstaking waiting and the evening of getting totally trolleyed. Excellent!

The eagle-eyed amongst you will have spotted the SoCo bottle. This is because the stupid Sambuca bottle has a thing on it that doesn’t let you put jelly beans in. Luckily, we had an empty SoCo bottle to come to the rescue! Ahem!

The day after my birthday, it’s one of my best mates’ birthday. He always does good parties so I go to them and pretend like it’s a party for me, too. It’s worked quite well for a fair few years (for me, at least!). He’d just bought a load of new lenses he was dying to show me, so I was wandering round with a Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6 on my camera all day and I love it! This is a select few of us in the back of Nick’s dad’s van. We won’t go into the whys and wherefores, that’s just where we were! Awesome lens, I’m probably going to post the rest of my pictures as I really love some of the ones that came out of that lens.

Damn shopping list isn’t getting any shorter! Happy birthday, Nick!

So, it hasn’t been a very birthday-y birthday. I tidied the flat, I went to ASDA, I drove 120 miles to my parents’ house and I went out for a couple of drinks with Jake and Charlotte. I don’t really do birthdays anyway so I’m not particularly bothered by the lack of fanfare.

The photo is my birthday cake, except I’m not a huge fan of cake. I am, however, a huge fan of pizza so it’s a pizza. We also didn’t have any candles so I got 23 matches. We didn’t light the matches because we wanted to actually eat the pizza. There was 2 pizzas. I ate one of them. I can now say that I ate a whole birthday cake.

I am 23 today.

(I promise to take better photos when my life isn’t so unpredictable. For me, it’s enough that I’m actually using my camera. That was the point of this exercise)

Nothing particularly special about this, but I love the reflections in the glass so in it goes!

Today, I witnessed how temperamental postfix can be, yet again. On our test server, postfix wasn’t starting and hadn’t been for around 35 days. There was also a cron queueing up mail every minute as well as the regular apps. This lead to over 430,000 emails being backed up and it was my job to remove them all! What fun!

I’ve also found out that I’m going to be making an iPhone app. I’m so excited!