So rather than try to beat my ass into the ground to complete a few things I had originally planned to do, I’m taking a longer summer break instead. This of course gives me the time to pack, and to de-clutter ready for the move, and also to get some other things in order.

Fear not, as I have 11 draft posts in various stages of preparation which I hope will be of some interest to visitors. Yet, I’m not going to list them or give any details as I can’t predict what will happen soon after getting my Internet connection back. Nevertheless, I may get around to posting at least one of those drafts before I enter the dark ages, and re-emerge with an even higher bandwith connection.

If you’re interested in my summer holidays, you can check out my flickr where I’ve posted pics of my wonderfully relaxing trip to Athens. It was good to see my friend Antonis again, and to immerse in another culture yet again. The best part about visiting a place where you have a guide from that country is that you get to experience the ‘real’ place. Meeting their friends and chatting with them about everyday things. Luckily, most Athenians speak very good English. If it wasn’t for that, I’d be screwed, because my Greek only extends to a few words (not even phrases). Having the likelyhood of visiting Athens again, I’ve also decided to enrol on a Greek Language For Beginners course, in the hope that I’ll enjoy learning something completely new (outside of Web Development/Design) and come away with some basic language skills.

Cool. See you readers in the fall.

He makes a good point given he had first hand experience of being disconnected from Google search for a short while, but what interested me was that he found the alternative search engines not quite as accurate for him as google was.

The ecomonic implications of Google’s other businesses are something else to wonder, but I’m really more interested in exploring if our generation of web surfers are engendered to Google and its algorithmic search results. I’m pinning this down to Google’s one pioneroing webservice because search is something which we all rely upon, and why we rely upon Google results so heavily.

I’ve tried to wean myself off Google by testing and purpose-searching other services. I’ve done this, and like Mike I’ve never really been completely satisfied. For some searches the alternative search engines can be more ‘enlightening’, and I say that to mean sometimes Google is too formulaic. If I want to be surprised, I’ll not use Google. If I know what I want Google beats the rest hands down.

But why is this though? Is it perhaps because I know what to expect from Google, and because I use it so often then I know how to cater my search terms to receive what I’m looking for (If anyone has any data or links on an average of Google searches per-person per-day, that would be cool, post a comment and give me some links!)? I often expect a Wikipedia result on the first page SERP for example, and that is handy if you just want to grab a quick overview of something. Same goes for the IMDB, I expect it to be there if I search for a movie name. Even if I want a quick spell checker Google usually suggests to you what you might want to be searching for.

This whole dependency would probably please the folk over at Google Search HQ. It’s exactly how they want it to be. I don’t care whether that strikes fear in your heart or not, but it remains that Google dominates search and probably will continue to do so as long as we all know what to expect from it. If Google radically altered its algorithm and we didn’t see what we expected, that would probably turn us away from their search.

It still remains that for a website publisher, Google-SEO is so well documented and commented on that I’ve conformed to that breed that states if you do well in Google you’re on a winner, and most of my sites do better in Google than the other search engines. 90% of traffic to my sites is Google generated. There is an argument that if Google search ceased to function, people would flock to the alternatives, and therefor traffic could remain stable via more visitors to those engines equals the same amount of searches etc.

What do you think about this honestly? Do you think we are all so reliant on Google Search than others just don’t compare in their SERP offerings? Another point: Are you (like me) more forgiving of other search engines when searching and actually spend the time going through their SERP pages while expecting Google to have it there for you on the first SERP? I know I am generally more forgiving of the others when doing this, and my SERP click through rate is probably higher on other search engines than on Google.

I simply expect Google to have what I want, and I am so used to using Google that I know how to tailor my search query to find what I want. What about you?

One of the most useful things about Opera that I’ve discovered recently is that you can in fact run multiple sessions (or Windows) in Opera and navigate them all from the same window.

Perhaps you knew this already, but I’ll just explain a little further if you didn’t. Using sessions as Opera calls them to organise your web browser tabs is something I’ve done for a long time, but I hate having multiple Operas on the task bar, because that is not the ideal way to find your way to and from sessions.

Enter the dragon: Windows panel. Previously I was unaware that when you open multiple sessions of Opera the Windows panel actually shows you every tab open under the appropriate session. So, just by having this panel open when multi tasking makes it really very easy and unburdensome to find what you need.

