The last entry I posted to this blog's predecessor was on the morning of 11 September, 2001... I had a job interview that day, at a big corporate design shop in Farnborough. I had to wait when I arrived, and people kept running down from upstairs to try and find the remote for reception's TV. I had my interview and emerged to the sight of the second plane hitting. It was a strange interview, and I didn't get the job.
After a brief period of unpublicised writing activity a few months ago, followed by a period of frenetic back-end new-site coding that, as yet, hasn't produced a usable new site infrastructure, I've decided that I should just dump the front page of the old site and get on with actually writing things in this blog.
If everything has gone to plan then my good friends James and Kari ought to be married by now!
I lived in Reading for eight years, went to university there (five years, a long story), ran a small (and not particularly successful) business there for three years, met, (married somewhere else) and set up home with Clare in Reading.
In which I upload all the photos I've been meaning to over the last couple of years but haven't gotten round to. If you're one of those people whose weddings we've been to, and we promised to put our photos up so that you can see them (but we didn't), then you're in luck. Sorry it's so late.
I started writing shortish pieces and publishing them online in reverse-chronological order, back in 1999 (they weren't called blogs back then, or at least I hadn't heard of blogs, which is admittedly more likely).
I've been to see Matt B for a spot of catching up and falling-over-in-the-snow-with-my-feet-strapped-to-a-plank, aka Snowboarding.
So, reprocessed.org was dead for nearly a week. Whoops.
So, what the hell happened to me...
I've just returned from an excellent time at Greenbelt, which I'll post about soon. I'm away again for a couple of days (I'm writing this looking out over the North Sea), and I'll be at BarCamp London, where I'll be presenting some ideas about typography and hacking. Frankly, I'm having an unfeasibly good time this week.
In October 1996 I arrived at Reading University and discovered that I had a URL of my very own (the long defunct http://www.rdg.ac.uk/~shu96mp/). The rest, as they say, is history: Ten years of extremely irregular and infrequent posting of things on the web, five of those here at reprocessed.org. That's just the talking: this also marks six-and-some years as a web professional, as designer, markup monkey, back-end developer, information designer (architect, whatever), and all at once.
I've been at the BBC for a little over three years, and I'm having a very good time. I've learned a phenomenal amount, worked with a slew of really great people, and now I help lead an excellent project team.
So, I'm going to be in New York from later on today, for a week working with a client on an exciting project. If anyone wants to talk software design, process, and practice, or about comics or whatever then cool. You can reach me by emailing matt at this domain. I'm meeting some of the NYC.rb folks at some point for beers, and I'm looking forward to finally making it to New York.
I suppose you're wondering what the point of this email is. Well, I wouldn't worry too much. It's partly to assuage my guilt at not having written enough emails, partly to handle the task of writing to lots of you and still leaving me time enough to do it regularly, but mostly it's because of Garrison Keillor. Sorry to shatter any illusions, but Lake Woebegon has convinced me of the validity of writing pretty pointless narrative emails. It's kind of a roundabout argument, but it's there somewhere.
This is my second despatch, despatch watchers, though it's my first from beneath a figurative paper mountain - the real one (as my housemates can attest) is about three feet to my left.
Good evening to all of you ether dwellers. It's an odd thought, but the only thing I'm going to keep, communications wise, when I leave this house, is my email address. Everything else will change. Funny that the least physical medium is the one most tightly attached. I'm going to shuck my real address and phone number, and pick up new ones, but email will still get through just fine.
This is a despatch-less despatch. Written in the absence of email. You're reading this after the fact. How far after I don't know, since I haven't sent it yet.
Progress! just about everything which ought to have a proper page now has real placeholder content instead of whatever similarly named file was hanging around. Although, this may not be progress and may just be slipping into the mire some more.
More news (of sorts) — I'm actually having a day off, on Monday when Clare and I are going into London to look round an exhibition and eat a picnic in a park and those kind of things (apparently Selfridges has a good Japanese food section, so we're going there. I may even persuade Clare into Wagamama...) [actually this is relatively old news, but my automated upload thing removes the blog so I have to republish, so I wrote another post...]
Clare's landlord had said they could stay a week past the end of their lease, but then forgot and let the new people move in today. We were up 'til 2 am packing up and clearing out, but we're still going to London today. Also, spent a while yesterday sorting out minor (and major) un-noticed errors on the site... I also got the Bobby validator from CAST and, hurrah, it all validates. Some weirdnesses which may warrant a small article on the point at which responsibility for accessibility falls on the client...
A busy week: We did the London thing, Clare & I, and the Luis Barragan exhibition was cool, and it was interesting to see how a 'modern' architect worked outside Europe and, to a lesser extent, America. Many of the rough edges of modernist architecture in Europe aren't there in Barragan's work, but the interesting bits are, as is a knowledge and love of local building traditions and an awareness of the environment around a building — Barragan considered the garden to be an intrinsic part of a house, for example. His use of form and colour could be quite wonderful.
There's quite a bit of checking going on behind the scenes at reprocessed.org and the content front is moving. In other news, my annual trips to Lee Abbey summer camp and to the Greenbelt arts festival happened, and both were good fun, challenging, and all those other things you associate with worthwhile work and relaxation. In other other news, Clare asked and I said yes. It's time to ask anyone who's ever organised an alt.worship wedding how to go about such things... Erk.
Look Ma, more content! But wait... look, Ma, poor QA and incomplete CSS updates...
