Blogging and all that malarkey

While I’m away in France, Ashley Baxter and Laura Kalbag are back again for this week’s episode of Unfinished Business. They talk about the common myths around working for yourself and working from home. Then they answer listener questions including what they both want to achieve before they retire, which, considering they’re both only 27, is a very, very long time away.

As much as I love being en vacance en France, I also miss making Unfinished Business, but this year I thought I’d leave the show in two very capable pairs of hands. (When they weren’t available) I asked two of my regular co-hosts, Ashley Baxter and Laura Kalbag to taking over the running of the Unfinished Business for the next three weeks.) What could possibly go wrong?

This week is a really good episode. It’s more business focussed than my normal episodes and a refreshing change for that. They talk about business insurance, including public liability, professional indemnity, business contents and copyright infringement. “C’est un bon épisode” as we say in France.

I’m a Fireworks man.

Before we go any further, I need to let people know that there is absolutely zero business content in the show this week. (Thousands of people are thinking now, “when is there ever?”) That‘s because this is a spoiler filled ‘Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes’ cinema special episode with my guests and film buff friends Brendan Dawes and Jeremy Keith.

It’s a wild show. We ask whether there should be a new Oscar category for performance capture and if Andy Serkis should win everything? We talk about the other seven Planet Of The Apes films, starting with the original five and if Tim Burton’s 2001 reimagining is a guilty pleasure. Then we get in deep with the new ‘Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes’ before asking ourselves the important questions; When will apes wear clothes? When and how will humans become mute, and why should you avoid watching an apes film in Rhyl?

Even if you’re not an Apes aficionado, I think you’ll enjoy listening to this episode of Unfinished Business as much as we enjoyed making it, which was a lot.

I’ve been looking forward to speaking with Sara Soueidan on this week’s episode of Unfinished Business for a long while, not least because I’m a huge, huge, fan of her work. She’s been writing what I consider to be the best articles about CSS and SVG. We talk about those, yes, but we also talk about what it’s like for her, living and working as a web developer in her home country of Lebanon. We discuss the preconceptions and misconceptions that people in the West have about Lebanon, its people and its customs. I think you’ll find what she has to say fascinating. I know I did.

Ashley Baxter’s back on Unfinished Business this week. We talk about the reasons why she’s speaking in public more and how it may help her to promote her new business. Speaking of promotion, we discuss her $99 tweet sponsoring experiment, how buying tweets works and whether it worked for her. We also talk about how to move on when you feel like you’ve reached a plateau, in business as well as in the gym.

This week on Unfinished Business, impresario, organiser of Flash On The Beach and more recently Reasons To Be Creative, John Davey offers me some fatherly advice on how to handle a personal dilemma and what not to wear at Alex’s upcoming graduation. We talk about the Reasons To Be Creative conference, how he finds and why he chooses so many new speakers and his unusual elevator pitch approach.

Swearing: I mostly bleep out swearing on Unfinished Business, but I think that this week’s episode is funnier with our cussing intact. I hope you won’t be offended by a couple of ‘f’ words, one ‘b’ word and a dozen jokes about Brighton.

We’re half-way through a project, designing a web ‘application’ for a client. This means writing lots of HTML and making plenty of template pages.

Designer and artist Brendan Dawes joins me again for the 75th episode of my “one-sided, biased, poor quality personal soapbox.” We talk about the people who have inspired us the most in our working lives and Bren tells me all about how the famous designer and filmmaker Hillman Curtis helped him to get started. It’s an inspiring story.

I’ve also reinstated the after hours film talk spot that Anna and I started in the early episodes of Unfinished Business. This week Bren and I talk about briefly about Her, the fabulous Stalingrad (2013) and Luc Besson’s totally terrible 3 Days to Kill starring Kevin Costner. It’s a funny segment although I’m clearly no Mark Kermode and this show is obviously nowhere near as good as something on the BBC.

I really enjoyed recording episode 73 of Unfinished Business, when I talked with Jeremy about advertising and creative work. But listening back, I didn’t articulate my thoughts anywhere near as well as Jeremy did.

This week on Unfinished Business, Sean Johnson and I talk not only about Laura Nevo’s “Dear Visual Design” letter but also how wrong the people who thought I’d criticise Laura are. While I disagree completely with Laura’s message, I appreciate her writing it, not least because it helps sum up everything that I think is wrong about how we talk about web design today. Sean’s not just along for the ride, he has plenty to say about user experience, the Net Awards and why he hates football. The berk.

