The problem, my sky+ HD box failed. Reason unknown after going through the technical support provided by Sky. Now that’s fair enough all I need now is an engineer to come out and replace the box its in warranty and all I need is a replacement. No one else is the building has come around asking if I’m also experiencing sky problems as they are, so it isn’t a problem with the shared dish.

Now, because of the shared dish we used a local company to provide the Sky box and the installation was the guy making 2 cables to go to the satellite connectors on the wall and plugging in the box. The problem is now that I want the box replaced this local company (Future TV) are saying if it isn’t a problem with the box they will charge me. What the ladies on the other end don’t seem to understand is that by the power of deduction it can only be a problem with the box and as they are unable to touch the dish as they didn’t install it etc they are charging me for nothing but coming over for 5 minutes.

I guess it can be like most things, it you use a 3rd party you can get burned if something breaks. Today for example the manager I’m expecting a call from has been ‘in a meeting’ since I called this morning at 11:30 (it’s now, at time of writing 15:00). If I’d gotten the box from Sky it’d have been sorted out by now no questions asked. The technical support agree that the symptoms show it’s a problem with the box and not the cables or dish but the local company doesn’t.

So now it’s been a week without any TV, the digital switch over has happened in Bristol so with a broken box I have no TV at all. So I’ve resorted to BBC iPlayer on the Wii and Sky Player on the 360. Sky player is useless. With my Sky subscription I get about 4 channels on it and some of the shows I could have watched on Sky are not shown live on Sky Player or I have to pay to watch them on top of my subscription and I’m flooded with adverts.

So always buy direct if you can, no excuses

After being teased by pictures of custom Droplets and the actual series 2 arriving it was great to finally be stood on Park street waiting to see everything. Arriving around 17:30 I wasn’t expecting to see the queue I did. I dare to think what time people started but there were already around 20-25 people waiting.

As the hour rolled round I was impressed to see the queue grow and grow. I was joined by Liam (@discoliam) and watched people look over in wonder of what was going on and even more people queue up.

When the doors swung open we moved forward in to Fifty Fifty and headed towards the far corner slowly as people started purchasing Droplets, bags and t-shirts we got closer to the front. It was great watching people open up the great packaging Gav put together for them. As planned I picked up 2 which both turned out to be blue pirates. I then popped downstairs to the gallery of customs which are amazing. If you didn’t get a chance to pop down to the launch then check the group out on Flickr which has loads of pictures of customs and more.

After a walk around the gallery I caught up with Ben (@purpleeggdesign) who was towards the back of the queue as he brought his droplets. One quick swap later and I went from 2 blue pirates to 1 blue pirate and 1 orange sports droplet. As the queue passed I tried my luck with a 3rd droplet and ended up with another orange. I got Gav to sign the bottom of my blue one as then went on the hunt for a swap.

The nice thing was the number of people swapping. I guess the way they are packaged in the box puts all the same colours together. Which isn’t great when I got 2 and Liam got three all of which were blue. I was able to swap my orange one for a Pink one meaning that later all I need is a white and purple one to finish the set. Though I may have to ask very, very nicely to get them as Droplets are blind boxed.

One of the great things is that it only took 58 minutes for the Droplets to sell out. I’ve seen some people blogging who drove 3 hours just to be there. If you want something to brighten up your desk and help fill your creative space Droplets are perfect. They’re small, cheap and great little things that make you smile. It seems there is also a massive community around them too.

Congratulations to Gav and a great creation and the effort put in to the launch. Keep your eyes out for them popping back up soon!

Photo thanks to Jazzybam

This may be a good thing. I’ve read loads of blog posts and books that suggest just getting it out there for the world to see. The only problem with this I feel is my lack of knowledge surrounding PHP/MySQL security my end up breaking something and I’d rather it didn’t.

I’ve also found out the sheer amount that needs to go in to the final report. A dissertation is around 10,000 words. A project like this where you’d hope to right a quick look over the project around maybe 1,000 – 2,000 is actually 4,000 to 6,000 words long.

Now it seems to me that I’m pretty sure my development time is more important and produces results than a massive report at the end. May just be me though.

The main task now (as you can guess, I hope!) is sessions. Without them it’ll fall over pretty quickly and be a useless app when its completed meaning no users for me and no nice app for you. I guess if you believe in fate then some recent lectures about Sessions and Cookies have come at exactly the right time for me.

Its one of these parts of the project that seems so easy but has me putting it on a back burner while doing other things. I know I need to finish this part to move on to the next.

WDC has gone from strength to strength. I’ve had some great people involved (some more than once!) since the start of it all back in 2006 and now I’m working towards WDC2010 it is going to be even better. It’s given me a chance to meet loads of great people who make up the web industry and I’m hoping to have helped educate some people (not just students) at the past 3 events.

I’ve started my own company, it’s been an idea in my head for a while and although I wasn’t always going to Web Design now it’s in place I may get the other branches of ideas going. It’s been an interesting road so far and hopefully the second version of the site will appear soon making it complete. If you want to see more check out Bluefly Digital.

