December 2011
2 posts
why I will be moving from O2
It just shows how important customer service is and how the unwritten agreement we make with our customers is just as important as the legal ones.
When I started out with O2 I had unlimited data as well as free wifi with the cloud and BT openzone. This made them perfect for me. I use my iPhone for web and email way more than I ever do for calls or txts.
Then with the most recent iPhone I was...
November 2011
2 posts
October 2011
3 posts
““The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the...”
– Three quotes by Winston Churchill.
This guy really is my hero. He has such an optimistic positive view of life.
“When we have clients who are thinking about Flash splash pages, we tell them to...”
– Jared Spool has such a wonderful way with words :)
Myself, grammar and spelling - how people like to...
One of the biggest areas of criticism I receive is over my grammar and spelling. This came up once again on this weeks show following some comments by Dan Oliver the editor of .net magazine.
I get on with Dan very well and consider him a friend. However his light hearted teasing is unfortunately not the norm. Many judge me because of my shortcomings in this area. It is something I am very...
September 2011
4 posts
Could you do me a favour
When I used to live in Portsmouth I was friends with an amazing couple who have since gone on to do some incredible work. Like many large cities Portsmouth has some very needy people. People who live below the poverty line and often are unable to even feed themselves.
Martin and Louise run a food bank which provides short term food supplies for those in desperate need. Its an amazing charity and...
redline96 asked: Do you think the separation of branding between boagworld and headscape is tied directly to the success of both? I've heard your podcasts about how it started, but in retrospect, would you say that the separation of your free podcast with your money-making business was essential?
BTW, you've done more to shape my ideas about good design/business strategy than anyone....
BTW, you've done more to shape my ideas about good design/business strategy than anyone....
“Constructing customer use cases from a disembodied database of issues is like...”
– http://www.instapaper.com/text?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.alistapart.com%2Farticles%2Fbeing-human-is-good-business%2F&article=204361850
August 2011
6 posts
Are teenagers just mindless thugs who riot?
Sometimes a contrast can be so extreme and striking that it has a profound impact on you. The last week or so has been a classic example.
Like everybody else I have recently been watching pictures of teenagers (mainly) tearing our country apart. The media has labelled this generation of teenagers a “lost cause” and blame their cultural upbringing and communication medias for the anarchy we have...
Sometimes form trumps function
It is generally accepted belief that form should follow function. In other words, it is more important to make a product work effectively than it is to define how it looks. Not that appearances are unimportant, but rather they should not negatively impact function.
Of course in the real world there are lots of examples of form coming before function. Fashion is a good example of this. I was...
July 2011
22 posts
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a...”
– Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love
Discovered this in the comments of my post on generalists.
“Websites [stand] out not because they were fashioned with HTML5 or designed...”
– http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/07/04/the-medium-is-the-message
An important lesson to be learnt. As web designers we too often care more about the medium than the message.
“So I recommend having fun, because there is nothing better for people in this...”
– Ecclesiastes 8:15 NLT - Now this is the kind of Biblical advice I am eager to embrace :)
My complete re-evaluation of God.
Please note. This post may make some of my Christian friends uncomfortable. The views I express here are my own personal doubts and conclusions. I do not claim they are right and that your beliefs are wrong. They are simply what I currently find myself believing. Please be gentle in the comments, whether you are Christian, atheist or anything in between.
When people first discover I am a...
“Continuous effort – not strength or intelligence – is the key to unlocking our...”
– Winston Churchill - the more I read of things he said the more impressed I am with this man.
Evernote as a text editor
I love evernote. For me it is a superb filing cabinet for most documents. Its easy to search and organise your documents and it will even search within images.
However, although it is awesome at storing data it sucks at entering it. Its interface is too cluttered for writing and its WYSIWYG sucks.
Personally, I prefer to write in something like ByWord which is a distraction free text editor....
Gmail: Sent messages appearing in inbox
There seems to be a bug in gmail that can suddenly start occurring on some accounts. Whenever you send an email that sent message immediately appears in your inbox as well as in your sent items (as if you cced yourself in on the message).
This quickly becomes very annoying and although some people have had success at stopping it by turning POP off and on again, nothing seemed to work for me.
The...
June 2011
23 posts
What are your core values?
So I have just finished reading David Allen’s latest book “Make it all Work”. Although it repeats a lot of what he covered in “Getting Things Done” it did help me to further my obsession with GTD.
When you read GTD the thing that immediately leaps out at you is the stress free system for managing all of the tasks and projects in your life. Where ‘Make it all...
“by some estimates, we produce 2 exabytes of information a year. (To put that in...”
– What does neuroplasticity have to do with web design? — First Advertising
Can anybody help me with Wordpress meets twitter?
So here is my problem. I want to display an area like this on the boagworld.com homepage…
So far that is not a big problem. Its easy enough to pull back an RSS feed of all tweets mentioning boagworld.
However, I would like to be able to pick and choose somehow which tweets appear so that I don’t end up with the problem I have on my current website where half the tweets that appear...
