I did take some nice photos though and took full advantage that for once I was awake at sunrise as well.

As most know I usually am more productive at night and I took full advantage of it - it got me on top of things but only just but enough to keep my mind at peace just that little bit more

It has been a while since I have updated and there have been some big changes of late especially for my dearest Gemma. On the one day about a month ago we had a buyer for her now old starlet come up and pay for it (infact he had no inspection done or anything - just bought it there and then) at the asking price.

Once he had left I went to do a quick search for any Swifts as now she was car less even though we had been searching for a suitable (black, manual) one for the past couple of months as she had the money to buy one while she had the old car so she wouldn’t be left carless. That being said I managed to stumble over one that was just listed that day in Brisbane and we rang and went down to see it right then.

On the way down Gem got a call from a work friend from the tourism branch she was working part time at to let her know she was leaving and had recommended her to the manager to take the full time position - awesome news! We then got down to Brisbane and saw the Swift and decided we loved it - put an offer in and bought it the next day. So Gem now has her new Swift with some plans of coil-overs and 18s very shortly.

So as mentioned before the work friend left and she ended up getting the job, so now Gem is a 9-5 office gal - woohoo! She also is coming over to the office quite a bit more often then usual as she runs out of things to do in her hour long lunch break

There was mouse poop everywhere! And worse of all there was some on the motherboard along with some obvious friend components on the motherboard. My first thought was “how the hell did it get in there?” and the only place even slightly feasible is a spare pci card slot on the back of the case (for those not in the “know” the gap would be around 2cm wide by 10cm high). That said it seems like the mouse has been in there a few times as around the power supply in the more open area there was heaps of poop - far more then enough for one visit.

So Ive now replaced the motherboard (somehow don’t think warranty covers mouse damage) which was only 6 months or so old and hopefully all back to smooth sailing again. I also setup a trap on the night to catch the mice (yes I feel bad about it but when they start costing money its not good), infact 3 traps - two cool new silver plastic ones (goes with the decor ) and some fancy mortein one that catches them inside. I also closed the gap on the back of the case with a proper cover for the spare slot.
Just as I was going to bed I heard one go off which caught a decent size mouse (photo for this post may not be accurate photograph of actual mouse) and then reset it to find another in the morning - so looks like I might just be getting on top of the problem!

I am now seeing this same trait of mine carrying over into the workplace, when our developer isn’t there I have a tendency to turn off all lights except my side light and am able to get a heap of work completed and enjoy it even more. Infact doing this has stopped a few of my friends dropping by work thinking I wasn’t even there

There is are two big downsides to this trait however - one is it is impossible to wake up some mornings and the second is it becomes quite difficult for Gem. Whilst Gem isn’t exactly a morning person either, she does have difficulties trying to keep up with my habits of being somewhat nocturnal. She does admit she goes to bed later as a result of me but theres still those nights that she does goto sleep far earlier then me.

So the other downside is waking up and is starting to really affect me more now with the cold weather we are having. Theres a perfect alarm clock that I want to buy but it hasn’t been put into production yet. Simply put you have to repeat the colours that it flashes on its display before the alarm will stop, but there is another one that is for sale but I can’t find in Australia. It has a four piece jigsaw at the top that is spring loaded underneath and when the alarm goes the pieces go everywhere so you have to find them and place them in it to stop the alarm. I just need to find somewhere here that sells them now!

I think my body’s natural liking towards night time also stirs my interest in night photography. For some reason its the only time I really like doing photography in and am trying more and more to excel in this field. I have taken a few nice night photos in the past but I hope to be able to start using some more external light sources (eg. torches) to really bring some interesting aspects of these photos.

It was in there for about 4 hours and as we all know water and other liquids generally expand when frozen despite what the glass around them thinks. I uploaded some photos to my Flickr Account - got a nice cleanup job ahead of me tonight See V does suck!

Also as a quick sidenote I also did another deal with the devil……. I signed up to myspace, yes I always said I wouldn’t but simply put too much peer pressure and 1 year later I signed up, but don’t get too excited its just link with friends really and linking back to here. Also DAMN its hard to make a template for myspace!

We both started to have differing opinions in the business and have decided to head our own ways. He won’t be doing much with website design as now pursuing the full time contract with a local ISP and I will be taking on all of the website development work from here on in. We both now know the decision of the split has been for the right reasons and have been able to keep our friendship through all of it as well.