I’ve moved a lot, since I started Uni. I’ve lived in 4 different places and am now in a place where I won’t get kicked out come July. It’s a nice feeling knowing I can settle in a bit enjoy the piece and quiet of a) no living in a student flat, b) no inspections meaning a 24hour clean-a-thon before hand and no house mates (aside from the lady!) which is the best. I’ve had some great flat/house mates over the last few years but some horrid ones to. Thankfully in this case the good and great out-way the bad.

Looking ahead…
Over the next 3 years I hope to do loads more. Come the summer I won’t have to worry about University and pleasing Tutors with the way I write logs for every piece of work I do no matter how small it is. This will mean loads more time towards WDC an putting more behind Bluefly Digital. I also hope to actually get out to a few events like dConstruct as great as it is running an event its far more fun to sit and listen and not have to worry about who is where and when.

I want to go to America, for work or for a holiday some of you may know I’m a small NFL fan and it’d great great to see a game over there just going off the International Series and the atmosphere there. It’ll be nice to get outside of Europe for once. I also want to get out in Europe too, there are some conferences around it’d be great to go to.

The 2 big things are WDC and Bluefly Digital. I love doing WDC not just because it’s a chance for people to get a conference at a nice price with some great speakers involved too but also because it’s great to give students something to help with their degrees. Bluefly Digital should be along for the ride with that one but I want to be able to expand my knowledge of both design and development as well as work with some great people from all over the place. If in 3 years I’ve done the above maybe I’ll have made it somewhere…

The idea is simple enough, open your browser and work your way from A-Z.

So going through mine are as follows:

• A: http://ac.mediatemple.net
• B: http://www.beyondunreal.com
• C: http://www.colourlovers.com
• D: http://www.damnlag.com (removed the ending as it’s launching soon)
• E: http://www.engadget.com/
• F: http://ffluk.football.nfl.com/
• G: http://gamefansnetwork.com/ (mine!)
• H: http://hotmail.com
• I: Nothing!
• J: http://jquery.com/
• K: http://kuler.adobe.com/
• L: http://www.lanarchy.co.uk/
• M: http://mail.huntershome.co.uk
• N: http://news.bbc.co.uk/
• O: http://www.o2.co.uk/
• P: http://www.petercolesdc.com/
• Q: Nothing!
• R: http://royalmail.com
• S: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
• T: http://twitter.com (who’d have guessed it?)
• U: http://www.unplggd.com/
• V: http://www.vbulletin.com/
• W: http://wearebluefly.com/ (mine too!)
• X: Nothing!
• Y: http://www.youknowwhodesign.com/
• Z: http://www.zeldman.com/

I guess some thing I’ve learnt from presenting to class mates at University are:

• Prepare it
• Know what you’re saying
• Know how to say it
• Expect someone to be an idiot

Not great advice and I’m sure most people out there who speak at big events know most of this already, but let me expand a bit.

Prepare it
Getting a presentation right is all about preperation. If you’ve looked in to the subject matter and know what you’re talking about then you’ll cover almost every thing you need to in the presentation. Putting it together with Google searches the night before tends not to work to well.

Know what you’re saying
If you don’t ‘um’ know what ‘um’ you’re ‘um’ meant to be saying it can be a bit tough getting the message across to your audience. They’ll loose track of you and get bored quickly which is never a good thing. If you’re passionate about what you’re speaking about you should know what you’re saying. If you are covering a topic you are unfamilar with then research and find common terms people will know about.

Expect the idiot
There will be at least one person who wasn’t listening and ask a really obvious question, sometimes the information will be right there in front of them but don’t just point them to it, repeat the point you’ve made and make sure they understand. If they do everyone else in the room already does.

The third event took place last Wednesday (21st October) at the Watershed in Bristol. Some 70 odd people were able to attend the event which was a great turn out. They were lucky enough to enjoy talks from Jon Hicks, Sarah Parmenter, Elliot Jay Stocks and Dan Donald with 3 panels covering everything from working on the web industry, working in the south west and actually getting that job and what to expect from it.

The talks were great and I feel the panels went down just as well with plenty of ideas floating around on the day and I hope everyone who went along learnt something from at least one talk. I know I learnt loads of things which have tied up some loose ends.

The panels only happened because of the people who were willing to sit on them. I’d like to thank Chris Garrett, Rachel Carney, Elliott Kember, Gavin Strange, Giles Colborne (who was nice enough to step in for Joe Leech at the last minute), Dan Williams, Peter Coles and Tom Holder. There advice and information shared was priceless and has hopefully helped everyone in some way.

As always I’m happy for any feedback from the day, I’ve already had some which will be helping towards WDC2010. Now I just need to catch up with everything else and sort out the WDC Archive which should hopefully have stuff from all 3 events.

But what makes your presentation good? What makes people remember it? and how do you make sure people go away learning something new?

Over the past 3 years I’ve seen a good number of presentations, some at University and other at conference events including my own Web Developers Conference.

So first off what makes the presentation a good presentation? You should have already heard of the phrase “death by PowerPoint” and it’s a good think to avoid. So when putting it together avoid:

• To much text
• To many images
• Really, really bad transitions & animations
• Putting your slides on a timer.

To much text is bad because you’re not telling your story on the slides you’re telling it through them. The idea with slides is to make a point and your speaking will expanded on them.