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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You may have read in recent days that somewhere under the Franco-Swiss border, they are currently powering up the world’s largest and most advanced light-bending doughnut, something called the Large Hadron Collider (or LHC for short).

If the warnings of impending world-annihilation due to accidental black holes and that type of thing have got you cowering under your bed covers, then you’re sadly overlooking the real issue. Just because this is arguably the greatest threat to mankind so far, it doesn’t eclipse the fact that is going to jeopardise where my website shows up in Google.

I very much doubt that Professor Peter Higgs was thinking about me and my Google placement when he sketched out his picture of the Higgs Boson in 1963, but that’s exactly the type of systemic, sloppy and myopic academic attitude that I’m talking about.

Until now I have been lucky enough to maintain a healthy and respectable place in the Google search for ‘Higgs’ - usually somewhere around page four or five on the .com side of things (higher on the .co.uk). But even so, I’ve always played second fiddle to the elusive Higgs Boson or ‘God Particle’ - it fills up about forty of the results ahead of me, and it doesn’t even ‘exist’ yet.

I’ve not made a fuss about it before, but all I’m saying is that if you decide to do a few sums which one day you plan to swap for a Nobel Prize, my view is that it’s bad form to wait forty-five years to go and claim it. It’s like redeeming a book token you were given for the Christmas of 1993; you simply should just accept it’s probably expired by now. Clearly, if you really wanted a book in the last fifteen years you’d have used it already. QED. 

I suppose the real problem isn’t Peter Higgs. It’s a guess, but I assume there’s probably some extremely convoluted family tie between us back in the 1500s or something.  I can’t therefore blame him out of a strong sense of family loyalty, and as it might be a bad idea to piss on the bonfire of the only member of your family who is likely to win a Nobel Prize this year (again, I wasn’t asked) I’ll blame the entire world’s media and scientific community instead.

Just because we get to the brink of the last major breakthough in particle physics, it doesn’t mean journo’s should go around writing long and informative articles about it willy-nilly. Some of us run respectable web design businesses and we’re trying to make a living. All of us have accidently Googled our names weekly (don’t deny it). All this publicity must be very nice for Professor Higgs (I’ll call him Uncle Pete from now) but who really reads all that that sciencey stuff anyway? There’s only so much room on the internets anyway - you’d be far better filling it up with my websites than some old tripe about a little bit of an atom which, by the way, if you dropped you’d never find again unless you had a 27km length of pipe and the GDP of a small African nation. Even then what are you going to do with it? It’s too small for anything useful anyway.

You might think I’m bitter. You might expect that I’m hoping that they never find that damned particle. You might think I’m concerned that I might get pushed onto page six of Google. Well I’m not. I’m just expressing the correct opinion that, like this theoretical bit of an atom or the guests of Jeremy Kyle, I have human rights too. It’s clearly and completely unjustified that one should be forced down the search results just because someone happens to have spent the best part of half a century theorising then proving the fundamental basis of science and the universe.

I don’t expect much sympathy, but just put yourself in my shoes. How many times in your life have you ever had to go head-to-head with something called the God Particle? A particle. From God. My guess is that if there is only one other person who understands the Google search algorithm as well as Larry Page and Sergey Brin, it’s probably Him. How can I, Andy Higgs, be expected to compete with that? There isn’t a SEO website in the world that tells you how to beat that sort of thing.

It’s totally unfair on me.

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I think I knew this day would return, but I had sort of hoped it would happen a bit more slower and obviously than last time, but it didn’t.

On Tuesday Will was using the Macbook for some notes when it suddenly froze up. I shut it down and left it after being unresponsive for over half an hour (really unusual) and when I started it back up the next morning I was faced by the flashing folder of doom.

So I knew it was curtains, but thought I’d better just check, and all the tricks I learnt from the last this happened (a faulty drive going in the first weeks of having the laptop two years ago) just confirmed it for me. Dead drive.

For those curious to know how you can tell whether you’ve got a pretty nasty situation:

• Incredibly long start up wait then the flashing folder of doom (comes complete with question mark)
• Rebooting takes no effect
• Holding down T while booting and linking to another machine via Firewire: if it fails to show a big firewire symbol on the screen/it’s non-mounting as a disk-type device on the other machine
• Booting from DVD setup disks and running Disk Utility demonstrates no reference to the hard disc, only the mounted DVD
• Additional clicking noises are not a good sign (the stylus may have collapsed or similar - potentially scratching the disc face)

If you meet this criteria, you’re probably in for some fun and games.

Luckily, I’ve been using SugarSync for a month, which silently syncs everything up to a big S3 vault, so I’ve lost very little thankfully. That’s damn good timing though - there were some critical files still on there from the last time I remote worked; this time last month I’d have lost it all.

The only other thing affected was my calendar and address book, but luckily I also run a regular automated iSync (using Proximity and an AppleScript) which keeps a complete and up-to-date version of both of these on my phone. Still, it’s a hassle having to transfer it all back into the appropriate multiple calendars. I’m going to start using gCal I think.

