Archive

Gothenburg City

Once again Ryanair came up trumps with a great deal on flights to Gothenburg City where I spent the weekend not long ago.

My first visit to Sweden; I managed to cram in loads of activities during the three days. In the company of school friend Tom, we visited The Museum of Natural History, Göteborg City Museum, The Museum of Medical History, The Maritime Museum, Botanical Gardens and Liseburg Amusement Park, as well as walked about 20 miles around the city.

During the evenings we had a couple of good if expensive nights out (two drinks typically £15-£25!), visiting a rock club on Friday and the Nefertiti Jazz Club on Saturday, both the venue for live bands.

I can report that without exception all of the locals we met were extremely friendly and helpful despite my embarrassing lack of Swedish (or any other language for that matter), and I'd definitely visit again. Take a look at the photos here.

Posted on November 24, 2008 23:50

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EOS

Being a graphic designer I though it was about time that I started doing some graphic-designery things outside of the office as well.

I spotted this at a fairly reasonable price on a recent visit to Amsterdam. It's a Canon EOS 450D digital SLR camera and together with a Tamron 70-300mm lens it makes even some of my photos look good.

Check out some snaps of Canary Wharf here, some drunken antics here and some messing around here and here.

Posted on October 06, 2008 23:43

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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...

Posted on July 31, 2008 13:12

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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.

Posted on April 13, 2008 19:42

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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.

Posted on February 18, 2008 19:13

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