On the way to work at eight o’clock this morning, my mobile phone gave a warning ring to let me know it was nearly out of power. It did so again ninety seconds later. …and continued to issue the same warning trill every ninety seconds for the following eleven hours, until I finally got home [...]

I went to @Media last year. It was great. I talked about it on my blog, I listened to various people speak, I got to talk to loads of intelligent, lovely people, and I got to see all sorts of fantastic presentations, and left having learnt a lot and feeling really inspired about web design. [...]

I’ve been reading an article on Malarkey’s site called the BritPack and where do we go from here where he — as well as the other “Proud Members” of the Britpack — is concerned about appearing elitist. Let’s face it, the Britpack is made up of some of the finest web designers and developers in [...]

I bought two jokes today, for Comic Relief, for 50p each. The first one was the one about the singing frog, and the hampster who played the piano and was a ventriloquist. I’d heard it before, but what the heck, it’s for charriddy, right? However, the second joke I was much less impressed with: Q: [...]

There’s bit a bit of a furore going on in the last couple of weeks in some quarters as regards assessing accessibility of different websites and comparing them against one another. Basically, what has happened is that the SOCITM Better Connected 2007 report was published, looking at the state of Local Government websites across the [...]

With a joke the other day from someone I knew when I was at Lancaster University — and in fact still do know now, this got me thinking about all of the people I was close friends with at Lancaster University, who through a combination of me being a lazy bugger, me being a dozy [...]

I’d just like to take this opportunity to welcome Paul Canning to the blogosphere. Paul is another one of those local government geeks who cover the accessibility/usability stuff, which is obviously how I know him, but what is worth pointing out is that he’s been blogging only since 5th March, and he’s already managed to [...]

I’ve been deluged by spam recently. Very little of it has got through, thanks to my spam filtering. In fact, my filters have stopped one hundred and eighty-seven spam comments from making their way onto the site in the last week alone. Taking a look through the contents of the spam, excluding the links of [...]

Yes, admittedly it’s not Friday. But a long-not-quite-lost friend sent me this one this morning and it made me grin while I was waiting at the bus stop. The “not-quite-lost” refers to the fact that my good mate Lyn (love and kisses) is someone I made friends with when I was at University (a “townie” [...]

This is a slight departure from the norm: this is a piece of short fiction I was working on for the Gateshead Short Story Competition 2007. Unfortunately, I never got around to finishing it in time for the competition. Or possibly fortunately, I dunno. You’ll have to make your own minds up about that. In [...]