I have been a fan of  Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “trilogy” since I was about 12. I remember lying in bed listening to the radio plays on a crappy old transistor radio and I’ve read the books more times than I should probably admit.  So when I heard that Eoin Colfer had been asked to write a sequel to Douglas’ books, I wasn’t sure if liked the idea or not. I certainly wasn’t going to rush out and buy it.

Yesterday I was in Waterstones in Brighton helping my eldest daughter spend a book token she got for her birthday & I remembered that I had a voucher to spend too. I wandered in to the science fiction section, saw the Douglas Adams books & tried to rememeber the name of the guy that had written the sequel. I couldn’t think of it, so I spoke to a member of staff who said “oh that’s Eoin Colfer”. They didn’t have any of the hardbacks in stock & the paperback isn’t due out until the end of may. What the did have however was a few copies of the a numbered limited edition version of the hardback.
This little beauty had previously been on sale for £100 but was now reduced to a mere £10! As soon as I saw it I new I was going to be buying it. It’s a heavy card box with fake faulty “neon” lights  built in to the front that spell out the title of the book. Inside there’s a hardback copy of the book covered in a duck egg blue towel with “Don’t Panic!” embroidered on it in large friendly letters.

This is a must have item for any Douglas Adams fan’s bookshelf & there’s only a few left, so if you’re near a waterstones I suggest you go and grab one now. I doubt they’ll hang around for long at that price.

When I get around to reading the book I’ll try to do a post & let you know what I think of it.

life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it

Ferris Buller

The last time I blogged about my life I had just left my Job as Lead Front End Developer with Tesco Property Market. I’d been there for 2 years and to be honest things weren’t going the way I’d hoped, so I took a role with Madgex in Brighton.

Madgex are well respected in the web development community, they sponsor a number of tech events in Brighton. It looked like exactly the sort of role I’d been looking for & I was excited to join the team there. Then the recession hit. And Madgex ended up having to make dramatic job cuts & I found myself out of a job. I have to admit, I wasn’t actually all that upset – I’d been tempted for a while to go contracting but I’d never had the balls to go & do it. This was my chance.

So that’s what I’m doing. It does mean a bit of uncertainty & less time with the kids, but I am quite enjoying the variety.

What is remarkable is the number of comments moaning and bitching about the coverage that the Guardian gives to twitter. It’s true that they have given it quite a lot of coverage lately in the paper, on the website & on the excellent Tech Weekly Podcast, with good reason, and this is the reason: some people, maybe even a lot of people think it’s interesting.

The fact is I find twitter extremely useful. As a web developer I use it for keeping up to date with the latest industry news, it’s an excellent way to pick your peer’s brains & share your own knowledge.

Every day papers & news websites dedicate pages & pages to sport. I hate sport; I particularly hate football. So do I take time out of my busy day to write to the paper or post a comment on the website every time there’s a sport related story? No, I ignore it and remain blissfully ignorant. I guess some people just have too much time on their hands.

This year the solution hit me – rather than taking a load of adapter plugs I just took one and plugged a UK 6 way extension cable in to it.

I realise that this isn’t an earth shattering idea but it made my life easier.

So here it is, the fordie.co.uk – what do you think?

Incidentally, I’m still playing with font sizes and colours etc – I might be fiddling around these for a little yet.

Also, I have found one or two niggly little PHP errors so far, if you spot any of these of you have trouble using the site please leave a comment.

For fiftytwo o-eight I’m planning to post a new photo each week to my flickr account. The hope is that this will encourage me to spend a bit more time on my photography this year and who knows maybe even improve my skills.

I’m not exactly thrilled with the first photo, and I had to bend my own rules a little to take it but I didn’t want the first week to pass without taking an posting something.

The plan for the rest of the year is that I’ll take a photo each week and post it by the Sunday evening.

This year (2008) is set to be a year of considerable change. If all goes to plan we should finally exchange contracts on our house move next week and move by the end of this month. Being in the new house will make life much easier as a good shops and the nursery will be within easy walking distance. It also means that Isla will (hopefully) get in to the school that we want her to attend when she starts in September.

Personally as well as spending time getting our new house up to scratch I’d like to try and get back to the gym. I also want to get back into my photography a bit more seriously. So for the next 52 weeks I am going to try and update my flickr account at least once a week with one or more good photos I’ve taken that week. We’ll see how I get on, I realise that this is not the most exciting challenge ever but I wanted to do something and felt that committing to one photo a day would frankly be unachievable.

I also plan to blog a bit more regularly and maybe even redesign this site, just don’t hold your breath.

Blogged with Flock

Now that the website is live there is no reason that I can’t tell you about it. Tesco Property Market is a new site from Tesco selling homes in the UK. The site carries advertisements from Fish 4 which are added by Estate Agents, however the most important feature of the site is that it allows people to advertise their homes for sale without the need for an Estate Agent. For a flat fee of £199 users are able to upload all of their property’s particulars and up to 20 photographs to the website and have a signboard professionally installed outside their house. The website handles all communications between vendors and would be buyers from arranging viewings right through to accepting an offer.

I’ve been responsible for the front end development of the site over the last few months & I’m extremely proud to have been involved in this project – hopefully we’ll make a big impact on the way homes are sold in the UK.

Erin is growing up fast, she thinks her big sister is hilarious, here you can see the little comedy double act in action.

Now I have a lovely clean install of the OS and the system seems to be running a treat, I slowly installing all my software and running Windows update many many times – I should be totally back to normal soon. All that really remains to be done is a restore of all my important data from back up.