Archive
The personal webspace of James Dunn
This page list the last five articles:
Exceptions
The last couple of months have been very much ‘business as usual', with a couple of exceptions:
I'm now working for a company called eDigitalResearch, who specialize in digital research for a wide variety of household brands and business to business organizations. My new role is "Graphic Designer" and this see's me designing and building a variety of online surveys, as well as complete research 'panel' websites, where members regularly answer questionnaires and develop their own online communities, much like Facebook. In other work related news, VuYou, the video streaming website that I did the design/front end build for while at Bluesulphur has now been launched. This is a great site, combining the ideas of social networking, blogging and video emailing into one, and potentially becoming huge! It is without a doubt the largest project I've worked on and had the most influence over, and I'm extremely proud of it.
In June I went on holiday to France for eleven days, driving down to the Dordogne region of France and staying in the beautiful Maison Des Pruniers. Apart from enjoying the stifling 34° heat we visited the towns of St. Emillion, Bergerac and Bordeaux, before touring back up the west coast via La Rochelle and Vennes.
Congratulations must go to Caroline who now after seven years at university has graduated and become a doctor. She will be taking up a position for the next year in Epsom and St. Heliers hospital in South London before moving to Chichester next year.
More news as it happens...
Lotus Elise
With the summer fast approaching, and my existing car now a full seventeen years old, I decided it was about time for something a bit newer.
The Lotus Elise seemed to tick all of the right boxes: two seats, convertible, fast, slightly unusual, and striking in appearance. It certainly makes getting from A to B a lot more interesting! Less desirable aspects include the extortionate insurance premium, issues with rain, and the fact that everyone now thinks they automatically have the right to cut me up/pull out right in front of me; but I've decided the pro's definately outweight the cons.
Over the summer I planning to drive down to the south of France for a couple of weeks and try out some proper windy roads, but in the meantime the daily commute is having to make do. I've also still got my previous car which is useful for things like moving more than one passenger around, and getting anything in the back!
Take a look at some more pictures of it here.
Website In An Hour
The amount the web has progressed in the last couple of years became especially apparent to me last weekend when I managed to set up a fully functional blog on it's own domain within an hour of having the idea.
My girlfriend Caroline is shortly due travel to Nepal for six weeks where she will complete a month's medical elective, and trek to the Everest base camp over ten days. Such an opportunity is the perfect subject to blog about so I suggested that she sign up with Blogger instead of sending emails home and attaching photos. Then I thought 'why stop there?'
I am of the opinion that it's not just web designers or people in the IT industry who find their own site useful. It shows that you take yourself seriously, have some level of technical competence, and is a great place for potential employers to find out more about you and download your CV. It also gives you your own email address which is always going to look better than the generic @hotmail.com. I'd almost go as far to say that every graduate looking for a professional job needs their own site.
With this in mind I checked the availability of some domains, and found that caroline-black.com was available. Already having my own account with Dreamhost meant that registering this name was easy, and within five minutes it was done.
However, the key to the whole site is the simplicity of Blogger. By default Blogger gives you a sub domain at blogspot.com, but if you look at the more "advanced" options, it has full support for creation of a blog on any website utilizing its built in FTP system. We were able to choose a pre-made template, write the first article and the rest was automatically taken care of. Future updates and all of the settings can be done from the Blogger website.
Obviously this method of building a site has some severe limitations, including the lack of a custom template and only a limited amount of flexibility in general. However, in a time vs. build situation it is defiantly a winner. Have a look at the result here: http://www.caroline-black.com.
Bluesulphur
From 21st January 2008 I will be taking up a new design position for Bluesulphur. Part of Compsoft, Bluesulphur is a full service design agency, specialising in web design, marketing and branding, and in a variety of different mediums.
Fronted by Creative Director David Stell, Bluesulphur is fully integrated with Compsoft who are Microsoft Gold Certified Partners, and have over twenty five years experience in developing data management systems, including the 'Obelisk' system for covert hi-tech crime investigations and 'Equinox' for specialised database development. Bluesulphur and Compsoft are based in Alton, Hampshire.
In my role I will be liaising with designers and developers to produce front end solutions for our clients, focusing on websites, web applications and some print design. It's a particularly exciting role for me as I will be one of the first designers at Bluesulphur, leading to excellent future potential within the company.
I will be a shame to leave Marine Trader Media/BoatShop24 Limited as it has proven to be a good year's experience for my professional career, and I wish the remainder of my team a prosperous and happy future at the company.
My New 'Rig'
Being a web designer comes with certain inbuilt assumptions that people make about you, examples of which include: you can instantly build them a website, you understand about all that "code", and you use a Mac.
I use a PC and always have. I'm not going to get into a full blown discussion about the pro's and con's of Mac vs. PC in a design environment here as I think everyone works best with the tools they are familiar with, and at the end of the day, Photoshop is Photoshop, and when writing code the platform makes little difference. I am going to tell you about my new setup.
I have been using my new PC for a couple of months now, and its been the second great purchase I've made from Viglen. It's a heavily customised machine from their Genie range, built to my specification with the following basic configuration:
- Motherboard: Intel D975XBX2 with integrated Gigabit LAN
- CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2* 2.66GHz)
- Memory: 4Gb RAM @ 667MHz
- Hard Disk Drives: 2* 320Gb Serial ATA 300
- Optical Drives: 2* Sony Multi format DVD 16x Writers
- Sound Card: Creative Labs Sound Blaster Audigy 7.1 (outputs to my stereo)
Up until now I've always had an old fashioned CRT monitor at home, but I've finally decided to splash out on some flat panels. One of the most useful things I've found for design work is having a dual screen setup. I've therefore now got:
- 16:9: LG Flatron L226WTQ (native resolution of 1650 x 1050 pixels)
- 4:3: Fujitsu Siemens Scaleoview L19-2 (native resolution of 1280 x 1024 pixels)
These both connect via DVI cable giving an excellent crisp picture, powered by a:
- Graphics Card: BFG (Nvidia) GeForce 8800 GTS OC2 640Mb
...which is simply awesome.
This is polished off with a backlit keyboard from SpeedLink.
As for peripherals:
- Printer: Samsung CLP-510N Ethernet (Colour Laser)
- Networking: Netgear DG834G (Wired & Wireless)
- I've also reformatted my old PC for backup purposes and for when things simply won't run on Windows Vista
My OS of choice is Vista Ultimate which despite a few compatibility issues to begin with, and a mild learning curve is turning out to be alright.
So how does all this stuff stack up? If you want to go by Microsoft's "Window's Experience Index" this setup achieves a score of 5.5 out of 5.9, let down only by low scores in RAM speed. On a more practical note, the system seems to take just about everything I can throw at it with ease: I can have multiple browsers open, three or four Adobe products running and be working on large files with no dip in performance. As for the cost of all this - lets just say that Viglen and Ebuyer have made a few pence out of me this year.