This is my personal website where I talk about a whole load of different stuff, from 
Fueled entirely by airbags...
Poor bastard! XD
Check me out - running at 5:30am without any kip! ~2.2 miles in a touch under half an hour isn't bad for me - managed to shave almost 2 mins off my "mile time" too... I'll have that, no bother.
I've got a problem though - the breathing is coming along nicely, I don't get as breathless now which is a definite plus - but my back is fucking killing! Right at the bottom, just above my arse. I'm guessing this is just due to muscle weakness but it's causing me a bit of bother and I keep having to stop (as you can see on the lower 'heartbeat style' graph which measures my speed on the image above. Any suggestions?
Plus I have sore chins but that's because I'm a big fat man bouncing up and down on skinny legs - hopefully it'll settle.
I'd really appreciate some pointers on the back issue though - is it just a case of keeping at it? Should I do less distance for a while?
Cheers
How Did You Get Into the Web Design Industry?
Okay - What does this have to do with sexism in the web design industry? Gah - I did good work, shoved it in a portfolio and applied for a job. They liked it, I got in.
Do You Think There is a Lack of Female Web Designers?
At every single web agency I've worked for there have been females on the creative team, whether they be designers, developers or both. I have yet to see a completely male agency. Moreover, none of these females even when the ratio has favoured men, have ever complained about feeling, or been seen as, a less valued member of staff. Important sidenote - there is probably a lack of honestly GOOD web designers, but I really don't think it's anything to do with their sex.
Have You Ever Experienced Any Negativity or Sexism Being in This Industry?
Negativity? If you mean "did people not want to work with the team because there are women on board" then .. No. Quite the opposite actually. I think (and this only my opinion, woah there!) women bring a sense of personableness (it's a word dammit) to a team. As for sexism, I'd have to say yes. But only if you consider male banter inherently sexist in which case I suggest you loosen up and accept the fact that banter doesn't automatically mean sexist and, if it gets to that point, it's now sexual harrassment. As it happens none of the females I've ever worked with were made to feel uncomfortable (and in most cases were pretty capable of making a bloke go red in the face) - in short, if you're personable, male or female, you'll get on in the web industry. If you're not, don't blame it on a sexist issue that isn't there.
Do You Think Female Designers Have Advantages Over Their Male Counterparts?
No, I think that some projects suit some minds better than others. Whether that mind be accompanied by titties or bollocks is neither here nor there.
If You Were Not a Designer, What Would You Be?
As a male, I'd have to say sewing machine operator. Because in this world of equal opportunities I'd feel it my duty to do whatever makes me happy regardless of my perception of the lack of equality in life. And I really like clothes.
What is Your Biggest Challenge/Achievement?
Again, this isn't really a sexual equality question is it. It's actually two questions, so I'm not going to answer. *Miss Piggy Hmph*
Anything to Say to Other Female Designers?
Just because you're female doesn't mean that a) you're going to be shit on, b) you have a right to a free ride. Work your arse off, come up with kick-ass work and get on with people - otherwise you're in the wrong job anyway and no amount of hand waving about sexism is going to change the fact that you have much more real, personal issues. And are maybe just not as good as you think.
Now, if you'll excuse me I have some puppies to brush.
Today marks my official promise to myself to run at least five miles a
week to get a bit more in shape.
i'm more inclined to be realistic. And that means no excuses. Wish me luck! (and follow me on DailyMile or SportyPal!)
edit: formatting fixed - damn phone, so much for mobile blogging...
Last night I took some time out from work to create a simple new website for my wife, to celebrate the lives of some people who have died from cervical cancer.
My wife is part of the Jo's Cervical Cancer Trust community, which aims to bring awareness to cervical cancer and the fact that it kills many young women long before their time.
During her time in the community she has become friends with a number of women who have, sadly, passed on. She wanted to create a shrine to their memory instead of their stories being lost in a deluge of new forum threads. It's her way of paying tribute to these women and highlighting what they and their families went through.
The site uses Posterous to manage the content if you're interested :)
Check it out http://www.josgirlsmemorial.co.uk and don't forget to donate to Jo's Trust.
"When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened."
- Winston Churchill
As a freelance developer and designer, it's always good when I have plenty of work. Me and my family get to eat which is always a bonus :)
Currently I'm working on the following exciting projects for various clients and agencies, deliberately vague so as not to breach any confidentiality!
