I thought I’d managed to kick the habit getting too busy with stuff to not write for over a week, but it turns out I was wrong.

Last weekend was Multipack once more, and as well as the usual faces there were some new ones too - Sam finally made it down, but I’m unsure how much he had reckoned on debating the correct height of a building you need to throw a cat off (don’t worry - it was all theoretical - but the answer is 7 stories). Si bought along Flickr stash which naturally went down well, and Tim bought along Site Doctor stash too, so my bag was packed full off goodies by the time I got home.

En route I had an opportunity to also see Tim’s ridiculously large media system, complete with (and I think I get this right) a 96” screen. It is vast and completely stunning in full HD.

Aside from collecting things and watching home cinema, I spent most of the rest of the week filling out forms, in the bank and asking questions about insurance and accountancy. Not what I would consider truly gripping, but a necessity unfortunately.

On the flip side I got to have a few drinks earlier in the week, and a new book of Moo stickers arrived which can’t do anything but put you in a good mood. Not even a up-until-four-in-the-morning work stint for an emergency brief managed to really dampen my spirits, although I’m really hoping I get a chance to see some people I’ve not seen in a while soon. It occurred to me that my travels to London have not been so frequent of recent, so I want to correct this.

Mike got in the paper.

If you are looking for something to amuse yourself for a while today - check out this awesome site by Uni-Qlo. I generally don’t do these sorts of things, but this one is just so ridiculously catchy…

Does it really seem three years since I penned my first blog post? Actually it seems longer if anything.

This year I made a re-discovery that means that it probably has been longer. I didn’t realise it at the time, as the phrase blog probably didn’t exist back then, but I kept a fairly loose journal on my DeviantArt page for a few years too, and I joined up there in 2001.

It took over a year for me to post anything on it, and I opened simply, saying “I’m not much of a big writer”. But within a week I’d posted another, and it wasn’t regular, but I kept it fairly well updated.

I think I considered moving the content into the beginning of this blog when I switched to EE, but decided against it as it never was meant to be published here.

The anniversary of the blog marks another couple of important personal anniversaries for me too - admittedly not on the same day, but a few days either side, so it’s quite important for me to remember it. Most other people don’t seem to keep track of when they started writing like this, but it’s something I don’t really want to forget for various reasons.

This is the third full incarnation of JustBeyondTheBridge in three years. I wonder what platform I’ll be typing on next year?

If you haven’t already seen the new coinage, you are in for a treat.

Matthew Dent, a graphic designer who won the competition to do the first major redesign of the full collection of UK coins since decimalisation in 1971, has come up with a delicious and contemporary new look.

There is something very solid about the coin, and this is a rare opportunity to make a very significant impact with design. I would describe British currency as a design classic in itself (not discounting some of the other great coins I’ve seen around the globe), and would place it in a similar camp to stamps in terms of distribution and gravitas. It’s funny to reflect on this, but I suspect if you ask many people what makes them British or gives them British identity, apart from drizzle, tea and Nectar points, the queen’s head on our coins would probably surface more than a handful of times.

That’s why this redesign was very important, and I’m pleased to see something that really can be commended on all fronts.

The outlines and weights have been retained, a sensible idea. The reduction in the size and weight of the 10 pence, 5 pence and 50 pence pieces in the past 15 years have made our coinage fairly manageable, and when making such a dramatic change to the faces, it seems only suitable to retain this major identifier.

Secondly and most importantly for me, the cut of the design is beautiful. Even someone who shifts pixels for a career, I can only begin to imagine how much agony went into getting the design and typography ‘just’. I’m so pleased they have spaced the design out as much as they have, it defies the obvious wonderfully.

The subject matter (the royal heraldic shield) cleverly ties up the problem of finding a separate identifier for each coin. In a time when there is so much debate about what truly justifies itself as being british or inclusive or whatever, it seems far better to use a symbol that is both recognised and less contentious than some other icons. I’m not saying there aren’t connotations, but I think this is a good way to go, and assuming we don’t become a republic in the next 40 years they should last too…

I’m interested to know what will be printed on the circumferences, but really I’m keen just to see them minted. Stacking coins will never be so boring again.

One slight question that still remains is whether completely removing the numerical value from the coin face will work. I’ve been to many places and it’s usually been the one sure-fire constant. On the other hand, maybe it couldn’t be a stronger representation of the British need to assert ourselves by requiring the user to understand English in order to purchase even the cheapest items…

It’s been a long weekend.

