So what have I been up to?

• Working on yet another Glastonbury Festival related personal project, involving some crazy Google maps integration… well, maybe not that crazy, but I’m new to the maps API so it’s been taking a fair bit of my time up reading through the documentation and trying to work out how and if I can do what I want to do. I’m hoping that, unlike several of my other Glasto projects, this one will actually see the light of day!
• WPSynergy. Yep, this is still alive! After making the mistake of announcing our plans far too early (and not long before both myself and Jeremie took on some work that has kept us busy for the past year), I have been putting some of my time into building the main WPSynergy website, plus some themes to launch with. Annoyingly, we’ve also been let down by a couple of people – for example, I wasn’t actually supposed to be building the main website, but after 4 weeks waiting for a guy to finish it off before he disappeared off the face of the planet, this also fell into my lap. So yeah, this project is not dead – it’s simply been postponed until we/I have the time to get myself back on my feet and get the essentials ready for launch.
• Spending too many hours at my day job. Do you ever get that feeling that your entire daily routine seems to be get up, go to work, come home from work, sleep, repeat? That’s damn close to how I’ve been feeling over the past few months. The reason for this relates a lot to my next point…
• Having no car. Yep, Vlad the Vectra was finally retired after the head gasket started playing up and it started sounding like it was ready to blow up. Thankfully, 3 months on, I’ve managed to sort out a new motor – a 1999 Ford Focus Zetec. Might not sound like much, but I fell in love with Focus’ the year they were released (1998 I think) so this has been like fulfilling a mini dream for me!
• Moving house. Sure, the actual move itself was only a 2-3 day event, but as with the fun of renting, from the day I handed in my notice at the old flat I’ve had an average of 2 viewings a day. I had no concept of how much effort it took to keep a house tidy enough for randoms to trapse through every day, but it turns out its not easy feat.

So this is my life for the past 6 months. Right now I’m sat in front of a fresh Ubuntu installation at Lissa’s house (on a bloody 2mb line) waiting for Eclipse to install so I can spend some more time working on Modmat2, then monday it’s back to the grind.

So there you go – I’m not dead, just bloody busy.

So anyway, I’ve made a list of the things I’m aiming for in 2010 – in the hope that posting them publicly will encourage me to keep with them rather than risk the shame of quitting!

Finish all ongoing web projects

I’ve got his unfortunate knack of having these great ideas for websites/apps, getting them about 80% finished before I forget about it and it disappears into my ever-growing list of eclipse projects. I think I’ve blogged about it before and I’ve certainly moaned about it on Twitter, but in 2010, thats going to change.

First on my list are my commitments to WPSynergy. I’ve been working on polishing off the PigNews theme, a free magazine style theme for WordPress built around my side project, the SynTOF theme option framework, and plan to release the first beta version in the next few days. Then I plan to switch over to version 2 of OneRoom, a theme originally created by Jeremie Tisseau, and then finally onto version 2 of Modmat, a theme crafted by my own fair hands back in February 2008.

Sometime during then I also plan to launch my own blog redesign. I spent a week before christmas mocking it up on Photoshop and I think its looking pretty sweet, so when I get a few evenings free I’ll throw that together.

Then I plan to move all my sites off the Media Temple gridserver onto my Linode VPS. Once I’ve figured out how/where I’m going to keep everything backed up, it should be ready to go.

After that I have a couple of Glastonbury related projects to finish, including an interactive map (more details to follow) and a few others. Mostly stuff I don’t want to announce just yet.

Get my fitness back

When I was 21 – a mere 7 years ago – I was relatively fit. Over time that degraded through general neglect and smoking until August 2007 when I decided I’d had enough and signed up with Fitness First. After 6 weeks of 5 day-a-week gym sessions, I was already starting to feel better and I’d more than quadrupled the length of time I could run before my lungs gave out (remember kids, smokings bad, mkay?) until disaster – a freak accident and I broke my knee and my left leg was completely out of use for nearly 6 weeks. I worked on getting back to being able to walk normally again, but never pushed myself the extra mile – end result is I haven’t run or even jogged fully for over 2 years and my left knee is a lot weaker than it should be. I was an idiot in that regard, I admit, and 2010 is the year I put that right. I’m paying out of pocket for some more Bupa physio sessions and see what I need to do to achieve that.

