So I figured I’d better claim my blog and setup my Technorati Profile.

It’s pretty cool, with this and my Socializer link I should start getting some traffic.

I’ve been feeling like it’s time to move on for a while but a recent salary review that felt like a slap in the face with a wet kipper has spurred me on to fnd alternative employment.

I got a call yesterday morning from James at Ecom he gave me his pitch, they’re a New Media Recruitment Agency, cool. They have all the major new media agencies on their books, cool. They’d like to see me as soon as possible to get to know me and find out what I’m after, cool - how about after work today?

So I manage to drag myself away from work and head over to Notting Hill Gate, walk in the sweltering heat and arrive at the most discreet un-marked door I’ve ever seen. I’m met by James who’s as casually dressed as I am and we go for a chat.

We go through the normal things recruitment people ask, I find myself feeling reassured that this is finally the right time to make the move and that there’s going to be just the right agency out there, sitting there waiting for me. And from all the phone calls this morning they’re putting me about…I feel so used and dirty. I do hope that last comment makes it onto We Feel Fine

So yeah my phone’s been pretty mental and I feel good about it, I’m at a juncture in my life and it looks like I might actually end up somewhere where I want to be.

If you happen to be someone at looking for some examples of my work, look no further.

So I’ve been digging around the internet a bit and found a couple of cool articles on Blogging.

There’s one over at Webmonkey

And a cool 56 point run down of how to write good Blog by Seth
Quite often on Blogs I’ll see a “digg this” or “link to your del.icio.us account” at the bottom of posts, I figured it would be kinda cool to get something like that on my site. So I head over to wp-plugins.net and found Socializer, it’s like adding a digg this or del.icio.us button to the bottom of your site, only better. Socializer collects all the links to all the social network sites so you only need one link on your site, to Socializer. I’ve added mine just above my comments and will be dropping thier little logo in soon.

Like all things Word Press the plugin installation was a breeze, it did take a little trial and error to get it implemented right, but total time was about 5 minutes. They also do plugins for Movable Type, Blogger and Blogware.

’cause this guy puts me to shame.

Now this guy really know what he’s doing.

So last weekend we (g/f, +2) took a stroll down to London’s south bank for a bit of culture.

Started off at The Design Museum with a look at 2006’s Designer of the Year entries. The 2 that stood out for me were The Guardian re-design and Jamie Hewlett.

The Guardian room is jam packed with loads of great detail about how they went about analysing and re-designing every aspect of the paper. It’s a real testiment to the curators that they were able to portray the detail involved in designing something so vast.

The Jamie Hewlett room is brilliant. I’ve been a distant fan of hist work for a long time and loved the Gorillaz concept from the first day I heard about it. The way that it subverts Pop culture and siddles in the back door with music that just wouldn’t get to where it is any other way. The room is packed with his work, 2 huge tables filled with sketches and storyboards for promo videos. One end has a huge projection of 3D animations, which personally I still don’t think are quite right. There are a couple of smaller monitors one looping through Gorillaz’ MTV cribs which is very amusing.

For me it was worth the entry fee just to see the Hewlett work, but I’m a fan so that’s not surprising.

After The Design Museum we grabbed some lunch and headed down to Tate Modern for their Long Weekend art extraveganza. Sadly we chose the “Surreal Day” for out visit. Someone had the bright idea of combining Surreal Art with Performance Art, in a word it was…rubbish! It was noisy, ugly, meaningless and most of all boring. Quite a lot of people seemed to be “watching” though, this may have had something to do with the weather which was pretty miserable.

So if you haven’t been to The Design Museum recently take a day and go get inspired, also check out Daniel Brown’s talk on 12th June he of Play/Create fame.

So it would appear that recruiters really do want to look at your portfolio site.

I had a call from a recruiter who visited this site expecting to find my portfolio only to be presented with my random rantings. Well I’ve reinstated my old portfolio site so that if anyone’s interested they can have a look at my work.

I’m also working on a new updated version, with a bit of AS 2.0 trickery, should be live soon.

Prickie, it sounds dirty but it REALLY isn’t.

It’s threadless for the badges, and has a very cool Flex interface/shopping cart.

Enjoy

So the open discussion at Adobe Live was a lively affair.

Topics touched on include:

Data ownership, www.openrightsgroup.org, shared data, open API’s, the flickr/google maps effect - I agree with the panel that, whenever anyone is publishing data online it should have an API and be usable by anyone how wants to use it. Sadly in the UK we have some pretty outdated laws when it comes to sharing data, luckily the guardian have started a campaign to free our data

Data states - when we’ve finished using an application, who owns our data, where is it stored, can we take it with us to use off-line? If you saw the keynote at Adobe Live you will have seen the example of a next gen app, a airline booking service that ports to 3G mobile and traditional WAP. The data was accessed through the web, offline on a laptop and a mobile device, it looks like Adobe have this pretty much wrapped up, we just need a couple of years to start implimenting it.

Apollo & Sparkle - Can someone clear up my confusion with Sparkle? Is it proprietry to Windows Vista and if so, why would anyone bother if there’s a cross platform equivilent in Apollo? - Both look very interesting and potentially a giant leap from the browser to the desktop. If Apollo is everything I’m hoping it will be there’ll be a communication layer between the OS controls and the Flash apps, in a similar way to Flash-Lite.

Someone asked if AJAX with it’s 136 (it may well be more by now) frameworks including Adobe’s Spry was just a fad or if it really is a Flash killer. I’m of the belief that you use the appropiate tech for each brief you get, if AJAX is what’s going to solve the problem then use AJAX. Is it a Flash killer, no. Is it the best thing since sendAndLoad, no. Is it more or less accessible than Flash, who knows they’re probably as bad as each other

Naturally Flex 2.0 was mentioned and hailed as the next big thing, the potential of Flex is amazing, people are getting so excited about this and Adobe have played it just right with the public betas. They knew that Flex 1.5 got a bad rep, mostly dues to “pricing” issues, now they’ve got that sorted they can start building on the players penetration, player 8 is up to around 75% already.

Lastly, Accessibility got a mention as did JK Rowling, while it’s sited as an “accessible” Flash site, that’s only relative. Flash is still only accessible by 2 screen readers, apparently. As someone who does a lot of work for local authorities and big corperations I have to work with inder the shadow of Accessibility on a daily basis. The thing about the W3C guidelines is that they’re just that, guidelines there is room for personal interpretation and when discussing Accessibility it’s never black & white it is always shades of gray.

Wednesday is shaping up to be a fun day, got my Adobe Live tickets and signed up for the London MMUG meeting in the evening.

Aparently the MMUG stand will be giving away a copy of  Adobe Video Bundle to all new members that sign up on the day.

Hopefully I’ll find some time today to have another look at the BitmapData hitTest example from Senocular…work permitting.