There has been plenty going on with me in the past few days. What with the completion and delivery of a piece important print work this week (with a Sunday to-press deadline) it wasn’t much of a weekend.

I’ve finally encountered the swathe of completions and launches for projects that have been ongoing (there are one or two anomalies that are yet to be mopped up, but on the whole things are wrapping up nicely).

Monday was no let up, heading to London for a meeting in South Kensington and an introduction to yet another exciting project. After all the formalities of work, I managed to track down probably my longest-term associate and friend (it’s hard to know someone longer than a person who you first encountered on the day you were both born - a day neither of us can truthfully say we remember) and we went for a couple of drinks to catch up on two years of life. Andy (we share the same name too) is an accomplished jazz musician, while I am a web type, but we’ve both ended up following the self-employed path. The number of coincidences between us including others probably are matched by an equal number of unrelated events, but I find it amusing how around 15 years ago (after a period of time when our two families had lost touch with each other), I was helping Dad cut down a hedge in the back garden of our new house, and we were all a little more than surprised to find that we’d moved in next door to each other. Despite all the odd gaps, the geographical differences and the rest, we always seem to manage to start conversations where we left off. It’s the only time I ever wonder whether your date of birth actually does have any possible influence on the way things pan out, and I’m certainly not one for believing those types of things.

Also today, quite surprisingly I came to learn that Dan had managed to inadvertently stumble across the co-founder of Tangerine design agency while organising some rental transport for him. Dan recognised the name of the complex where his customer worked, and mentioned he had previously collaborated with a design agency in the same estate. It turns out Dan’s customer was now working for the very same company, but had previously been attached to a rather more well known ID outfit.

Dan didn’t recognise the name of the agency ‘Tangerine’ (I could have told him who they were straight away), but the customer soon enlightened him that he had co-founded it few years ago with a bloke called Jonathan Ive. Had I been in the car I think I’d have a few more question. This opportunity was probably as close as you could get to achieving any kind of insight into the notoriously elusive designer’s method. Either way, I still find it highly amusing that Dan managed to get into a conversation with his ex-business and design partner, especially whilst doing something completely unrelated to design.

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.

Once again that day of the year comes around when I gather up all the bits and pieces from one of my previous travels, order it, catalogue it, mount it then file it in a binder. This is the closest I come to obsessive compulsive, but for the past five years it has been a bit of a ritual, and I notice from year to year the date I tackle this job gets further and further away from when I took the trip. This, of course, is not ideal. You start to forget things. But it also makes the process more enjoyable as you stumble back across all those little things that had completely slipped your mind.

The main bulk of each of these folders I compile is made up of thick wadge of photographs. Usually it can take one to three days to mount them all up, depending on the size of the haul, which gets larger every year. Thankfully, after my US trip in 2005, I managed to cut down the number of photos I actually got printed afterwards (no one apart from myself wants to shuffle their way through over a K of someone else’s holiday snaps) so I just got the salient ones done. Unfortunately I wasn’t so pragmatic about Tibet, Nepal and India, and there is a stack approximately two inches tall on my desk, yet to be tackled.

I would place the photos in slip-in albums, but the cost is prohibitive for what you get and you still have to put them in order. A maximum of 60-80 photos per album usually at between £15 to £25 a pop means that I’d be looking in the region of £250 to mount them up (let alone the cost of the photos), and that would span 10 thickly bound volumes. No, instead I mount them in plastic sleeves with self-adhesive photo corners, which of course also gives me room to insert things like tickets, leaflets, notes etc etc and can usually get it down to one heaving volume. It is a miracle of patience I’ve ever completed one, let alone five - and by the end of the day you are guaranteed a headache from the concentration. That’s why I only go proper-travelling once a year.

I’ve just completed Japan & Australia (2006), but have yet to tackle the latest batch and it’s quite daunting. Maybe I’ll leave that one another year…

Last weekend proved to be more work orientated than I’d normally like; not to say I didn’t enjoy it, just it wasn’t much of a break from the web.

On Saturday was the first Multipack of the new year and a good turn out. There were discussions of magnitude going on, and I think we made some important decisions. Either way, there has been a flurry of activity this week. Expect some announcements soon.

