I’ve been thoroughly booked up the past few days. What with having a bit of a large night out on Friday with George, Will and Gwyz I was on surprisingly good form for Saturday’s Multipack, although I did avoid revisiting the beer.

Hosted entirely in Digbeth (just below Brum city proper) we had a really good turn out and I met a good number of new faces. Kudos to Mr Oxton who made a nice comment about me on his blog for the price of a Guinness.

Matt’s talk on ARIA was a nice little intro to a wider subject that I had previously known little about, whereas Bruce very neatly illustrated some of the finer points of HTML 5 as it stands and the political wrangling that always threatens with web-specs. Stuart rounded off everything with the most technical part - outlining the best bits of ‘new’ JavaScript and what we can look forward to from browser support in the future. I suppose it therefore was only fitting that he had co-ordinated with Apple to release the upcoming beta of Safari so soon afterwards… (I also quite surprised myself when I realised I had understood pretty much all of it).

Other things I took away from the day was a brief and sandwich-punctuated discussion about Microformats and Birmingham Social Media with Andy Mabbett; a chance to examine the new and neatly put together studios of One Black Bear; discuss wacky Japanese architecture with Jon Dennis and discover why exactly Tess was brandishing a thick PHP textbook at the last meeting. And of course it was great to see all the usual suspects as well. Photos here.

The only disappointment was that the sun didn’t last until Sunday but since then I’ve seen Raj, Tom and George, caught up on Lost and Flight of The Conchords (of which episode 5 is a cracker) organised go-karting for the weekend and been pleased by what the accountant had to say about the business helping to pay the rent.

Tomorrow I’m doing my annual attendance at the old school, answering questions on web design for kids about to pick their A-Level subjects. The buffet is usually excellent.

I’m also looking forward to the next couple of months. I’ve organised a trip down to Southampton on business, have a great piece of work coming up which almost makes me envious of myself (if that’s possible) and am eagerly awaiting delivery of rare book purchase (for me anyway) - the Typographic Desk Reference. It will nicely prop up the one other proper design book I own.

I think this photo most adequately sums up last Friday.

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It’s been a while since my last post. Around a month I believe, which is a fairly big gap by my standards. I believe twitter has something to do with this, but also a general lack of desire to write loads.

However it has allowed me time to contemplate the following three pieces of wordly-wise advice for you.

1. The speed limit on single lane national speed limit roads is 60mph and most people know that. If you think it’s 50mph, or 40mph, I suggest you re-read the highway code. Also if you don’t know it’s 70mph on dual carriageways, the same applies to you too. The government should take note; most people don’t understand the white disc with a black line through it. Perhaps it would be more sensible to put a number on all future speed limit signs so the whole thing is unequivocal. Sensible huh?
2. Gym members; if it was intended for that, they wouldn’t have called it a hair drier. Why you think anyone else wants to watch you heat your genitals while standing completely nude in front of a mirror is a mystery to me. Get it away from there before you do an injury to yourself. It’s not going to increase the size of anything, and even if it does, we don’t all want to have to watch.
3. If you’re installing iWork ‘09 and you had previously installed iWork ‘08, please remember that just because you installed it doesn’t mean the default program which opens a file has changed. I found this out halfway through a keynote presentation. Delete the old version to avoid and mid-presentation annoyances.

I’m not actually that much in a ranty mood, those are the exceptions to the rule. To counteract the negativity of the three points listed above, here are three positives from January 2009.

1. If you haven’t seen Slumdog Millionaire, you really should do. It’s very enjoyable.
2. If I had to recommend some music right now, I couldn’t say better than The Black Key’s last album (2008), Attack and Release. And what better way to listen to it than through free online music service, Spotify
3. The Simon Amstell interviews Eddie Izzard experience was great. The audio recording will be available as a podcast on iTunes shortly.

That is all for now.

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It occurred to me today that we are getting close to Christmas.

This may not have been much of a revelation for other people, yourself included, but for me it came a as a bit of a surprise. The few presents I have bought have been done so with the help of others, which has partly taken out the associated stress of shopping at this time of year, however it also means that so far I’ve not really drunk in any festive spirit.

I did fetch the tree down from the loft a number of weeks ago, and also think I saw some tinsel recently too. Other than that, exposure to truly Christmassy things have been missing to date. Even this year’s Christmas number one is not very Christmassy, but then again, I can’t remember the last time one was.

For the most part of this week I’ve been grappling with proposal documents, long days in London learning tag-based codes, eating pies, drinking in Stourbridge, spending hours getting a bulb fixed, and picking up my new chair from Rotherham, which gave me an excuse to see folks in Sheffield. It could have been any other week in the year.

My todo list in things has become far more static than it should be, and I’m now finding that although I’ve reduced the number of items ever in my inbox at any one time, these have simply been translated into list items.

