Just received the 7th sales call today. Now I won’t complain about the amount we get, but I will certainly complain about their attitude. Having the phone hung up on you or not being listened to and having to repeat 4 times that you are not interested gets on everybody’s nerves. You would think that a bit of respect and friendliness doesn’t cost that much!! Just the other day I received a sales call and told the person I wasn’t interested, well he said that wasn’t a problem and wished me a good day. I should have asked him for his details and asked him to train other telephone sales people about respect and friendliness.

I just remebered he called from Talk Talk.

I discovered this really cool site today. Looks like a great way to brighten up the office (or house)! Check it out:

blik surface graphics

It is just a shame our walls here in the office are not smooth. Oh how I wish woodchip had never been invented!

Who’s to say? I do think as there are more and more sites, good designs are becoming extremely rare. Just do a quick Google search for best design and it’ll give you a list of award winning sites that makes you wonder what they were judged on.

The Internet has become such a big part of our lives and more and more people decided to get involved and qualify themselves as fully professional web designers / developers. Myself being a designer I work with 2 great developers, who changed my way of thinking. I used to be one of those people pretending to know everything there is to know about setting up a site, whereas developing a good, user-friendly site, compatible on all browsers, is not as easy as it seems.

My job is to come up with a creative idea that after teaming up, gets moulded into a shape that not only looks good but works perfectly for all users. And this is where the problem lies I think, designers and developers have their own place, but if they learn to respect one another and work as a team they can create some of the best work ever.

I hope this will become something more common in the future.

The instruction at “0×01872f2c” referenced memory at “0xc0000000″ The memory could not be “written”

Click on OK to terminate the program

Recently Robin and I were in Paddington Station and Robin noticed this error message on the screen of one of those information/email/phone thingys. It is unbelievable to see this for a number of reasons:

1. Why does anybody think that an error message like this is acceptable. It means nothing to the average user and worse it kinda freaks you out a bit with all the “0×01872fsc” referencing memory explanation.

2. Why would anyone put an operating system on one of these phone/info thingys that may throw up any error messages at all. I know thorough testing will not always eliminate all errors but there should be no chance of an error that doesn’t make any sense on an interface that is miles away from the company that owns it.

All in all it was quite unbelievable to see and we couldn’t resist taking out the camera phone and snapping it.

Enjoy.

Well I have been back from holiday for a week now. The temperatures were about as hot as forecast so we had a great time. Great relaxing and taking things slowly.

It made me think a lot about the unnecessary stress and pressure we feel from always rushing around. When the temperature is over 30° you simply cannot run about and rush from one thing to another. Sometimes we think that by rushing all the time we can fit that much more into a day when actually it probably doesn’t make that much difference.

I am sure we would all like a bit more time during the day to get more done but this extra time is very elusive. We rush around to try to capture the extra time but almost all the time we save from rushing we waste as we are not composed when we arrive at the next task.

Although I guess most of our clients would like us to achieve more in a shorter time and so for less money, but unless you get the balance right it would just result in us always arriving to a meeting flustered and we would never be composed or calm enough to be any real value. I am pretty sure no client wants to pay someone for sub-standard time working on their project!

We probably don’t need siestas or extra long lunch breaks, but let’s remember not to add more pressure and stress to our lives all in the name of shaving 10 minutes off our journey time.

As a web developer, I am all too familiar with building sites for, as until recently, the main source for viewing websites…….the desktop computer. However, the mobile phone handset is fast becoming greater than a simple fashion accessory! A vast majority of people in the UK now own a mobile phone, with mobile phone companies becoming a formidable force in the economic world. Is interesting to note in the UK that the mobile network Orange had taken over European Internet Service Provider, Wannadoo. Orange is now offering broadband services together with mobile phone services. With the rise of 3G technology providing faster mobile internet access as well as video and music download, not to mention handset camera and mp3 technology, mobile handsets are becoming the source of communication, information and entertainment.

It seems that, with the rise in popularity of mobile handset internet, web developers may soon be increasingly more involved in mobile handset website design and build. I personally have been involved in developing mobile phone applications and composing ringtones for handsets. However, I have yet to develop a site for a mobile handset. The challenge of presenting accessible information on a small handset is an enticing and exciting challenge which I foresee many of us involved with in the future.