Sunday started badly at 4am when I finally drifted off to sleep. At 10am I was running a training event with some clients, which of course, was well planned except for the venue. In the end we found some big armchairs and sockets in The Talbot hotel and had four hours playing in HTML/CSS wonderland. It’s not the most riveting way to spend a Sunday, but at least it was painless. Unfortunately the odd schedule meant I didn’t manage to get over to the pool, which was probably the day’s biggest disappointment.

Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday were full of the extraordinary. I’ve been pushing the limits of my knowledge of servers recently, and also trying to break the back of a body of work that has been mostly enjoyable yet time-consuming. Anyway, most of that is under control now and I’ve had a string of new projects float over the horizon, so I’m feeling good at the moment.

Midweek I ventured down to London for a meeting and afterwards met up with Swanny who I managed to prise out of his office at 7pm. After a couple of drinks in a place where it was too expensive to buy bar snacks, I left for home.

Finally the post-new year social activity is taking off again and I’ve come out of the haze that surrounded the beginning of 2008 to establish some firm plans about what I want to achieve in the next few months. I’m looking forward to the challenges. I can’t believe it, but I’ve just realised that what I’m talking about are really just New Year Resolutions. I thought I didn’t do New Year Resolutions. Looks like I’ve been deluding myself.

Oh, and the Macbook Air looks interesting…

Only every twelve months do I upgrade my phone, so it is truly a ‘special’ delivery when the postman arrives with a little white note and a pen asking for my autograph.

This is the first time I haven’t really thought long and hard about which phone came next, I’d resigned to the fact that Sony Ericsson tend to make fantastic mobiles, and so plumped for the highest spec one they do in what I call the ‘work’, and they call the ‘K’ series. I don’t know what the K stands for, but much like CYMK, it doesn’t really matter as long as you know it’s important (the K in CMYK stands for Key actually).

I approached my contract renewal with the sole aim to keep my bill down yet gain as many minutes as possible. I have therefore, ended up on an 18 month contract for the first time. No iPhone for me anytime soon I predict.

The fact is, I only really buy phones for two reasons (excluding phone calls, obviously). The first is the camera. I could have gone for the N95 with all it’s bells and whistles, but even the owners who really should love the thing can’t say much nice about it. Much like Cameron Diaz in a chastity belt; everything you could ever desire is inside, but it’s just so damn hard to get at.

At the moment, 5 megapixels is king (that is unless you want to spend the GDP of a small African nation on a handset). As a person who in 2003 used to parade around with a 5MP camera as the greatest thing I ever bought whilst most people were still asking what ‘digital’ was, I feel slightly wary of my newest purchase. After all, it’s only 3.3 megapixels less than my DSLR, and in the 12 months since I bought my last phone we’ve gained 1.8MP on the previous version.

Anyway, I digress. Five million dots was the lowest I was going to settle for, so if it was going to be a Sony, it had to be this model.

The second major feature I need is synchronicity. My Mac’s, my phone - they both have to mirror all of my contact details for reasons including theft, loss and the knowledge that everyone I know is contactable no matter how drunk I am or what time it is.

Well all modern phones have that feature these days (Bluetooth), but the calendar and contact updating always impressed me on my W800i and K800i previously, so no reason to change what works.

So, I made a blind purchase. The guy on the phone offered me a deal I couldn’t refuse and although I’d never seen anything but a photo of the thing, I knew it was the handset for me.

Well, I may have been a little naive in not having a proper play beforehand. Although on the whole it is a very nice Sony Ericsson from the same mould as it’s two predecessors, it does lack a little in joined-up thinking. It’s not the software which has been improved upon - very well in most cases. It’s not the battery, SIM and memory stick access - a brilliant improvement. It’s not the display - brighter, more clear and sharper than ever. The main issue I have is with the keypad.

It maybe a ‘getting used to it’ thing, but my major bug bear is that although the keypad buttons are beautifully spaced, they are just about the same height as the amount of flesh required to squash-in when you try to press them. Hence, much like a overweight cat sitting on a remote control, the buttons are completely covered, but don’t actually press in.