I took Friday as day at the motors (mixing business with pleasure) and with a bit early morning travel managed to get down to Brands Hatch for 9ish. I had been hoping to get to see more than just practice day, but as things happened, the weekend was already booked up (I will explain later) and so I was only able to stay for the one day before having to head back home.

In simple terms, a client’s son (Adam) competes in Formula Renault (think next is Formula 3, then GP2, then Formula 1) and he invited me to come down to watch the opening race of the season. It’s been a couple of years since the last time I got to watch (at Donington) and it’s something I really enjoy so was more than happy to get down there, especially as last weekend didn’t prove to be much of a break in the end.

Will also came down and we had the full day slinking around the pits, paddock and stands. It’s great to get full access to these places, and to get really up close with the kit, especially as I’d taken the SLR down. The weather conspired against us however, and most of the day it bucketed it down so I spent a lot of time collecting puddles in my camera bag. Despite this it was still bloody great, and although not an official race day, Adam’s results were good and looked promising for qualifying on the next day.

After making an epic journey back home, the next morning Deako turned up at 10am ready to get over to Wales. After the success of our photo trip to the lakes six months ago we’d decided to plan another, this time to the Elan Valley.

We were staying in Rhayader (a place which I’ve visited/walked/camped around several times before) and made it our base to get out into the valleys. Unfortunately the weather followed, and we spent a good few hours at the top of the incredibly full and impressive dams contending with pretty heavy conditions. It wasn’t good photography weather, but we managed to get a few locations in before the evening.

Thankfully Sunday was brighter and we traced the second, longer chain of dams and reservoirs. If you don’t really know about Elan and these structures, essentially if you live in or around Birmingham, the water you drink came from here. Most of the five or so dams were built between the last decade of the 19th century and the early 1950s, and they are really impressive bits of architecture. Several valleys were flooded to make way for the new reservoirs and one lake alone contains enough water at any one time to supply Brum for up to 15 days. Eerily, several villages and substantial large houses were submerged in the process, and they still sit at the bottom of these vast pools in which you cannot sail or swim. The scenery is stunning, and after the heavy rainfall, all of these structures were overflowing with run off. It’s a very impressive sight, especially from the base.

In the afternoon we had reached Devil’s Bridge, but as the weather had started to deteriorate again we took a trip to Aberystwyth where it cheered up and we met up with Damith (one of James’ old housemates from Loughborough). We took an unplanned trip to the beach and my first ever experience of home-cooked Sri-Lanken food (which was delicious and despite containing copious amounts of chilli, I managed without a problem).

This morning required some coordination as both mine and Deako’s phones were out of battery (mine unfortunately wasn’t just out of battery it transpires) but we eventually managed to organise getting to breakfast at the right time (our hotel rooms were in different buildings on different streets) and get all the way back out to Devil’s Bridge before we realised neither of us had handed our keys in at checkout.

Thankfully we had planned to return at lunchtime for one final photo opportunity in Rhayader, so after tackling the waterfalls and Jacob’s Ladder, we returned the hotel, handed in the keys and spent the last hour filling up our final memory cards with photos of red kites - a bird of prey that thrives in the Elan Valley and can be relied upon to arrive at the right time every day to feed in a field left with carcass scraps. The hardest thing to do is convert 200 shots made in quick succession into just three or four prize photos.

And so I’m back, with a really broken phone and a very long list of to-dos.

I was finally able to find out that Adam Christodoulou finished first and smashed the Brands Hatch lap record on Sunday in the opening race which is a great way to start the season.

This week is going to be full on.

I’ve been playing with this on and off for a few days, but have managed to finally get my photo collection back onto this site. Instead of hosting it (which was the headache), I’ve tapped into Flickr’s API which handily allows you to get your photos out (I used this PHP wrapper in the end - I was going to use Trev’s but it wasn’t quite baked yet...).

Using a little bit of wizardry I’ve also linked in Upcoming and Google Maps. Unfortunately, until the API supports collections you can’t browse in the exact way I’d like, but you can view by photoset, most recent, tag and individually. I’ve also dragged in comments and EXIF data for those who are interested.

It’ll probably see some tweaks in the coming months, but for the moment it’ll do. You can see it it here.

