Posts about Loose talk

In no particular order:

I can remember the first cigarette I ever smoked. It was 1983 and on my way to art foundation one day, I stopped my car at Kettering railway station and bought a packet of ten Benson & Hedges and a box of Swan matches. I pulled on the cellophane band, tore off the top and flipped open the golden box. I’ll never forget the smell of tobacco that rises from a freshly opened pack or the bitter smell of a match. I slipped a cigarette between my lips, struck a match and lit it.

After last week’s episode of Unfinished Business, Laura Kalbag wrote two good posts on mentoring.

Yesterday, when I appeared on The Web Ahead, I issued this challenge to anyone who complains about hearing familiar faces speak at web conferences:

I spent last week in Geneva. Nothing out of the ordinary about that as I’ve been working there fairly regularly over the last couple of years. But last week was my birthday week — Tuesday. 47. A new wallet. Thanks for asking — so they had to be very special people to persuade me to spend the week with them. They were. Good honest folk.

After I posted my review of Hammer – the simple to use, GUI app that helps me design with HTML – this week, several people tweeted a few alternatives. Oooh, oooh, let’s go look!

Although Adobe have said nothing officially, their silence says it all. Unofficially my little birdies tell me that Fireworks is not being updated for retina displays so the tool I’ve used and loved for a decade or more is effectively dead.

Something strange happened to me on Twitter today.

With the help of Tapbots’ Netbot client, it looks like App.net might be gathering steam. If App.net’s your thing, you’ll now find me there too although I guess I’m not alone in being unsure when I’ll use App.net instead of Twitter.

Follow me on App.net. (Damn that name isn’t getting any easier to say.)

The responsive pattern library is meant to be a comprehensive collection of responsive interface patterns created by and collected for the community.

Here’s more from Brad Frost. I want his dog. So badly.

Adobe announced yesterday that Creative Cloud customers (like me) will receive an upgrade to HiDPI and Retina Display Support. This sounds like great news if you’re a Photoshop or Lightroom user — two apps that will receive the update first — but not if your everyday design app is Fireworks, not Photoshop. There was no mention of when (or more likely if) Fireworks will be upgraded.

It’s been a mad couple of weeks since I came back from holiday. This week onsite with my friends at STV and the first spent head down on another project. But before I could get back to work, I had to set up our new studio.

Making screenshots for the some portfolio panels for my new site design — It’s out on Wednesday kids — I came across a problem. I couldn’t get screenshots sharp enough for a retina display because I’m snapping on a plain ol’ Macbook Air.

Damn.

I haven’t posted lyrics for a while, but it seemed appropriate this week, both with the news (no pun intended) this week that Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson face charges relating to phone hacking and the fact that I put the final, final, final touches to my design for the upcoming Hillsborough Independent Panel’s report into the Hillsborough Disaster that will be launched in September.

My beloved Fireworks, now in CS6, encountered an error yesterday and refused to save. My only option was to Force Quit the app and lose half an hour’s work. Hey ho.

Then I found out that auto-save might have helped me, maybe lose less work. Here’s what I did.

My contribution to The Pastry Box Project this month:

There’s no reason why anyone should have to wait more than 24 hours for the money you owe them, especially people you work with.

So the next time you receive an invoice from a contractor or supplier, pay it right away. Don’t wait a month, a week, a day or even an hour longer than you have to. Better still, find out how to pay them before they start any work. That way you can pay them immediately when you receive their invoice.

They’ll feel good and so will you.

(This post was inspired by the experience of someone I know.)

This morning I picked up the phone to (just) Holly, a chirpy sounding lady who asked if we played music ‘within our business.’ If we did, we’d need a license. I told her we didn’t (yeah, shoot first and ask questions later) and she said we’d be removed from their list (whatever that is.)

This post from Jolly Bureau ties in very nicely with what I wrote for The Pastry Box Project this month. So I thought I’d elaborate on:

About a year ago, I left day rates and job rates behind and started estimating, billing and working on projects on a weekly basis. A year on and I’m better organised, more productive and less stressed than ever before. Our accounts are in better shape and no one owes us money for longer than a week. It was one of the best business moves I’ve made.

When I set up my home/office wireless after switching broadband providers, I called the downstairs router’s network ‘Planet Of The Apes.’ And why not? ‘Andy Clarke’s Network’ is a boring name. (And Planet Of The Apes is a better movie than Star Wars.)

Then I called the Airport Extreme extended upstairs network ‘Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes’ and the Airport Express I keep under my desk ‘Beneath The Planet Of The Apes.’

I bought a mifi today because I’m working in London a fair bit over the next few months and the client site doesn’t have open wifi. I could stick with the network’s given name, 3MobileWiFi-c602, but ‘Escape From The Planet Of The Apes’ seems much, much more appropriate.

I’ve worked for myself for the last fourteen years and for most of that I’ve worked in my office at home.

If you’ve been using Twitter and the Twitter app for iPhone for a while, you’ll probably miss having access to your direct messages in the toolbar since Twitter replaced it with the ‘discover’ button (whatever that does.) Don’t worry, because some friends of mine who work at Twitter in San Francisco showed me a way to unlock a hidden power user mode that puts DMs back in the toolbar.

When I upgraded my phone to an iPhone 4S it instantly took over as my main camera. I use Camera+ and ProHDR, olloclip lens attachments and POPA and I couldn’t be happier with the results I get.

This week I was sat in a hotel in London and uploaded at photo to Instagram. It was a kangaroo I met a couple of weeks ago at a sanctuary near Brisbane.

It’s a half decent photo.

OMG! KANGAROOS ARE SOOO CUUUTE!

But posting the photo felt wrong.

I know plenty of people who post Instagram photos from weeks or even months back. But Instagram isn’t Flickr and photos on Instagram should be from today, or at a push from yesterday.

You know. Like insta(nt).

Anything else is a Delayagram^™.

So I’m sitting in the studio, alone, this morning, listening to The Talk Show while I get my head clear for a day’s work, when the Mac behind me starts to talk (video below. How can this even happen?