Anyway, the new hard drive with five year warranty is in the post. All I’ve got to do now is wait for the fun of installing and configuring every single app again. Hurray.

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It’s not often I have bad days, or even pretty awful days - I generally am upbeat even if most things conspire against me. I like to think I’m a committed optimist on the whole. If I wasn’t, I don’t think I’d be doing the things I’m doing, or enjoying myself at all.

It therefore comes as a nasty shock when you have one of those days, and today I feel has been a pretty abysmal one. Shit, you might say.

Unfortunately if your curiosity has peaked, I’m not going to divulge exactly why today has proved disastrous - needless to say, what started as bad, just got worse. Even the things I would normally brush aside as those annoying day-to-day facets of life, but each one of these tiny things just prickled so much more today with everything else going wrong. It was like falling off a motorcycle; the initial experience of hitting the ground really hurt, but to add insult to injury you rolled off the road and into a ditch full of nettles, and then found you were sharing it with Hannibal Lecter, a canteen of sharp cutlery and a bottle of chianti.

The one positive I’m aiming to take out of this is that I haven’t had a really bad day for a very long time. The last one this bad was likely six years ago. I know that seems extraordinary, but most of the time my off-days are interspersed with glimmers of joy. Today lacked that little luxury.

I think perhaps I may have even predicted this. I couldn’t sleep last night, and that’s pretty rare too. I also knew exactly what was going to go wrong (at least for the first part of the day) - all the other stuff that happened after just appeared to be the bonus ball.

Tomorrow should be better, but there is still dread looming. None of the problems thrown at me today have been resolved, so I’m going to do the best I can, then sloop off to London for some catharsis.

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About this time two years ago I encountered my best practices epiphany, when in a whirl of blog posts, articles and university modules I managed to haul myself onto the table-free markup bandwagon.

At the time there was a frenzy of community based activity, and even if a lot of other people had made the conversion to high-quality code before me, I’m sure there were also a lot more who followed after.

I loved the engagement, the semantic pedantry, the arguments, the twists and turns through the intricacies of the markup, which by all accounts had turned out to be a much larger tapestry than I might have previously believed. This empowered movement has been one of the web industry’s greatest achievements to date, and it’s effect seems to have manifested itself into the lifeblood of most web professionals today.

However (and there is always a however), I came to realise soon enough that this was a phase and not an era. This level of frenzied output would eventually be stifled by a number of factors. Ever-increasing, ever-more critical audiences meant that the pace of discovery and analysis quickly reached a boiling point and saturation occurred. We ended up running out of useful things to say on the topics of HTML and CSS. Whereas a small group of people had championed and educated the masses previously, the masses were now looking for their own slice of web pie, and the advent of Web 2.0 was the real world consequence of our new found knowledge and confidence with our technologies. It was like Ug had been making sparks for years, but had only just discovered how to arrange kindling.

The effect was a revolution that was probably the most bloodless in history. Ever.

I don’t know anyone who has been put out of work by Web 2.0 (I’m talking creatives, not entrepreneurs), and it seems that some focused retraining is really all it takes to make the leap. It’s not like the industrial revolution when your Spinning Jenny suddenly needed to be replaced; we even had the luxury of knowing our equipment was still adequate and the training was completely free (especially if you knew how to use a search engine, and most web professionals don’t feel they even need to include that skill on their CV these days).

This was all part of something big. It wasn’t just about clean code and semantics. Nor was it wholly about getting your styling to work in every goddamn, picky version of Microsoft’s browser. It was about a general step forward which brought us nose up against the glass bottom that is Genuine Progression.

Staring at the arse of Genuine Progression is also where we left Ug. Ug is a simple chap who has very recently learnt how to light a fire. Even before he mastered how to create it for himself, he knew what could be achieved with it. He saw it warming things, destroying things and cooking things. Ug is harbouring big ideas for his new skill, but frustratingly he doesn’t seem to be able to execute them.

For a start, Ug wants to make a bonfire with a Guy on top. The problem is that King James won’t be born for another 8,000 years, and no one has a clue how to make sculpture because ancient Greece doesn’t even exist yet. Ug knows what he wants, but he just can’t do it. He also pines for wonderfully sqidgy, sweet, melt-on-a-stick marshmallows, but despite having more sticks that he could ever desire, he sadly lacks the powdery pink and white confections needed to make the experience truly ‘complete’. Roasted sticks just don’t taste as nice.

And this is like us, the web professional in early 2008. Save for a few minor distractions and spending time taking a Polyfilla-like approach to smoothing out the gaps in our knowledge, we can’t actually go much further without improvements to the technologies we work with.

There are two monumental events that still and always will get web pros excited (aside from LOLcat). The first is the release of a new web browser. This really gets us going, especially if anything vaguely interesting has been done with the rendering engine. Wowsers at browsers.

The second things is far more important, and far more rare. In fact, it is so rare that at the going rate, a web professional might only ever encounter four of these events in their entire working life. What I’m talking about is a Specification Upgrade. Oh how we lust for a Specification Upgrade; waiting for some acronym-prefixed-decimal to increment just once is like hanging around for the phoenix to figure out how to begin the ignition sequence.

