Caught in the act

2006: A year in photographs

As I did last year, I've compiled a small set of photos that sum up 2006 for me. You can view them on Flickr.

Merry Christmas - I hope you've all been good little boys and girls. I know I have ;o)

Merry Christmas Y'all

For the first time ever, I'm actually prepared for Christmas ... like, three whole days in advance. Usually I'm one of these blokes who's still running around the shopping centre on Christmas eve, thinking 'Why didn't I order this cr*p off Amazon?!'.

Well, this year I did order that cr*p from Amazon, and it's all wrapped up and under our tree.

The problem is now I'm getting twitchy. I'm convinced I've forgotten something important. I keep checking my 'Presents Bought For People' list, and cross referenced it with my 'Presents I Bought For People And Have Now Wrapped And Put Under The Tree' list. Everything tallies. Nothing amis. So what have I forgotten?!

No doubt I'll find out on Monday.

Wishing y'all a Merry Christmas.

Oli.

New NEW design :o)

Yes, yes. It's all changed again. If you visited this blog in the last three weeks you'll have seen a fairly drab, colourless design that I started working on. Well, it's gone. Some of you complained that the RSS feed was gone: well, its back.

I was inspired through delayed reaction to a comment Tom made about a week ago. When I told him about my attempt to create a table-free design for my website, he said "keep it simple". I don't know why it took me so long to react, but he was right. I'd wasted almost an entire weekend wondering why the boxes in the sidebar were bunching up; why the spacing and padding wasn't consistent; and why my curved edges didn't display correctly...

...in fact I spent almost a week on this before I realised that I'd forgotten the purpose of my blog. Ho well, silly me. I'm back to reality now, and merrily posting away.

This new design is based on something I liked when browsing a couple of MSDN blogs. The header is easily updatable, so hopefully I can keep you entertained with weekly updates to the banner. I'm also looking into updating this template to work with the new Blogger layout tools. There's a host of useful add-ons which become activated once I do this, such as the ability to show RSS feeds from other sites, etc. All in all, I'm quite happy with this new design. Now, I wonder if my Starbucksblog buddies will let me apply the same treatment to that blog? Its long overdue for an update ;o)

A River Runs Through It

... I'm pretty sure that river wasn't in front of my house when I left this morning:

I'd better take my wellies to work tomorrow!

It's that time of year again!

Compared to the same time last year ;o)

Goodbye NMPFT

It may not seem like much, but those red letters mean a lot to me. They've been up there since I was very small and droolled a lot. When I was at that age, NMPFT was a magical place - somewhere I actually wanted to come.

Then I grew up, but NMPFT didn't. For some reason that I'm still trying to figure out I got a job there, and in those six years I've seen a lot changes. It seems that most of those changes involved removing the magic one little bit at a time, and there's not a lot left.

The photograph here marks the moment when NMPFT made one of its biggest changes I've seen whilst working there: It's changed it's name to the National Media Museum. It might not seem like much, and to some it probably makes sense, but to me it just hightlights a growing trend at the museum. For the last four years the museum seems to have been in a state of constant flux. Nothing, it seemed, was good enough and therefore needed to change. And then change again.

Four years of that has taken its toll. I don't think the museum will ever get back to where it was when I was a kid.

As for the future? The name change also comes with an expanded remit, which will no doubt entail further change. Not that I'm afraid of change. Change is healthy. But only if you get a chance to actually benefit from that change before the next wave of changes arrive.

Anyhoo. I've ranted on enough. The National Media Museum has arrived, and that's that. They even have a new website that I helped code. Check it out ;o)

Welcome Back!

Sorry, it's been ages since I last posted. I've been so busy. No really, I have!

I figured that I'd make it obvious I'd created a new post by completely redesigning my blog. I did this one all by myself, from scratch. I thought I'd have a go at creating a website without using tables for layout. It's proven a bit of a nightmare, with elements not sitting where they should in all browsers ... but I think it looks quite pretty. Well, for a first attempt it does.

A number of things have happened since I last posted, but I'll post them in the days to come.

In the meantime, Happy Christmas! (Is it too early for that yet?)