Anyways, things at PX Webdesign have been flat out of late, in fact so busy now that we pretty much can’t accept any new work for at least 3 months time! We have so many projects on and thankfully most of the work is all of the custom development kind of work that my main aims were for the business to grow towards.

Will be updating our site shortly though with all of the latest projects so keep an eye out, and also hope to get back onto things here a bit more as well now Ive got things heading along steadily in the business again.

Forgot to mention also, had breakfast with an old friend - eM the other weekend which was great to catchup with and try and pass some of my xhtml/css skills onto someone

I have come up with some new ideas for the business of late such as a monthly newsletter to send out to all of our current and previous clients just to let them know of the work we are doing of late and also any latest news related to website development etc. that I think will take their interest. This strike of interest came from reading an article about Email Marketing from FreelanceSwitch (a site worthy of a bookmark). After seeing their preference to Mailchimp I have decided to give it a run for our first newsletter so will have an update here on when I get the first one out.

My trial of Google Analytics on a few sites of my own and some clients has been a great success of late. Still want to gather another months worth of data but from the features I have seen so far (site overlay, visit lengths etc.) its very promising! Also they have just recently released a new update to the software as well.

The first difference I noticed was the icons for folders etc. were all different, sure it hurts not to see familiarity but it sure is better looking! It feels much faster then the previous version and the only problem I hit was that BirdieSync (program I use for sync calendar events on phone with pc) needed to be updated as well, but that was an easy fix. Which reminds me, make sure you get the ‘Lightning‘ addon for Thunderbird, its a great calendar addon!

In other news the annual Toowoomba Car Forum Anzac Day cruise held yesterday was a great success with over 40 cars turning out and of course theres a heap of shots to look over in my Flickr account.

Update: Damnit! The pen writes in blue, oh well thankfully Ill just buy a black refill

I have just recently listed this site in the Standards Reboot for 2007 which I think is a great concept for showing off how semantically correct your code is without CSS to aide it. I was hoping to do it under the new design but just don’t think Ill have the time to finish it off for it.

Came across another checklist that you might be a hardcore (read: obsessed) designer, heres some I could relate to!

2. You get pissed when a free Photoshop brush you download is less than 1000px in size.

5. You’ve had “Software Nightmares,” when you’ve been working way too much.

6. You consider meals interruptions.

7. You’ve intentionally given up trying to explain your projects to non-designers.

8. You’d rather organize your desktop than your sock drawer.

15. You’ve actually $paid for a font.

16. You bookmark a resource more often than you have a fun night out on the town.

22. You’ve intentionally overbid a project because you can sniff out a bad client from a mile away.

23. You can’t go to a restaurant without secretly critiquing the menu design.

25. If you had a penny for every mouse click, you would have been a trillionaire 3 years ago.

The main one we have been working on is the shopping cart, we finishing off the front end for it now (pic included) and then it should be ready to go in the next couple of days. Be trying to get some more done on the weekend I hope.

Last night I cleaned up my Flickr account along with adding some more photos. Got some good shots of Leah’s Golf GTI which are well worth having a look at, I’m starting to get a lil better now I hope!

Also last night we went for dinner at the CBD Bistro in a part of our quest to try and sample as many places across Toowoomba as possible. Wasn’t exactly busy and I would give it an average rating, nothing suberb and nothing bad. Im thinking next time we might try the National Hotel as we have heard a few good things about it of late.

Im finding all of these places from the Online Dining website. It was originally started by another webfirm here in Toowomba and I must commend them on the concept as it seems to have really taken off of late and I have even seen some print advertising around the place for it as well. My only gripes are the design needs some working, but the actual usuability and functionality is pretty spot on.

I just finished updating the frontpage to the haskings.com domain. The old design was somewhat.. ummm.. embarassing so fixed it up once I had the chance to do so. This also brings me onto the topic of the new design for this blog, I am really tempted to follow an almost 60’s / Swiss style design such as this site and this site but going for some darker colours then at present. But knowing me it will probably end up being completely different then Im thinking right now.

After having a little look into Google Analytics I have decided to bit the bullet and apply it to a few of my websites both personal and commercial. I think James helped convinced me a bit on this after realising my current (and well loved) stats program AWStats doesn’t show screen resolution of site visitors along with all the other fancy stuff Google Anayltics provides. So after a month and a bit Ill be certain to writeup a review on just how it was and if I will continue using it and apply to some other of our client’s websites.