- A new fully-content managed website for a country park.
- A brand new e-commerce and content managed website for a supplier of hand-crafted goods.
- A new community website for motoring fans
- A fully content managed event planning and management website
Additionally, I have a number of personal projects I'm working towards completing as part of my personal "get off my ass and put my skills to good use" project
- VatSimSigs improvements. Since I launched this site, I've had some really positive feedback from the community and have a number of improvements and additions I want to put forward.
- Working on the blog, and the business websites to make them work harder for me
- I really want to resurrect Twizzle, my simple Twitter client but I'm waiting to see what effect the discontinuation of Basic Authentication by Twitter has on their API before I do it - this will also be my first real application to be built for Windows Phone 7 and I can't wait to get cracking on it.
So, all is going well - this has been an excellent year for me in terms of new business - long may it continue (so that I can buy Walkers crisps instead of Tesco's). If you'd like to work with me, fire me an e-mail and we'll meet up for a pint.
Peace!
I'm not affiliated with this product, but I am fifteen stone. Fifteen. Fucking. Stone.
For those of you who know me, you'll remember me as the kid who was tiny. They even called me Littlewoods at school for christs sake, the fucking wags that they were! Hilarious! Even when I was twenty-three, I was still only nine and a half stone - now I weigh as much as a small car! what's going on?!
I blame getting married tbh - I eat more, and better. I'm content. They say that's what happens. But dammit I'm not ready for middle-aged spread just yet, so I need to do something about it!
Now granted, a lot of it is muscle (if I do say so myself :D). I've put on quite a bit of the good stuff since I started kickboxing and I feel pretty fit. But since I moved down south from the Toon, I've not been keeping up any kind of training ritual at all. Except for trips to the fridge. And if I'm honest, I feel the worse for it.
So, enter SportyPal. I've been using www.dailymile.com for a while to track my workouts, although admittedly they have been few and far between. It's good, but it's not enough. The reason for this is two-fold. One, I'm lazy. And two, I'm even lazier when it comes to typing all the information in about a run/walk/bike ride. I just cannot be bothered, it's the 10's for christ's sake and I'm a twenty-first century kinda bloke. Automation ftw!
SportyPal is different. It does it all for you, because I have a smartphone with a built in GPS. It can track my routes, tell me how long it took, how high I climbed, how fast I travelled - it's awesome. Not least because all I need to do to keep tabs on myself is to click "upload". All my workout data is sent over the interpipes and presented to me on Google Maps with more stats than I can dribble at.
There's no better motivation than seeing yourself rack up the miles - trust me, it's a good feeling when you see how much exercise you have done instead of being a lazy git. Plus, you can gloat by sharing it on Twitter/Facebook with the click of a button. "Hah, have that, you fat gits!", is my usual warble after a particularly energetic sesh!
Best of all - it's free! More money for mars bars, er... weightwatchers flapjacks! Hooray!
http://www.sportypal.com - add me, I'm woodss.
I'm an avid Flight Simulation fan, have been for years much to the mirth and merriment of the people I know. I enjoy nothing more (well, within reason) than filing a flight plan from one place to another and sitting online while I'm guided via live air traffic control - pretty much as real as it gets without setting foot into an actual plane.
Seems to me that Posterous isn't all it's cracked up to be with regards comment spam - sorry for all the messages advertising sunglasses, lolitas and penis creams (none of which I have bought by the way, although I do need some new sunglasses) - normal service is hereby resumed.
Tonight I watched the Facebook Feight keynote where Facebook announced their new technologies and applications live to the world.
While I was out and about this evening, I was fortunate enough to be driving along as the Sun set in the sky. Straight in front of me it shone, very low (and large) in the sky and for some reason (perhaps the ash cloud from the Icelandic volcanic eruption lately, or just the fact that it was so low that the atmosphere filtered some of it's intensity out), I could stare straight at it.
It was amazing - here I was, tootling along in my car, living my life, doing my thing and in a couple of inches of view ahead of me, was over a million miles worth of burning, boiling, beautiful, floating light. A million miles. That's a long, long way! Think about it; you probably only get about 150,000 miles out of the life of your car and it takes you 10 years to travel them. Think about how far you travel in ten years in your car up and down the motorways, to the shops, on holidays... this was ten times that distance, visible straight in front of me, and I imagined a line barely reaching a quarter of the way across. That's how far I'd have driven.
