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We went to see the Blackpool illuminations this evening, and I thought it’d be perfect for a stumble, as I’ve not done one in a while. Windy, sporadic rain, but I collected 1,122 SSIDs!

After the initial anticipation, and what seemed an age until invites went out, I’m on Google Wave.

I’ve been on it for about a week now, enough time to start forming some opinions on what Google Wave is, what it isn’t, and what it could be.

Firstly, how I got my invite. Basically it was a sliver of opportunistic luck with a dash of cheek. I’d been to a Northern Digitals meet up in Manchester at the beginning of October, and being an early bird, met with a couple of others before the bar opened. Of these, we struck up conversation with Dave Kinsella, beers were bought and a good night was had.

When he got his Wave invites through, and tweeted to ask who wanted an invite and what was it worth, I bluntly reminded him he owed me a beer. Dave was good enough to invite me to Google Wave! Read more…

So, after a bit of a tongue in cheek post about there only being 300 people on the internet, I had another strange set of circumstances confirm this to me while in Brighton for dConstruct.

Whilst nursing the hangover on the Friday, Chris, Rob, Heni and I went for lunch with a splendid chap by the name of Remy Sharpe. Remy’s well known for his jQuery javascript workshops, and he’s a pretty funny chap, which is a bonus.

The talk over a lunch of Mexican spicy stuff turned to Twitter, and Remy was telling us how he originally had the username of @remy. However, thinking he’d do his friends a favour and spare a character, he changed his user name to @rem. Read more…

Once again, I made the trek down to Brighton for the annual dConstruct conference. This years theme was Designing for Tomorrow, and while not based in current day, hands on skills, I think it’s aimed at setting your mind free and letting you daydream a little, aside from your daily grind. Heni said it best, dConstruct is a little more esoteric than most other conferences.

Anyway, the long drive down flew by once again, due to great music and greater chat. Chris Mills and Rob O’Rourke accompanied me, and we spent Thursday afternoon driving. Arrived, met Heni Swann and went to register. Next up, burgers at GBK. Nice. Time for drinks.

The pre-party at Po Na Na wasn’t quite as good as last year, and that’s attributable to no free drinks. Simple equation. Most of the crowd relocated to the bar in The Ship Hotel, which is where we were staying, so it was a late nighter in there, catching up with Twitter acquaintances and mailing list buddies.

Anyway. Friday morning, with a hangover, Mills and I headed to the conference. Read more…

I’ve just got back from a week in Spain, and this time, I didn’t take a netbook (as such).

About two weeks ago I got hold of a 13″ Macbook Pro, the new unibody enclosure laptop from Apple. I didn’t want another 15″ laptop as I ended up never taking it anywhere as it was so big. So when Apple finally dropped the 13″, I snapped it up. Read more…

Last year, I went to dConstruct 2008, and it was great.

I’m very happy to say I’ll be going to this year’s event too, with the same shotgun travel buddy Chris Mills, with the added hilarity of Phil Sherry and Rob O’Rourke in the motor, splitting petrol monies.

Though I think 2008’s line up might have been a little better than this year’s, I’m really looking forward to the speakers, and meeting all the faces from last time too. It was great to chat with like minds about the presentation we’d just seen and get involved in informed and considered dialogue. Getting pissed was pretty cool too.

Roll on the 4th September!

I have this theory about the real amount of people on the internet.

Every online service I sign up for, the same people are on there. Oh, hi LuxuryLuke, leandaryan, lloydi, philsherry… I must have the same 20-30 people on 20-30 social networking sites.

Now I have a theory about this. There is only actually about 300 people online on the internet. They are your circle of friends, incidental characters and innocent by-standers whom you flame.

Everyone else, every username you see, every blog you read, every email from someone you don’t know, is what’s known as a non-playable character (NPC) in video gaming jargon… think about it. I bet you’ve not got more than 30-50 people on any number of networking sites, and they’re the same people aren’t they?

Prove me wrong…

More proof in part II

Here’s something I’ve been struggling with for months. What title do I have on my card and email sig?

Hell yeah, that seems vain at first read, but let’s look a little deeper. When Pete and I started JP74 in 2001, there was just the two of us. He did the heavy coding, and I did front end web work and graphic design. So we took the titles of Technical Director for him and Creative Director for me.

In our formative years, these proved to be good titles, as creatives from agencies would take my title at face value and trust that I knew what they were talking about when mentioning point sizes, EPS files, Pantone references and kerning. I’d studied as a graphic designer, so yeah, this was all straight forward. Read more…

Finally, just a shade over six months after being propositioned by the mighty Chris Mills to do some writing, my article is online!

The site, dev.opera.com is a resource aimed squarely at people who are web-literate and happy to get their hands dirty in code. However it’s quite techy, and not too design-led, either theory or practice.

Chris asked me to get involved and write an article that fused a bit of design know-how with technical ability, and since we’d just finished the GDR Creative Intelligence web site at work, which features sIFR heavily, I thought sIFR would be an ideal candidate.

The article didn’t actually take six months to write, it was done in fits and bursts, mostly while in Spain on holiday, but took a while to get edits done as Mills, in his capacity as Opera’s Developer Relations drinker is all around Europe at conferences and spreading the good word.

So, without further ado, here’s my article… I hope you find it useful.

I tossed out a question on Twitter that I’d been thinking about for a while.

What’s your favourite obsolete technology?

This had been playing on my mind for a bit, mostly from playing on the Sega Dreamcast, but also a stint on the original Tetris on an old Gameboy Pocket, but also thinking about my old Sony MiniDisc players, like the MD-R90, which I really miss.

I got some great answers from my mates, another MiniDisc lover, the ZX Spectrum, VHS porn (thanks Rob!) and a LaserDisc system for Dragon’s Lair!