So is this going anywhere? Good question. I’ve always been interested in what we can do to improve the web, and more than happy to get into discussions where we debate future progress. After all, those choices we make now will affect our direction in the future. But in recent weeks and months, I’ve become bored of the debating floor. Far too many superfluous opinions make making judgements cloudy and decisions hard to make. Bitterness between parties is prevalent, enlightened argument is either lacking or overflowing - either way, no one seems to be able to agree on anything - and I’m not talking major divisive issues - I mean anything.

Our next scheduled monumentals are Firefox 3, IE 8, widespread adoption of CSS 3 and then finally HTML 5. The first two are on the radar (albeit with a wedge of time between them) but the last two are not. The bickering, the in-fighting, the lack of direction, the flawed design by committee route means that a decade will pass between the recommendation of 4.01 and the ordination of new version (and then we can look forward to the adoption process afterwards - like an after-party, but one that goes on for just a little longer than eternity itself).

Essentially like Ug, I am disillusioned with staring up the backside of progress. We’re waiting for a monolithic system to finally display some kind of life and allow us the space we need to fly some new kites, and which ultimately is the reason why the entire web community for the foreseeable future will continue to waste dedicate all it’s creative resources and energy to having a massive free-for-all arguments on topics like the use of a meta tag.

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Yesterday I had a request to set up some hosting by a friend of mine. He does some small web design projects for local businesses and regularly asks for a small dollop of space to host the sites.

Once in a while you come across a great example of someone not understanding how the web works, and when he told me the domain that this newest client wanted to host, I couldn’t help but cringe at the address they’d picked.

The domain starts http://www.a12one … (I’ll leave the rest out to spare their identity), and despite my friend’s explanations that the logic was faulted, the client had come to believe that, because it starts with ‘a1’, it will appear at the top of Google searches.

Ah if only. I think you would find if that we’re the case. Being A A J Higgs it would have tangible advantages for me. Needless to say, I can’t really see it happening, although it would be quite amusing soul destroying to have to press the ‘o’ in Gooooooooooooogle approximately 24 billion times to get somewhere near the Zs pages. Poor Xerox, Yellow Pages and Zoo Magazine; they wouldn’t fare well.

As an additional punch to the groin, I have a feeling that mixing letters with numbers might cause a migraine like headache when recalling the aforementioned address. It could only have been ‘improved’ upon by inserting hypens at every available opportunity.

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After getting onto this topic before, some of my friends told me to calm down. Brace yourself for an opinion.

I was amused this morning to hear that they had pulled the promotional video that goes alongside the campaign due to reports of induced epileptic shock . I made a similar comment yesterday, the difference was that I joking at the time.

Admittedly good, strong brand design is hard, and sometimes you need to be downright adventurous. A really rule-breaking design thrown in amongst the other designs can be used as leverage with your client to get them to accept something slightly more bold than their conservative attitude might normally allow. However it has dangerous consequences, especially when either the client says they really like the wild one, or when the branding agency gets to absorbed by their own ‘genius’.

I think this is probably a case of the latter.

Eighties rave culture has seen somewhat of a renaissance in the past few months, but this is nowhere near long enough to establish that the trend will continue for much longer (especially five years until the games eventually starts). Also, whereas in youth culture acceptance of something radical is possible, universal sporting events are not a place to flex over-zealous creative muscle.

By their very nature, sports are stalwarts of conservatism and not prone to spontaneous alteration (e.g. rules, the rare admission of new sports, the subtlety in the number of milliseconds between newly broken world records). The Olympic brand needs provide a universal appeal, worldwide, and although attempting to be daring, this one desperately misses the point.

I’m not adverse to seeing something truly innovative, but unfortunately this brand may leave a bitter aftertaste for years to come, a reminder of public spending wastage. White elephants are a speciality of recent UK government; the Olympics has already run three times over budget (VAT, doh!). With �400,000 being spent on a re-brand (a large chunk of which will have been spent on market research) it only goes to show how self-absorbed (and plain wrong) a consultancy can be; a good example of how nobody involved seems to be a good judge of value for money. This is not just my opinion – I’m referring to the hundreds of thousands of complaints and overwhelming public opinion that the design is “a bit crap”.

Although I think popularity around this will grow in the short term, (or indifference will culture) this was a bad decision, too risky, and possibly heading to be the appropriately lasting icon of a publicly-funded financial sieve.

There is a difference between being clever and being abusive with design principles, and the only other rebrands I can remember that garnered such a negative public riposte were when Coca-Cola changed it’s name and when Post Office became Consignia (and guess who was responsible for that). Both lasted five minutes. Interesting to see if this one sticks (it will, at least for a while).

It makes designers look like we don’t know what we’re doing.

Update: I’ve just discovered Wolff Olins (the London 2012 Olympics brand agency) were also responsible for the very short-lived Abbey National rebrand four years ago (you probably won’t even remember it – see above).

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