My solution to this would be my nail (thankfully since I stopped biting them in India, I now have some), but the convex shape of the buttons means all but the most concave of fingernails can press them. This means that my rather ‘pointy’ and ‘nail-like’ nails slide around as though they’re competing in the Winter Olympics.

I do seem to be getting the grip of it, but it has taken a day or so. It will get easier with time, but after just picking up and playing with my old K800i again for five minutes, I think I will miss the big, hit-them-with-a-baseball-bat style buttons.

The other major button errors are the navigation keys. For the K850i, the joystick has become a thing of the past which is unfortunate if you like amusing yourself with Java games, because it’s not so easy anymore. However I’m not overly enamored by games, so I’m just trying to get used to the Big Blue Thing that replaces the joystick and loops around the 2 and 5 keys. It isn’t really bad, but still, bring the stick back - we’re in the middle of a 1980’s revival, we should be embracing these types of old-skool technologies.

The four (or two) silver navigation keys (depending on how you look at it) really are too small considering this a phone and accepting calls/hanging up are pretty important in my old fashioned view of things. However the biggest departure in navigation is the touch-sensitive (light-sensitive) menu buttons at the base of the screen.

Initially I didn’t enjoy them, but I’m pretty fond of them and their animations now. With no tactile response, it seems odd that you’d implement just three buttons using this technology. Then again, they didn’t use much logic in designing the rest of the keypad, so why start using those brains now.

Otherwise, they’ve taken a big step in the right direction. The camera is a real camera. It has ISO selection, metering, a proper mode switch, shutter release and on/off button on the side. The lens is now sensibly protected by a clear cover rather than the fantastically effective crumb and dust pit that previous models came with. It also lights up like Kit from Knightrider, which means if the spinning light ever dies on your Sky+ box you can just sellotape your K850i to the front of it with the shutter open and party on down.

Ok, so it’s missing optical zoom, and WiFi. It’s not really a cutting edge departure in design, and it’s sort of ‘gone a bit Britney Spears’ on the keypad layout. But hey, it’s new, it’s shiny, it’s a SonyEricsson and I’ve got so many more minutes now that I’m going to have to start making new friends just to mop up the call allowance.

Anyone who has had a discussion with me about my TV habits in the past six months will probably have heard me mention the BBC iPlayer. I signed up for a beta account the day they announced it back in the summer and was lucky enough to get immediate approval to start using it.

For me, ‘On Demand’ has been the most important advancement in the television watching experience for a very long time. I understand the hype, but have not yet really engaged with HD, digital recorders or services like Sky+ - I’m spending less and less time actually sat in front of a TV to watch programmes.

This is probably partially down to my lifestyle - the computer is always to hand and in most ways it delivers my DVD/video-watching experience in a far smoother way, and I’m not limited to when I watch what. Even when I do use the TV, Virgin’s Catch Up TV service is a regular player, and although I’m unsure why there are two extra & identical channels dedicated to just Virgin content, I tend to hit the big blue button (on the old Telewest remote) and browse through around a week’s worth of content.

The main problem I find with accessing On Demand content on the TV is speed. I’m used to zipping through menus at lightening speeds, and having to wait for slower-than-56k-modem-speeds for just a textual menu to load drives me up the wall. However, when you get there, the experience of watching something you missed two days ago rather than having to sit through forty minutes of some other drivel to wait a repeat to start, still wows me.

When I started using the iPlayer beta back in the summer, I was still using Windows mainly, and so it didn’t matter that I needed to download most of the programmes in big lumps (using the Beeb’s own peer-to-peer network). However, I knew that one day before the end of the year I was going to switch over to Mac, and with no sign of when support would be coming, it looked like I’d have to run the service on a virtual machine for a few months. In actual fact, no sooner had I installed Windows, I found BBC had suddenly made some of their programming available through embedded Flash players, but I still had to download some of the content.