Smoking, smoking, smoking

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve “quit smoking”. Its usually successful for a few months and then some event will just trigger it off again. Last time it was the day of Robs Wedding when I went into panic mode before I gave the best mans speech, and another time was the day I broke my knee.

So the problem isn’t quitting, its staying quit. I haven’t worked out how I’m going to achieve this yet – maybe invest in some hypnotherapy or something similar. Maybe check out the Allen Carr easyway clinics. I’ll think more about that another time.

Blog consistently

To be honest, I’ve promised myself every year since I started this blog that I’d post at least once a month, and until 2009 I managed that. My aim for 2010 is to not only post at least once a month, but try and keep it relevant – ie, I want to keep away from writing stuff just for the sheer hell of it. I do enough of that over on Twitter.

So there we have it – my aims for 2010. I’m quietly confident I can manage them, as they’re all things I’ve been promising myself I would do for a while. Whether or not I keep to them or not is anyones guess – I’ll report back in a year.

Its been a busy 6 weeks. Highlights include:

• Planning an 6 week project to fit it into a 5 week timescale – or at least it would have been if the people enforcing this timescale had any appreciation for whats involved and didn’t keep wasting time with meetings to discuss the same things that were discussed previous weeks. We now have 3 weeks and still haven’t been given the go ahead to start.
• Starting a wiki from scratch (more on this another time). I know wikis are collaborative things, but I feel like I need to get some content on it before I let it loose into the wild – I don’t think I’d contribute to a wiki if the creator hadn’t even put any effort in.
• Preparing for Robs wedding. Well, mentally preparing – I’ve never been a best man before, and to be totally honest I’m shitting bricks at the thought of giving a speech to a room of 100+ people. I’m not a public speaker!
• Writing a tasty little Twitter class for grabbing, caching and displaying tweets by search term (currently in use on the Twitterbury site).
• Continuing work on PigNews for the WPSynergy project.
• A couple of other personal projects (too early to announce just yet) and some minor freelance work.
• Periodically driving 200+ miles to see my lovely girlfriend Lissa, who has just started a masters degree in TV script writing.
• Playing Xbox – specifically Halo ODST. The firefight game mode is the 2nd most addictive thing I’ve been exposed to this year, just short of Left 4 Dead, and its slowly sucking up the small amount of free time I have left every evening.

So thats me. My plan for October is to work on finishing the things I’m on with, without adding anything new to the list. Easy on paper, not so easy in practice so lets see how it goes.

#1 – The Saniplus pump thing behind my toilet decided to break yesterday, and the plumber told me he couldn’t fix it until today (monday). I rung my letting agent today who said they’d sort it, and they haven’t. So I have no toilet.

#2 – I’ve discovered that as the pump isn’t working, water from the shower isn’t being pumped out either so the shower is filling up. Call me a fussy, but knowing the toilet and shower meet in the middle and neither are emptying has sort of put me off using it. So I have no shower.

#3 – I woke up this morning with the itchiest back ever. Couldn’t work out why until midday today, when all the points I’d been scratching suddenly turned into big red bug bite lumps. So Ive been bitten half to death, and the one thing I think could ease the uncomfortable itching is a shower – which isn’t possible!

#4 – My Virgin Digital box started playing games with me. If I get up and walk towards it, it goes crazy and starts acting like I’m jabbing every button on the remote and the only way to stop it is to sit back down & turn it off and on again. – not every single time, but I can do it a few times a night it seems. I debated whether I was going mad, but I’m now convinced its the box – I don’t know the ins and outs of how infrared works, but as the remote is infrared and I’m not carrying anything that broadcasts an infrared signal, what the hell could be interferring with it??

