I’ve made it a habit in recent times to steer clear of mentioning actual clients in actual blog posts, but as so much time and effort has gone into the complete re-skin and slew of new features, it’s only fair to give this one a bit of a nudge.

RateMyPlacement is one of my big ongoing and often more intensive projects, and today/just now, we proudly launch version two. Hence why I’m still sitting on the edge of a cup of very black Spanish coffee, six hours after I drank it, and it’s just gone midnight.

For those familiar with the concept, this paragraph is needless, but for everyone else, RateMyPlacement is a place for students looking for, and who have returned from, internships and placements. It allows users to rank and share their experiences with future ‘placementeers’ and is a resource peddled across universities and placement offices around the country.

There are a few bolts to be tightened and edges to be deburred, but on the whole it’s there.

One interesting day follows another - tomorrow I’m in Cheltenham teaching GCSE kids how to design a good logo.

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On Saturday afternoon I was trying desperately to avoid getting on with things - the weekend isn’t for working and you can only wash the car so many times.

I quickly came to the conclusion that the cure for my boredom should be cheap, simple and quick to get into. It was at that point I drove to Southampton.

Maybe my plan didn’t meet all the aforementioned criteria, but it worked out just fine. The beautiful weather made for great driving and three hours and a bit later I was in a pub with Dan and Steve, who I’ve not seen for a good few months, and it’s been over a year since we met on their home turf.

On Sunday Dan and I played a sneaky nine-hole at the local golf club, had some lunch, bought him a Mac, watched Massa ruin his race at the GP then head on home in time for tea.

I was a little surprised how much I managed to eek out of the weekend. Usually, if I plan to do something big or chunky timewise, I am bound to think it must be tackled on Saturday morning otherwise it simply won’t fit, but I was wrong. A late Saturday departure and six hours driving in glorious sunshine there and back made the whole weekend last much longer.

I might try that again sometime soon.

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A fantastic result for, and congratulations to Adam today, who clinched the UK Formula Renault 2.0 Championship title in the last race of the season. Unfortunately I did get a chance to get down to Brands to watch it, but hopefully some tracks slightly further afield may make for some more interesting track visits.

On a similar note, if you’ve got two or three minutes for a stunning animation of the new Singapore F1 night circuit, check out this virtual track tour with Mark Webber and Sebastian Vettel. I recommend you download the full version and watch fullscreen for the most impact. Impressive.

This week I managed to get my paper, pens and craft knife out again, which always makes for an enjoyable but messy work experience. If only all web design was quite so hands on.

I’m also trying out Billings3 properly. Although I’ve been a Billings2 user for a number of months, I’ve actually still remained mainly on my own invoicing system, but I’m thinking if I’m going to spend the money on invoicing software (again) I might as well use more than the timer part of the software. Other people seem to be giving a positive response so far, and I’ve been pretty impressed, although I never really knew how it worked anyway…

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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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Not content with just a holiday this week, Will managed to persuade me to drive him, Henry and Taffy down to Silverstone today for the penultimate race of the UK Formula Renault season. Luckily we had additional passes today, which meant the full BRDC hospitality. Spent most of the day in the Clubhouse surrounded by the driving elite (Damon Hill etc). You can’t complain.

Adam suffered mixed fortunes, finishing second in the first round, but then unfortunately succumbed to some really bad luck in the second round which means it all comes down to the next two races.

The final meet of the season is at Brands Hatch in a few weeks time, when the Championship will conclude. I’m not sure if I’m going yet, as it’s a bit of a trek, but either way I’ll be watching carefully - it’s set to be a nail-biting finish. Come on you Christo.

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A week away in Spain last week was very much deserved; a chance for some respite and to catch some rays after our miserably wet summer. I went about this with gusto and torched my chest on the first day. Result.

Despite the pain, Sean, Ryan and myself set about the Asturian town of Gijon (North West Spain) and found ourselves wallowing in seafood and the local cider, which is poured from a height and swilled down quickly. We even managed to fit in some beach prowling, tapas chewing and an eventful Iberian musical experience (which included beer, The Go! Team, a bull fighting ring and some early morning violence).

In the second half of the week we stayed with Ryan’s girlfriend Aihnoa at her family’s holiday home further along the coast in Llanes (neighbouring the town of Poo). More seafood, more cider, drinking games with the locals, a failure to grasp the language and some swimming in the sea later, and the holiday was over very quickly and I spent a further four hours in the car driving back from Essex.

It was all suitably fantastic.

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For all the years of cheap lager drinking that went on at university, I have always preferred a pint of something with some flavour and body to it, so I’m a little surprised that I’d not made it to a beer festival before, but then again I didn’t really know anyone who was interested.

It’s become apparent in recent months that George is a very big fan of proper beer, as is Tom, and they both are fully paid up CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) members, and I jumped at the idea that a Saturday afternoon could be spent in a tent in the middle of Worcester Racecourse surrounded by a silly amount of good quality alcohol.

It turns out it was a bit of a washout outside (though not as bad as last years complete submerging of the festival in the floods) so most of the time was spent hopping between the occasional bit of hard flooring over the mud, clutching at the ever-precious sampling glass.

I really don’t know how many barrels were in the place, but there were a lot - and a massive choice of bitters, milds, porters, ciders, perries, pilsners etc etc. I’m not exactly sure how much we got through in the four hours we were there, but needless to say we didn’t have many tokens left between us and it certainly was very enjoyable. Strangely enough, I didn’t feel it at all this morning.

Might be tempted to do one of those again in the future.

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