It turns out it was just the beginning of a wider roll-out, and now everything (as far as I am aware) is available as a embedded video. Initially, I was a little skeptical about the quality - in the first week or two there were a few instances where the playback went down mid-way through a programme, but this seems to have been ironed out. I did wonder if the quality had suffered because of the streaming nature of the system, but after using the new Flash-based media for about a month, I can’t say I’ve really been bothered and the problems have become less frequent. It’s not like you’re having to watch it at a measly YouTube quality anyway (and I think that will remain a benchmark of TV-streaming for a long while).

The interface of the system has seen some changes since the beta launch of the pink and black iPlayer. I was initially concerned by the reliance on JavaScript in the interface, and had occasionally hit bugs which prevented me from getting what I wanted without having to refresh the page. The desktop application twinned with a web application approach that was used for the peer-to-peer element was a little bulky I felt, but no I don’t have to concern myself with that, the process has become far more lightweight and nimble than most video-delivery services; the BBC being lucky that it doesn’t have to include anything but the content, unlike feature-packed, advert-ridden, social-video-networks.

I can’t really fault the immediate benefit of a multi-platform, Flash-based, seven-day service, except that perhaps I’d like it to include programming from other networks. According to reports, plans are in the pipeline. I’m always disappointed to find Channel 4 doesn’t supply their content in a wholly Mac-friendly manner (try live streaming of Channel 4 or the 4oD service), but I know that we are still in the early stages of development of these media repositories, and further down the line it we will hopefully see more providers offering their content in the way the BBC is now doing. After watching iPlayer content in this new way, I would definitely advocate that this is the way forward with the medium. Those who still want to download (as long as they have a copy of Windows), still can.

And maybe one day we will see whole series back-catalogues being made available through these services. 4oD have a pretty good pay-for system for this already, but the BBC would have to provide the service for free.

The BBC’s listen-again and on-demand radio operations have also been poured very recently into the iPlayer mould, although the change is superficial at the moment. RealPlayer is still required to access any of the content, but I’m sure they will eventually take the lead from Channel 4 who have been pioneering a Flash-based system with custom playlists of programmes so you can create seamless radio experiences for yourself. Still in beta, Channel 4 plans to launch a number of new digital radio stations in the next year or so, but their beta channel (4Radio) is already available in this way.

Overall, the impact of the BBC’s iPlayer on my television watching habits over the past six months has been significant, and whilst I enjoyed 4oD as the first in it’s field I really don’t want the hassle of firing up Windows everytime I want to watch Grand Designs - I’d rather go and use Catch Up TV on the box. Online for mainstream television, the BBC iPlayer now leads the way.

(p.s. Anyone who knows a good way to control the iPlayer using an Apple remote and is reading this… I’d be very interested to know!)

It’s probably best to say Happy New Year at this point. Mine was spent in London, another cheap return ticket by train and plenty of amusement along the bank of the Thames.

Swan and myself started with a couple of beers in Seven Kings before heading into central london where we met with Devito and Ainhoa before finding somewhere to sit in a Wetherspoons somewhere behind the Tower of London. A bit of ameretto and a couple of hours later we took off again closer to the river, having a good little meander in and around walled gardens along the river and through the marinas before ending up outside the Lord Mayor’s office with Swan’s sisters and their respective boyfriends.

It was quickly decided to find some shelter (a bar) where we waited for the strike of midnight. We had stopped right outside HMS Befast, hoping to be able to glimpse the spectacular fireworks, but rather perceptively, we managed to avoid them completely. It didn’t seem to matter too much at the time though - we heard Big Ben, saw some flashes of light behind the City skyline and retreated back inside briefly to place one last order.

At this point Swan, Devito, Ainhoa and myself split away once more and took to scouring the backstreets for some final place to spend the early hours. Despite our best efforts to crash a party without tickets, we found places would let us in if we paid, so we did.

The rest of the evening was spent on a cultural exchange with a group of Swedish tourists. I now know that something that sounds like ‘schlips knutze’ is a tie with a knot, however I am struggling to find ways to work this into conversations. It took about four hours to get back to Swan’s and I didn’t get to sleep until 7.30am.

By the time I arrived at Marylebone at 3pm later on New Year’s Day to catch the train home I was feeling surprisingly awake, but after walking back from the station then fish and chips, I was out like a light.

A good start to the new year by my reckoning.