#5 – I made the mistake of having a cigarette on friday night, so now I’m back craving again. OK, more my own stupidity than bad luck but either way, I’m sat here feeling particularly on edge knowing I have a broken toilet, shower and virgin box I have to sort out tomorrow.

The one good thing to come from this was the discovery that taking the time to type out things that are annoying me seems to make me care less about them, like some sort of blogging therapy.

Anyways, I’m done. Off to watch broken digital.

</rant>

The picture on the left is the hill leading down to the main road – now officially a sheet ice slide.

Just to make things worse, my road has one exit and I’m facing the wrong way.

Can’t wait for tomorrow morning. Should be… fun?

Still, the fact that its Christmas eve and I’m not out finishing my Christmas shopping is a bonus… and a massive improvement over last years 4pm dash around the White Rose Centre looking for stuff for my dad.

And after 5 days festivities, I’m back in Leeds finishing moving to my new flat. Bit gutted that I can’t get Sky TV, owing to the 30 foot tree opposite the flat blocking the signal, but it turns out that if you ring Virgin and blag that you’re a “disillusioned Sky customer” who’s considering switching, they’ll offer you a pretty sweet deal. I’m looking forward to testing out the alleged 20mb broadband.

So anyway – enough of the procrastinating. Time to finish packing.

Merry Christmas everyone!

This time I went over on some ice and managed to twist my left leg underneath me when I fell. Same knee I broke a couple of years back, so it was already a mess. This just made it worse.

This actually happened last saturday, but after going to the doctors midweek I decided to go to the hospital later as it was still pretty damn swollen. I figured it’d be a quick check up and out the door.

4 hours and an x-ray later, they decided no bones were broken (although were strangely amused by the 2 screws in my knee from the previous operation). But as predicted, the swelling was too much to really examine it too much so Ive been booked in again in a week. Dammit!

I also got 2 shiny new crutches, at the cost of losing one of my 3 year old Glastonbury veteran crutches. That takes my total up to 5 now – 3 metal, 2 wooden. How depressing. But the worst part was that they’ve put me in some sort of velcro splint. Over the past 5 days its got to the point of me being able to hobble about on it with no pain, and now I’m worse off than I was 6 days ago – well, movement-wise anyway. At least theres no pain anymore – its nice being able to sleep at night!

Ah well, these seems to be a shrug-of-the-shoulders “it happens” moment. Work has sorted me out with a VPN so I can get back to working full time from home next week and I’ll have an online christmas shopping rampage this weekend, so neither of those to worry about.

I’ll be back on my feet in no time

This is my first flight for a few years, and already I feel like going through airport security is comparable to bending over and waiting to be shafted (excuse the expression!). I’m sure this has been debated many times before, but why a 150ml limit on liquids/gels? Bearing in mind a standard tin of lynx deodorant is 250ml, they may as well tell you not to bring anything, rather than the sarcastic ‘you should use roll on’ that the ever-so-helpful airport security suggested. Interesting that they’d prefer i brought a glass bottle of liquid than a tin of gas, but anyway. End result-i now have no shaving foam, shower gel or body spray. Bastards.

And don’t even get me started on the cost of long term parking… Scandalous!

It feels wierd leaving – especially since I worked about 2 years before that at a subsidiary company, Bailey Teswaine, and only having actually been in Yorkshire 7 years, its hard to remember not working for them.

I spent my time working on the company intranet, which was great. 50% was maintenance, which allowed for reading through lines and lines of existing code. Boring to some, but when its all new to you its a great way to pick it up. The rest was project work, which meant building apps for people who had a specific requirement for it – satisfying, because you know in 99% in cases it’ll make their job a little easier!! Plus because it was all internal, it allowed for a certain amount creativity you may not get working on a public facing site. All in all, it was a fantastic place to learn.

Cheers to Paul, Tez and Mark for teaching me a hell of a lot of what I know – especially Tez who showed me coding JavaScript doesnt always have to end with you banging your head off a desk – well, not all the time anyway. And cheers to them and everyone else – Browno, George, Bloomo, Penny, Dave et al – who kept me entertained day in, day out.

And most of all, thanks for the leaving present (above). Genius