Quit your day job. Go on. I dare you.

Chiavari, Italy

listingslab — Tue, 13 May 2008 14:30:06 +0000

I love Italy, me. Three days down on the Liguria Riviera, just south of Genova was exactly what I needed. Want to see some photos?

And the answer is…. 119

listingslab — Tue, 13 May 2008 07:52:01 +0000

From 9am on Saturday until 9pm Monday evening my email inbox received 119 messages. That breaks down as follows;

37 General spam (the usual porn and pills crap)
29 Robotic Spam (automatically submitted robotic link building crap from the various web forms that filter down to my personal email address)
24 Normal clutter (newsletters etc from companies I’ve bought things from, or signed up to for whatever reason)
5 Phishing Scams (fake emails from banks/paypal etc asking me to login so they can steal my identity)
3 Nigerian Scams (people asking for my bank account details so they can send me zillions of dollars)
11 FaceBook Spam (people tagging me in photos, friend requests/updates & the like)
7 Service updates (from companies I do actually buy services from, usually giving me updates on those services)
2 New Business Contacts (from people who are actually looking for flash or drupal development services)
1 Personal Email (from a real, live friend of mine in the UK who was actually sending me an email)

And that’s before I checked my RSS reader which had 213 new items, but at least I can simply unsubscribe from RSS feeds. And to be fair, most of those entries were some bloke I used to work with who went to Florida on holiday and uploaded the entire contents of his camera to flickr.

Off on our ‘olidays

listingslab — Sat, 10 May 2008 07:32:13 +0000

We’re off on our holidays this morning. Just a short 3 day camping trip down to Portofino in Italy. I bought a Quechua 2 second tent and a few other necessities yesterday - including the coolest thing ever…. a little electric fridge for the van which plugs into the cigarette lighter. I’ve got some basic dive equipment with me & I’m going to get into a bit of free-diving for a few days, eat great Italian food and increase my tan from my current farmers tan (face & arms only).

So we’re off. I’m going to turn my phone off, not check my emails and generally unplug and relax. I wonder how many emails I’ll have in my inbox when I get back. 100? 200? 500?

Life admin needed

listingslab — Thu, 08 May 2008 11:54:11 +0000

Ever had that feeling that your life is coming apart a little bit and you need to get back on top of things? You car’s dirty, rusty & in need of a being a bit fixed. All your clothes are piled up in the corner waiting to be washed. You haven’t opened your mail for a month and there’s no food in the house. After a prolonged period of BBQ’s, drinking and parties to mark the end of the winter I’ve been doing a bit of life admin over the past few days.

Yesterday was the day to go and find a lawyer. I’m not in trouble or anything - I just needed to get a document notarised for a a German thing that’s going on. But as it happens I have been wondering how to find a French lawyer for a while now. I need to set up a French limited company this summer and I’m also planning to buy some property. The chap I met yesterday in Sallanches tells me he is known as ‘The EnglishNotary’ here in the Chamonix valley. Not because he is English, but he speaks it perfectly and has over 200 Ros Bif clients on his books, so hurrah. He’s the man.

Next the van. I took my skis and winter equipment out of it for the first time since December, cleaned out the inside, washed it, oiled it and generally sorted the thing out a bit. I’ll take it in for a little service in good time, but just for now a bit of air in the tires and a wash is all it needs for the weekend when I’m going off camping in Italy for a few days with my girlfriend. Just through the Mont Blanc tunnel & down to the coast, it’s only 3 hours or so away. I might even get the chance to do a dive two.

Now if I can just get on top of the work I’m doing, get my washing done and stop getting ridiculously drunk all the time…..

New Sony Video Camera

listingslab — Tue, 06 May 2008 11:40:31 +0000

I love my new camera, me. It rocks. It’s still on the Mini DV format, which is great because I’ve got piles of DV tapes from my old camera and they work beuatifully on my new one. I can also share tapes with other people who are shooting on smaller, consumer cameras. And it looks cool too.

The best thing is that it is High Definition. HDV is an inexpensive high-definition video recording format which uses MPEG2 compression to fit HD content onto the same DV or MiniDV tapes originally developed for standard definition recording. The compression used results in some quality compromises compared to higher bandwidth HD recording formats, but has still proved useful for many purposes including several popular TV shows. more info here

High definition is cool because it looks good on the big, fat tellys people have these days. Of course I’m going to have to procure a big fat telly for myself soon, but in the meantime my mate in London put me onto this site called Vimeo which is a little like YouTube, except it allows uploading of High Definition content. It’s prO. So I’ve uploaded my film form the weekend as HD to see what happens. Here it is. You like?

10th Chamonix Freeride Day

listingslab — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:15:15 +0000

I bought a new video camera recently and havebeen making films for a few days. Incognito as you can tell from the picture of me at the Marmotton Bar yesterday afternoon. You int sin me.

Click on the picture to see the film on youTube

May Day Bank holiday

listingslab — Fri, 02 May 2008 13:01:28 +0000

This is where it all ends. It’s May Day bank holiday and is now officially- at last- Spring. At least after the weekend, when it’s the grande montets freeride day. Loads of fun, and probably quite drunken. Plus the after parties that night. Wicked.

In France, on MayDay (aside from not a shred of work getting done, natch), the traditional thing to do is to buy a posy of spring flowers from one of the many people selling them in the streets. I think you enjoy them for a day and then plant them outside to start off your garden for the spring. Here’s mine.

CerosMedia 2.0

listingslab — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:19:17 +0000

I haven’t been writing my blog this week not because I’ve fallen into a crevasse, but because I’ve been writing code. This was no pineapple birth. OK, so there was some raised voices at the end, but c’est normale huh? This puppy went live the day it was supposed to. And how.

This is the best website I’ve ever made. It wasn’t designed by me, or even conceived by me, but I made it. I based the functionality on an up to date drupal 6.2 installation. Messed with it as little as possible. Changed look and feel and added new flash/drupal integration technology that has hitherto only been thought of. Never done. Which is where my fee comes in. I can’t say how much it costs to build a website like the one below, but it’s non-trivial to me.

Have a look at the website now - and tell us…. by contacting cerosmedia.com or listingslab. Were you entertained?

Does anyone know?

listingslab — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:45:12 +0000

Does anyone know if you can wash cats? My one seems to be getting a bit smelly.

So. What’s next?

listingslab — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 12:11:43 +0000

So the skiing’s nearly done. The lifts are still open, but the snow is like glue now. There’s still good snow up high and the touring is good, but to be honest…. I think I might be finished skiing for the season. There’s the end of season party at the top of Grande Montets next weekend, and who knows…. perhaps I’ll find a bit of time to go touring at some point, but I’m really I’m done. I’ve started to think about going diving down on the Cote D’Azur in May, surfing in Mimizan on the Atlantic coast later in the summer and obviously there’s plenty of climbing and mountain biking here in Cham over the summer.

Now it’s time to work. I’ve been flat out for 3 or 4 days now, cranking out a website for a client who is exhibiting at the Internet World Expo early next week so until that project is done I reckon I’m going to be pretty busy working. It’s a great site though - my first proper commercial site using a flash display layer linked to a drupal CMS system. I can’t wait to show it off here on the blog when it’s ready.

Other than work there are still the parties. There’s a gap at the moment, which is probably just as well. Fred’s birthday the other night turned messy & there’s plenty more where that came from.