Keeping Busy

Its been a while...

Have you had a stroke?

No. Just been so busy with real life that blogging and other online activities have taken a back seat. Apart from ranting at substandard car companies here's what I've been up to:

• Got made redundant. Boo
• Got a new job with a great web design (york) company: Brightfive. Yay.
• Built some new web projects of my own, the best of the bunch by far is my clever Hotel Finder application. Its pretty useful (I think). I did a more detailed write up of it here.
• I got married. Yay. Wife has a blog too. Best link to it I suppose. Its mainly hormonal rants and recipes. You have been warned.
• Having a baby. Yay. Boy. Due in September.
• Got sunburnt like a proper Guiri (or is it Langosta?) on my last quick trip to Spain. Boo.

So its been a busy year so far.

Whilst not really my line of work any more - I still like to keep tabs on the Spanish property market. Here's a post I made on Spanish Property Insight using Google's Trends for Websites to compare traffic levels.

Lets not leave it so long next time...

Edinburgh Festival & Fringe 2009

Absolutely loved my holiday in Edinburgh, enjoying the sites and sounds of the various festivals. It truly is a fascinating and beautiful city, vividly brought to life in August by the thousands of shows and their lively promoters.

I was a festival/fringe virgin until now and absolutely loved the heady mix of booze, comedy and music. It brings back those lovely, lazy student years.

Well, my highlights of Edinburgh -

• The National Museum of Scotland - great interactive as well as historical stuff (plus see Dolly the Sheep).
• A-team the musical, really.
• Bec Hill - cutesy but fun stand up exploring the nature of super heroes. With free cheese on toast.
• John Robins - excellent stand up, with great observations on relationship breakdown. Warning - your girlfriend will want to take him home and look after him
• Book Festival - meet authors, buy books, listen to readings - great!!!

Also found out they give awards for the funniest jokes at the fringe. My fave:

Marcus Brigstocke - "To the people who've got iPhones: you just bought one, you didn't invent it!"

The best (and worst) fringe gags are here - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/8216991.stm

Social Events and Social Sites

Went to the wedding of a very old chum last weekend and had a great old time. Managed to lose the nice silk tie I bought at Malaga Airport, and instead found myself rushing round the local TK Max for any old nylon nasty.

Also, I still don't own a digital camera, so all the pics I took were on my mobile phone. "Mills, you pikey, buy a proper camera" etc...

Also I think I was one of the few single people there, as the smug marrieds kept pointing me towards anything with a few teeth and a pulse.

Anyhoo, my insecurities and general social faux pas aside, it was a fantastic couple of days. I received a rather nice set of stirling silver collar stiffeners (yes, really!) for being an usher.

Now, I have a phone full of pictures, whats the best way to share them? And flickr sprang to mind. Its great.

Nice suit chunks, so whats flickr then?

Its a photo sharing website, first and foremost. But its also one of those modern web 2.0 type sites where you comment, create groups and the whole social web thingy. But basically the 2 best things I have found is that:

• You can download a widget to your pc which allows you to upload one or more pics at the click of your mouse.


• You have a permanent online repository of all your pics. You can link to them from your blog and/or send the url to anyone you want to share the pics with.
  

All rather clever. I even found some fun flickr based sites such as:

• Flickr tag browser - a funky search app that lets you search all the pics uploaded and suggests related keywords. Try finding those photos of Britney without her knickers on for example.


• flickrvision - a semi voyeuristic worlwide insight into what people are uploading real time.
  

Have fun, but really, I don't want to see any pictures of your cats.