Ram It Down, Judas Priest’s troubled late-eighties attempt at returning to their heavy metal roots, has always been a difficult album for me to listen to. I recently worked out why. Firstly the sequencing, or song order, is all wrong. Secondly, they missed some of the better songs from the recording sessions off the album […]
The 20th of January is almost two months ago now and yet I’m only just getting around to jotting down my thoughts on Simon Collison’s inaugural New Adventures conference. My excuse is that on the day itself and indeed the month leading up to, and the month following the conference, I had a terrible chest […]
I have had three albums on heavy rotation since purchasing them last year: Bang goes the Knighthood by The Divine Comedy, Write about love by Belle and Sebastian and The Final Frontier by Iron Maiden. All three demonstrate the kind of song writing craftsmanship that few other bands can achieve this far into their career. […]
Mark Boulton’s Five Simple Steps: A practical guide to designing for the web has to be my favourite web design book of the year. One of the many things I really love about it is the personalised anecdotal style applied throughout. It’s the kind of book that will age gracefully as it doesn’t dwell too […]
Dan Wellman’s book jQuery UI 1.6 (ISBN 978-1-847195-12-8) from Packt Publishing is the kind of book I wish I had when I first started tinkering with jQuery. Firstly, I’m a web designer, not a developer. Scripting scares me. I’m really out of my comfort zone when I need to bring a web page to life […]
A lot of web designers, myself included, are mostly concerned with the way things look when people visit the web sites we create. We’re all about the design — layout, typography, colour, graphics and how they enhance the user experience. We start with some sketches, do some wire-frames and rapidly move into software like Photoshop […]
MediaWiki Skins Design — Designing attractive skins and templates for your MediaWiki site is the first book by UK based web designer Richard Carter. The book covers practical tips from the very basics to integrating MediaWiki with popular social networking services such as YouTube, Twitter and Delicious. It is published by PACKT publishing (ISBN 978-1-847195-20-3) […]
The Life Pursuit is Belle and Sebastian’s eighth album (counting the faux-soundtrack, Storytelling and last year’s single’s and b-sides collection). It’s amazing to note how prolific they’ve been yet they’re still fairly underrated by the mainstreem. You’re more likely to hear their singles on Radio 2 than 1 and they do make some fairly odd […]
Having spent a weekend dry-slope skiing in Southampton recently, it seemed only appropriate that we should make use of the relatively local Milton Keynes ‘snowdome’, Xscape. This huge indoor ski slope contains real snow that is created using some sort of magic blowers. I don’t fully understand exactly how it works but skiing on it […]
Helen and I had a nice lunch at the Hind’s Head Hotel in Bray, near Maidenhead, this afternoon. Owned by the same people who run the no.1 restaurant in the world, The Fat Duck (just over the road), the food was no less extravagant. I had a rabbit and bacon terrine to start followed by […]