But this isn’t a moan, more an observation. I’m now quite looking forward to a few days off and all that excess - I just wish this weekend had been a bit longer.

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I was pleased to discover this gem in the Stourbridge News this week. This free CV listing service has been running a while, but it wasn’t until this week that I noticed the fantastic social observation of my local area which the illustration provides.

Clearly the demographic illustrated here is a true representation of the cross-section of society which can be found in Stourbridge. If you have ever visited here you can always expect to see number of road workers, cleaners, doctors, office workers and police officers. What you might be more surprised to learn is that one in every 17 people in Stourbridge is an astronaut.

Another fact that you may not be aware of is that Stourbridge has a higher ratio of Ninjas to any other single profession in the town. Both red and white Ninjas live in the Dudley Metropolitan Borough, but of course, you wouldn’t know that because Stourbridge-bred Ninjas are very, very good at their job.

We also have a number of celebrities living here. Chef from South Park, Britney Spears and both Roy and Moss from The IT Crowd.

Clearly the most dangerous job in Stourbridge is being a nurse. Most nurses live in fear of the famous yet terrible brain-sucking monster, which of course eats their head like a creme egg.

I hope you now have a little more insight into Stourbridge and the sort of people who live and work here.

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I like Manchester, and on Saturday evening I found myself sitting at a low table with picking up cards with a beer in my hand. The best way to enjoy Manchester I think.

It was Mike’s birthday and just an overnight stop, but his new flat is very nice and a lot of people turned up to trash say hello, including Ben and Noel who I haven’t seen in an age.

As I’m off to Switzerland at the weekend, I’m going to have to slot in quite a lot before the week is out. New camera batteries should be en-route, but cold-weather clothing has yet to be arranged. Hotels booking are somewhat light on the ground also.

There was mass relief this morning as completed a fairly ugly integration project between two large systems. It’s all working now and I’m quite proud, although why it needed to be made so difficult in the first place is beyond me, and my client agrees.

I was once again annoyed that I’ve missed out on Eddie Izzard tickets. Four more dates were announced, but apparently not to the mailing list usuals and so lost out again. There are strictly a few seats remaining, but I don’t really fancy paying £65 to go on my own (not to mention getting down to London/arranging to stay the night too). I’m just keeping my fingers crossed he will do a proper UK tour.

Oh and it’s that time of year again, so the taxman has written me a lovely letter asking me for my money once more. Is it so odd that I just want it out of my account right now so I don’t even have to look at it mournfully for the next three months?

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Last weekend was the November Multipack and proved to be pretty packed out… we struggled to find seating big enough to accomodate us all at the Old Joint Stock so eventually moved on to the Windsor. There were some new faces along too which is always good, and I was able to interrogate Mark and Anthony about technical things, so pretty productive really.

Finally I got the opportunity to see Tim Minchin live on Wednesday at Huntingdon Hall in Worcester. It’s an odd building in as much as we initially couldn’t find the entrance, but the converted church made an interesting comedy venue (we we’re all sat tongue-and-groove in the pews) and it was a very enjoyable evening. I was a bit concerned about the acoustics initially as we we’re pretty much the last people to book seats and so were sat right at the back, but it wasn’t too much of a problem. I’d forgotten how hard it had been to get hold of tickets in the first place until I learnt the family next to us (oddly split up with us in the middle) had travelled down from Blackpool - a four hour journey one way - just to get the last few seats for the show.

And tomorrow I go to Manchester for Mike’s birthday. My last visit was exactly one year ago, and I have a feeling it probably will get as messy as last time (Mike is a little predictable when it comes to organising get togethers).

I thought this was quite funny.

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I don’t know anyone this side of the pond that didn’t want to wake up to hear that Barack Obama had won the election this morning, me included. I can only hope that he really can deliver change. For all the rhetoric of election time, it’s hard to know what the reality will actually be, but I remain very optimistic and very happy.

And to the other great victory this week, Lewis Hamilton got his reward for a fantastic nail-biting season, not least the final moments of the final lap of the final race of the calendar. My heart was in my mouth for the last three minutes of the Grand Prix - the most exciting race I can ever recall seeing, and complete restored faith in British F1 motorsport.

Not content with those two highs, I saw the new Bond film, Quantum of Solace last night with Tom and Raj. I’d attempted to lower my expectations to avoid disappointing myself, and tried not to listen to too many reviews, which was just as well as I came out more than satisfied. I will admit, it didn’t quite deal the punch Casino Royale did, but then again, we’re now a little more used to this Bond now and so know what to expect - just compare Casino Royale to Die Another Day and you’ll see what I mean. If you’ve yet to see it, my advice would be to ensure you go in in a mood to concentrate - I felt that considering it’s rated 12A, the plot required a fairly adult level of focus. Overall though, I enjoyed it.

Finally, I wish I’d upgraded to Expression Engine 1.6.5 a lot earlier - this flies compared to the version I was running before…

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