Out of the blue I got a phone call from Will asking if I wanted to go go-karting yesterday and it didn’t take much convincing. I didn’t even realise we had a go-kart track in the Bridge, but apparently we do, and for the hour or so we spent there was much enjoyed. It’s not something I’ve tried before (not for not wanting) and found the whole experience much like paintball; great fun but one of those things you’ll only ever do every so often, so I was keen to make the most of it. I’d definitely do it again one of these days, though the unusual surge of adrenaline in the morning meant I had to drink coke all afternoon to stop myself from falling asleep.

In the evening I helped Dad assemble a vast collection of parts for his new compressor. It involved visits to Brierley Hill, Netherton and Wollaston before we finally got the whole apparatus together. While we were up near Quarry Bank we went over to one of the family graves which hadn’t been visited for by anyone for years. Despite being 99 years old this year, the memorial is still intact and good to see still standing. Only four or five of the nearby graves (out of many hundreds) are still tended and most have been vandalised, collapsed or fallen apart. It’s the first time I’d seen it and it’s a pretty impressive bit of stonework, put together for my great-great grandfather (Edward) in 1909, then used for his wife (Emma) and their son (Richard, my Gran’s dad who died four days after she was born, yet whom she still eulogises for).

I love this sort of stuff - not the macabre aspect of the graveyards, but seeing things that are genuinely important to your family history. There was something striking about this, probably the biggest memorial in the whole cemetery, in the highest plot, but now so wrapped up in brambles you cannot get to it without climbing through trees and round collapsed stonework. It’s completely lost to most people, but thankfully remains intact apart from some minor ageing. The other thing that intrigues me about this stuff is that I simply would not have existed without the people who lie in that grave, buried almost a century ago; people not even my 95 year old Grandmother ever really knew. And yet there it stands still.

I finally completed all the paperwork I needed to, created some interesting vector work and took a trip up to Sheffield to organise a new project this week. Despite this, it doesn’t quite feel like Easter yet - it seems to early - and I think next weekend is likely to be more relaxing than this one (says the man who’s organised a photography trip to mid-Wales).

Last weekend was the largest Multipack meetup that we’ve had for a good while. As well as a good turn out of regular faces, there were also a large assortment of new ones, and despite some awkward seating arrangements and the lack of rugby being shown (the projector was broken) it was a very good afternoon.

Talking of rugby, I can only be pleased at the final England game in the Six Nations, however the disappointment at our general/earlier performance doesn’t inspire confidence. I’m prepared to be a bit more optimistic, but really, how did we manage to go and lose the Calcutta cup? Come to think of it, I’m glad the projector was broken.

I’ve got a mountain of forms to be filled out this week. With what can only be described as a marathon event of bureaucratic gymnastics ahead of me, changing one or two details with Companies House is clearly not as simple as I had hoped.

A client invited me to a business seminar earlier this week, and so I asked Will if he wanted to come along. We had to get over to Villa Park, but it was a good evening, and it provoked some in depth discussions about the types of work we are both involved in. I’m not one for schemes and things, but the psychology and profiling techniques were fascinating and I definitely was able to gain some perspective on my own situation right now.

I’ve made a couple of gem-like discoveries this week on the software front. BluePhone Elite has solved my problem of writing text messages quickly while working. I believe it can also allow me to take calls through the iMac too, but I’ve yet to figure out how to do that. It does pop up and tell me who is calling though. If there is one thing about phone communication that inspires a rage in me, it’s txting, especially when speaking is a more effective method of communication. Admittedly, there are times when a text works - a time, a number, a two word confirmation, but my inclination to create an essay or use long words make predictive text and tiny keys only confirm that these are the tools of Beelzebub. I bet he uses text messaging for every piece of communication.

The second piece of software that has solved a problem that until now I couldn’t explain fixes a niggling problem with my Macbook. I didn’t realise, but the having to wait up to thirty seconds for my laptop to go to sleep isn’t a consequence of age - it turns out that it has to save all the memory to disc at the moment. As a matter of course I put in the full amount of memory possible into all my computers, and didn’t realise this is why the process has become agonisingly slow of recent - it’s moving 2GB to hard disc every time I close the lid.

Well as a person who’s laptop spends more time on his desk than on the road, this is something I’m prepared to cut out, and with the SmartSleep preference pane the Mac now (once again) sleeps the instant I close the lid. Of course, on the move it’s more important to use the hibernate feature, so when the battery power drops below 20% it automatically turns it back on for safety reasons, but it’s bliss once again being able to flip the thing closed and put it directly into the carry case without having to wait for it to brace itself for some kind of nuclear disaster.