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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Whatever you think about these features, in my opinion there has always been something missing to the basic functionality - the ability to move items around on the taskbar. Every window on the screen has a corresponding button in the taskbar, but these are static and do not allow you to rearrange their order. I like having my email client on the left, any tools (such as Photoshop and Illustrator) in the middle, and my web browsers used for testing on the right. I find that it reduces the speed at which I can get things done if this isn't the case, as well as find it extremely annoying. Normally I would open the applications in the order I want them to be in on the taskbar, but this doesn't help if something crashes, or I change the applications that I am working with. Enter Taskbar Shuffle.

This tiny free app sits in the background and provides the functionality that Microsoft should have done years ago. In fact it integrates so seamlessly that I don't even notice it's there. It provides the ability to be able to drag and drop taskbar buttons to whichever location I choose, instantaneously allowing me to create the setup I want. The application itself does not have many configuration options (which I like), but allows you to load it at start up, display or not display a system tray icon, as well as automatically organise buttons in various ways if you choose.

Whether all of this is it entirely unnecessary to mainstream users is up to the individual, but in my mind, it's invaluable. You can try it out free here.

TightVNC

Within our home network I've been using TightVNC. This is a free, open source piece of software that is installed on each 'terminal'. It allows anyone to access any other online terminal providing they know the IP address and password of the target machine. The core component of TightVNC sits in the system tray and allows for basic settings to be made such as setting of the computers password. To connect to another machine, the "TightVNC Viewer" application is used. This simple interface asks for the IP of the target machine, and allows you to specify approximately what network speed you are using. Once connected you can access the computer's desktop as if you were sitting in front of it, with complete keyboard and mouse control. Performance on a small home network is excellent, with both cabled and wireless connections being virtually lag free. If you install the optional mirror video driver (also free), there is no detectable delay at all. Connection information can be saved to .vnc shortcut files which then allow instant access to the remote computer.

The end result of this is that I can perform upgrades and fix problems on all the machine in my house without having to physically be there. This is especially useful as several of the desktops do not have keyboards or mice attached to them. TightVNC also allows for file transfers, as well as synchronising of the clipboard between local and remote computer. To summarise:

Pro's

• Free
• Excellent performance
• Copy/paste and file transfer facilities
• Easy to setup and use

Con's

• Initially, you need to know the IP address of the machine you want to connect to
• Occasional connection issues when connecting to Vista machines
• Setup to access from outside the local network is more complex
• Sound from remote machine not migrated

You can download TightVNC here.

LogMeIn

For accessing machines that are outside the local network, I have discovered "LogMeIn". This company offers a free service to remote control machines from any location in the world via a web browser interface.

Like Tight VNC, this requires software to be installed on each client computer, which sits in the system tray. Once setup is complete I then sign in to the LogMeIn website which displays a list of my computers and their online/offline status. I can choose to connect after entering a machine specific password. The interface is presented in a web browser using a Java Applet by default, although you can choose to install a Firefox plugin or ActiveX control which improves performance and load times. In order for the remote desktop to fit into your local browser it is automatically scaled down, although there is an option to view at full screen.

Performance varies, and is dependent on a number of factors, including the connection speeds on both sides, and presumably the traffic levels of the LogMeIn website. You can also adjust the number of screen colours and manually override the detected connection option to see if it makes any difference. This said, although it is not as responsive as TightVNC, these performance issues do not affect usability at all.

I've been using LogMeIn for around two months now and it's already invaluable a number of times. I can offer assistance to remote users in London and Bristol, as well as access my home machine while at work.

Pro's

• Free
• Easy to setup and use
• Remote desktop to a machine from anywhere in the world
• Excellent security (256 bit encryption)

Con's

• Some features such as file transfer are only available in LogMeIn's premium products
• Performance can be slow and image quality can be poor
• Browsing to the LogMeIn site, signing in and logging on to a remote machine can take time

You can find out more about LogMeIn here.

Introducing the New JD-Works Site

Over the past month I've been redeveloping this site to try and show off more of my skills as a designer. It has literally taken me ages as I've been through about six different design concepts, even taking some to the build stage before scrapping the idea completely. I've also been indecisive about what content I want keep - looking at what has worked well in the past and what needs to be changed has taken longer than I expected. Plus the project always gets sidelined when I have other client work to do.

However, the resulting website is one of the first designs I've managed to work with for over a month, and not tear up. This has fortunately been enough time to get it to the state it's in now. Here are some of the new/updated features:

Restyled Blog

I've now upgraded to Movable Type 4 which has forced me to refresh all of my blog templates, and update them to take advantage of the new features available. Some of these improvements include integration of 'Captcha' verification on comment entry pages, which should help to prevent spam commenting. This has also allowed me to reopen commenting for all of my backdated articles.

New Photo Section

In conjunction with Ben Abbott I have developed a new photograph gallery system that takes its data directly from Flickr. Developed using FlickrHelpr, JD-Works now imports all of my photo sets directly and displays them in appropriate categories. The whole system requires virtually no maintenance and creating new galleries is simply a drag and drop procedure.