Jeremy Keith joins me on this, episode 73 of Unfinished Business. Although I try to steer clean of provoking him by not talking about moon landings, we disagree about just about everything else. Fish tacos, things that scientists haven’t done yet and I think they should’ve and what makes advertising fascinating to me and hateful to him. It’s a lively show. There are sparks. I think you’ll like it.

When Sue and I were a young couple with a four year old boy, we didn’t get the chance to go out very much. An evening meal while a babysitter watched our son Alex was a rare treat.

Regular Unfinished Business co-host Laura Kalbag’s started to work with her partner Aral Balkan on their Indie Phone project. She wanted to hear about Sue and mine experiences of working together for sixteen years, so she emailed her some questions. I hadn’t heard her answers until Laura read them on the show, but I think that made for interesting listening.

We didn’t get through all the questions and answers on the show, so here are her complete answers. I think they offer some insight into what it’s like working together at Stuff and Nonsense for as long as we have.

A slight change of format for this week’s Unfinished Business. Laura Kalbag wanted to know our experiences of working with our partners—she’s just started working with hers—so she emailed Sue some questions. I hadn’t heard her answers until Laura read them on the show, but I think that makes for interesting listening. I’ll publish Sue’s full answers on Stuff and Nonsense later on in the week.

Spoiler alert: I’m discussing a theme from the first half of the latest series of Mad Men, season 7, but I don’t mention what happens to major characters.

Towards the end of the 1960s, technology had begun to creep into advertising and in ’68, Mad Men’s Sterling Cooper and Partners agency (SC&P) install their first computer, a room-filling, low-humming IBM System/360.

I wrote a lot more a decade ago than I do now and with the ten year anniversary of this blog just past, it’s fascinating to see what I was interested in and sharing back then.

Ashley Baxter is back on Unfinished Business this week and we start the show by talking about why she started a podcast with some other fella. We discuss how businesses should be authentic on Twitter and if a brand can justifiably spend 45 days planning a tweet about cheese. (Mmmm, cheese.) We round off this week by talking about how working with other people can affect your fitness and diet and why working from from home might be the best thing for some people. And let’s not forget Ashley Baxter’s Scottish Slang Word of the Week. “Heffer.”

Illustrator Josh Cleland joins me for episode 70 of Unfinished Business this week. We discuss about how I’m struggling with an idea for the next version of the Stuff and Nonsense header and I baffle Josh by talking about vintage British adverts, including the PG Tips chimps and Cadbury Smash’s famous Martians.

On Unfinished Business this week, I’m joined by designer and artist, the one and only Brendan Dawes. Bren and I talk about data inspired art and his Cinema Redux pieces. As we can never get together and not discuss films, so we talk about the greatest westerns of all time, the True Grit remake and Django Unchained. Plus, being ‘men of a certain age’ we reminisce about childrens’ TV from the seventies and why the writers of The Banana Splits must have taken a lot of drugs.

My blog is ten years old today.

Of course Stuff and Nonsense as a company is older than that by a few years, but today, ten years ago, on May 13^{th *}, I rolled out the welcome mat on the new site.

On Unfinished Business this week, and with us both fresh from the Net Awards, Laura Kalbag and I talk about our experiences there. I explain why I don’t feel at home in the web design industry as it is today and how its conversations no longer reflect my interests in design.

After last week’s ‘giant’ misunderstanding about speaker fees, we also talk about the responsibilities that speakers have to themselves, to an audience and to an event and the people who’ve organised it. It’s a lively discussion. We talk about swearing, why private agreements between speakers and conferences should remain confidential and why speakers should play their part in supporting an event, before, during and after it.

Laura, I and everyone who makes Unfinished Business, wants to say an enormous “thank you” to everyone who voted for our show and put it in the final five top podcasts of 2014 at the Net Awards.

I couldn’t be happier than my friends Craig Lockwood and Amie Duggan, those wonderful people behind events like Handheld Conf, Besquare, FoundersHub and, later this year, The Web Is… have taken over at Five Simple Steps.

On this week’s (early) episode of Unfinished Business, Ashley Baxter’s back to talk about her brand new business, Insurance By Jack. We talk about why she started the business and some of the challenges she’s already faced. No ‘Ashley’ episode would be complete without her “Baxter’s Scottish Slang Word of the Week.” What is it? You’ll just have to listen to the show to find oot.