It makes you think, you know, this beautiful ball of light is floating around in the empty darkness of space about 95 million miles away from where you live your life. There's barely anything in between, and it sometimes looks like you could just reach out and touch it. Perhaps the human mind is incapable of comprehending such distances, but I know that while I was looking at this amazing spectacle, I felt extremely insignificant.
And insignificant I am. We all are. We're tiny little ants in the massive black farm we call the Universe, and sadly being so small we'll never see most of it. Check out this video which puts a sense of scale on things.
So, since I'll never see most of the amazing wonders this Universe contains, I'll have to make the most of the ones I can see, and enjoy my insignificance as much as I can.
As long as I get to see the Sun like I did tonight, it's not that hard to do.
How many SEO copywriters does it take to change a lightbulb, light bulb, light, bulb, lamp, bulbs, filament....
Thanks to @misteroneill and @justinlilly
Am I the only one totally blown away by the level of detail? Truely, we're on the frontier of great things now that technologies are starting to mature.
This industry never, ever gets boring, that's for sure!
Hey folks, long time no see!
As you can probably see, there have been a canny few changes around here, but one which you might not notice is the fact that I've now switched from a custom-made blogging system to the fantastic Posterous.com service.
Posterous, a free blogging service, is a piece of piss to set-up. All you have to do is e-mail some images, text, links to YouTube etc to the "post@posterous.com" account and bam, it's instantly converted to a nicely formatted blog post with embedded video links, galleries etc.
Normally Posterous blogs are hosted using the format "yourhostname.posterous.com", but you can point your DNS to the Posterous servers in order to use your own domain. Useful for some, but not for me because I do other things on this domain such as display my portfolio of work, and other stuff that I maybe haven't implented yet. If I pointed my DNS away I'd lose the ability to do this.
For those reasons, I decided that I was going to use the Posterous API to query my Posterous account, and read in the blog posts as if they were hosted here. Thanks to the PosterAPI project written in C# by Nuane, I can do this no problem at all (although the Posterous API only returns the previous 50 items, which is a bit pap). See the links in the footer for more details on how this works.
Sooo - since it's a bit easier to post and edit, you might find this blog gets updated a bit more frequently! Enjoy!
Edit: Bear with me while I import all of my previous articles - it's a pain in the arse, since I didn't have an XML-RPC enabled blog beforehand so I'm having to do it manually...
Also, it appears that Posterous severely buggers up any attempt at making your pages validate properly, with its YouTube embed code - bah! Something I'll have to live with I think!
In this short tutorial I will show you how to make common ViewData information available to your Views in ASP.NET MVC, without having to duplicate ViewData[] variables in each seperate controller
During my learning phase of ASP.NET MVC, one of my bugbears was that when I wanted to display information from my database on multiple Views, I had to load that data in during the running of each Controller Action, and essentially duplicating code across multiple Controller Actions.
For instance, if I wanted a list of categories for my products on the Master Page, in each controller I might have something like:
ViewData["Categories"] = (from c in db.Categories where c.isEnabled = true orderby c.Title descending select c)
If you imagine that code repeated throughout the perhaps 20 or 30 Controller Actions within the application, you can see the kind of problems you'd have maintaining it - it's a violation of the DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) principle for starters.
Essentially the solution is very simple and involves creating a new abstract class of Controller called "CommonController" (or XController, or whateverController you like) and placing the code in there instead of your actual controller.
When you create a controller normally, this is the code you use:
public class HomeController : Controller
Create a new controller, and use this instead:
public abstract class CommonController : Controller
Notice the "abstract" keyword in there, that's the only difference.
Now, in your actual Controllers, you need them to inherit this CommonController instead of the normal Controller, so instead of using:
public class HomeController : Controller
You need to use:
public class HomeController : CommonController
Now, in this class instead of the usual ActionResult methods, you'll have a void method set up like so:
public void GlobalController() {
ViewData["MyVariable"] = value;
}
Now that you've done that, all of the ViewData variables set in CommonController will be available to the Views returned from your Controller.
Simples!
