Journal

Keep on moving

Well, it’s done and dusted – the London chapter is finally over. Today the removal van collected all of the stuff from the flat down there and should deliver it up here in Liverpool within the next few days. Hopefully.

It feels a bit weird that after two years down in the big smoke, I actually left in kind of a hurry. I’d got round to feeling that London was home, however temporarily – it just turned out that it was more temporary than I expected.

It’s like a few years ago when I good friend announced he was off to the ‘States for a while and we were all meant to go to the pub the night before he left. I think I turned up late for whatever reason and only got to see him for a short while. It wasn’t until a week or two later when I thought to myself that I hadn’t said goodbye properly. It brought back all the times we’d gone out or played footie in the park and I missed that more than I thought I would. It feels a bit like that with London.

Coincidentally the same friend is one of those I’m leaving behind in London – along with my cousin and a few other folk who I’ve come to play footie with in Hyde Park. And, to be honest, I was quite fond of the flat in South Ealing, too – all of the friends mentioned above were in close proximity and the surrounding area was quite nice compared to the other places I’d stayed in London. Heck, even walking through the cemetry didn’t seem so bad after I’d done it for a month or so. And the Corriander Leaf – man, that was a good Indian restraunt!

Ah well, onwards and upwards I suppose – I’ll be up for another night out in Liverpool later this evening. My cousin is on the train up here now, along with my girlfriend, so at least I’ll have some semblance of continuity in my life for the first time in weeks. By the end of next week I’ll have the furniture where it should be and most of the stuff unpacked… should be settled in by the end of the month.

In no time at all I’ll be ready to do it all again when our time is up in this flat.

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Journal

So far so good

Well, after a week in Liverpool I can honestly say it’s been quite good fun so far. The job has been going pretty smoothly – looks like it’ll be good hard work in the next few months, but I’m looking forward to doing something I’m pretty interested in, for a change.

So far I’ve managed to avoid “Cockburn’s Syndrome” – where you leave a job and your previous employers suddenly realise you’re invaluable before swamping you with phone calls and unwanted hassle. In fact, it’s a little too quiet – I hadn’t realised I made such a good job of the Intranet at my old place!

Anyhow, I’ve found a nice flat here in Liverpool which should do for six months or so until we find somewhere more permanent. I’m getting a bit sick of moving around all over the place. A couple of years of stability would do nicely, I believe – I’m not sure my computer desk will handle another move, never mind me.

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Portfolio

WipeoutZone version 2

www.wipeoutzone.com version 2Towards the end of 2001 it became obvious to me that the old WipeoutZone site required a much needed overhaul. There were nasty nested tables everywhere and the site was an absolute chore to update. The Flash navigation made me squirm every time I looked at it and the whole DR rip-off that I’d come up with before was less pleasing to the eye with every visit.

So, after making the decision to go standards compliant with the design I done away with all the tables, except for those which hold tabular data. The layout is handled by the style sheet and the code is as clean as anything I’ve ever done.

Yet again, Fireworks fell short of the mark when it came to doing the banner and Adobe Photoshop came to the rescue. Maybe with version 5, eh Macromedia?

Anyhow, the templates took about a week or so to come up with, plus four hard days of coding to convert the old pages over. I’m quite pleased with the result – it’s very fast and works well in all the leading browsers.

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