New Portfolio

My portfolio has had an overhaul and I've added lots of new projects that I've been working on recently, as well as some employment and qualifications information.

I will be trying to update the blog more frequently as I notice that my last entry was over six months ago, but in the meantime please feel free to take a look around.

I wanted to go somewhere a bit off the beaten track, but also not too far from home, and Morocco seemed to fit the bill at only three and a half hours from London. We initially flew into Marrakech, although traveled up to Casablanca for the first weekend. Returning on the Monday, we then embarked on a four day trip into the Sahara, stopping over in Ouarzazate and Merzouga, in between camel riding, dune trekking and sampling the local 'cuisine'.

On the final weekend we traveled to a coastal town called Essaouira which bares heavy European influences as well as some incredible artists and craftsman selling their wares. Back to Marrakech for our final night in the unbelievable Riad Magi before our return to London.

On some holidays you return with the thought "it's nice to be away, but now it's nice to be home". This definitely wasn't the case on this occasion. Take a look at some pictures here.

• Life at MTM continues to be very good. We are currently completing the infamous 'Phase Two' part of the redesign of BoatShop24.co.uk, which see's major changes to just about every part of the site; due to go live mid-March.
• Have arranged a ten day break to Morocco in a few weeks time. Flying into Marrakesh where we've got the first night's accommodation booked, and after that see where the country takes us...
• Brother Stuart turns 21 on the 21st February.
• Just (successfully) finished a one month self imposed ban on the drink!

• Marine Trader Media. I've now been working for six weeks as a "Creative Designer" for Marine Trader Media, based in Chichester, West Sussex. My job involves working on in-house projects, such as development of the company website BoatShop24 (look out for a re-build soon!), as well as creating solutions for external clients. Look out for us as the London Boat Show in January.
• Have been spending time in Bristol and London which has been fun. At last managed to do some shopping and buy things for myself for the first time in about a year. I now have a new wardrobe!
• JD-Works. Having mentioned ages ago that I would be doing a redesign of the site I have actually now got round to thinking about this a bit more. Have got something in the works which hopefully will be unveiled in the beginning of 2007...

And that's just about it for the time being. Check back soon...

I think the best thing about this holiday was actually the fact that I did very little! However, despite all the lying around the pool and sitting on the beach, I did make some time for a couple of walks round the local hills, some kayaking, as well as plenty of local food and drink!

Take a look at some photos here.

• James Dunn BSc (Honours). I have now graduated! I achieved a 2.1 in Multimedia Technology and Design and had the graduation ceremony at Wembley Conference Centre on 18th July. This also signals the end of my time at Brunel University, and I moved away from London at the end of June. The rest of my room mates (Rob, Irma and Reza) opted to remain in the house, and have found a new person to fill my room. I wish them all every success in the future.
• Client Work. I have been working on a number of freelance projects this summer. These include a website for Concept Foods Ltd which is now complete, an ecommerce site for a startup company called "RulerReading" (currently under development), and an XHTML/CSS exercise in building Stuart Graham.info according to the clients design. Also in the progress is a site for a drum'n'bass DJ, and a redesign of JD-Works.
• Night of the Living Legends. This was a big success with over 120 people attending and the party running all night! Some of the best costumes included "Where's Wally", "Tomb Raider" and "Game Boy", although I have to admit that my own attempt was rather poor after a week spend rushing round setting everything up! I will get round to uploading the pictures and video from the 'Diary Room' just as soon as I get time.
• Holiday! On 1st September I am off to Spain for ten days to visit a friend living out there. Full report when I get back.
• What's Next? I'm currently looking for jobs in the web design field, and have a few ideas as to where I might end up.

Please come and visit if you have some time over the next couple of days. The exhibition is being held at the Business Design Centre in Islington, and around 150 students are exhibiting their final year projects, ranging from websites to product design. See the Made In Brunel website for more information.

I am on stand D6 (upper level), number 042.

One of the coolest features I think is the "Geo Overlay Map". This shows graphically where visitors to your site are coming from, represented on a world map. The larger the dot, the more visitors from that particular place.

Other features of Google Analytics include the ability to view the kinds of web design parameters that visitors have, such as browser, resolution, flash version etc. However where Google Analytics is most effective is the way it displays this data to the viewer. All the result screens are crystal clear, with information represented graphically as well as textually, and in a logical, customizable format. This is extremely refreshing when compared to the default statistics packages that come with many web hosting packages, such as Dreamhost, that uses Analog.

While I don't doubt that there are other, if not superior web stats packages out there (Shaun Inman's "Mint" being a possible example), I can't help but think that Google have got it right with their attempt. Credit must go to 'Urchin' who originally designed and built the package, before being bought out by Google. Although this may be initially perceived as a bad thing, remember that Google have managed to make it free, unlike its previous owners.

You can find out more about Google Analytics on the home page here. You will need a Google account to use Analytics, and currently new accounts are by invitation only. You can apply for an invite online.