See this picture to find out what I mean:

I have to admit there isn’t much organisation going on in that screenshot, mainly because I opened a saved session to show you what it looks like. But I’m sure you can see how you might be able to have multiple sessions open and have it all neatly organised.

For example, you could have your favorite websites open in one: We’ll say for example that they are SitePoint.com, Digg.com, Facebook.com perhaps Twitter.com etc etc.. and in another window you have say a bunch of stock photography websites open because you’re looking for a certain picture for a project. You can quickly see how organising your browser tabs in this manner is going to help de-clutter your experience.

The other side to this point is considering the windows panel does a lot for you, do you need a tabs bar at all? I generally have an extremely cluttered browser by default, with the panels open either on Mail, RSS, or even Window/sessions as in this example. Plus I have the view bar open as I store handy Opera functions such as user-style sheet and page zoom. But could I do completely without the tab bar? Not me, but for someone who likes a minimalist approach, it is really just a few clicks away:

To me, removing the tab bar and the menu bar is a pretty extreme approach. But there is something nice about it too I think. And with that a quick tap of F4 (if you are on WindowsOS) will pop open the panels and you have access right there to your tabs and windows. Yeah, even ctrl+tab will cycle through.

Although I’ve mentioned that I clutter my browser with lots of handy quick ways to navigate around, and for me that improves my ability to navigate quickly, using window panel now makes managing my tabs a whole lot easier, and while this doesn’t really apply to just browsing around, it comes in handy just at the point where you are multi-tasking like working on a project and needing lots and lots of tabs open.

There are a few niggles still, and notwithstanding all the pushing and shoving I did for IE to display it somewhere near envisioned. I’ll be getting to those in the future, since I’ve only noticed them since uploading.  I’ll also want to look at a few areas again once my eyes haven’t been staring at the mock and sandbox version for so long. There’s only so much you can see after a long time looking, and usually not the bad points. I decided to push it out there on this blog for two reasons really, one I wasn’t happy with the old version, and that was always intended to be just a stop gap. And the second,  I wasn’t happy with the old version, and that was always intended to be just a stop gap. Now I realise that’s only one point, but I thought it was such a pertinent one that I should say it twice.

That’s all for now, Smegheads. And yes, I’ve been watching Red Dwarf recently. If you’ve never seen that TV series, a whole lot of what you just read won’t make sense.

Well there are a number of reasons why actually. It wouldn’t have escaped the casual sitepointer that both avatars have been the cats from the book/cartoon. I do like cats, yes it is true. In fact, they are the best pets, but not if you have a large hungry one. Those are best in the wild, and not in zoos. Average cats, the kind that are too arrogant to go looking for food themselves make good pets. I’m preparing myself for getting a pair of them actually, and do you know you can buy special poop-palaces for them nowadays? Oh yes, your cat must have a private place to do their business, plus it comes with a air filter so that few oudors escape. Perrrfect.

So back to the disney Jungle Book. It was one of the very first films I can remember watching, and I think it sparked a life long interest not just in cats, but in adventure and far flung places of the world. I still find adventure literature really engaging, same for documentaries also. Actually finding usable stills to make avatars of, and vectorising them is a problem. I usually resort to a google image search.

So I was using the good old Bagheera avatar on sitepoint for quite a while, but when I became a mentor it just didn’t seem to fit with the colour orange, and on a passing suggestion from Raffles in my congrats thread, I started to think about using Shere Khan. So I did, and no doubt any sitepointer visiting this ere blog will already have seen it.

I watched the flick again just recently, and I have to say I really still do enjoy it. The animation was actually quite ahead of its time when it was produced, and was the last Disney film to get the real Walt Disney touch. The backgrounds are incredibly detailed and have an almost watercolour-like property to them. Although, the animation of water has come along way since they did it in Jungle Book. But, I don’t think they ever got better songs for a flick than what they achieved in JB. You have to admit, (Or at least, I will admit) that the groove to “I wanna be like you” is one dandy fine jazzy number.. and who could not love the scatting from King Louie and Baloo?

And, you gotta admit, the voices of Sebastian Cabot as Bagheera and George Sanders as Shere Khan is absolute genius.

I also have to point out that King Louie didn’t feature in the book but the similarity to how the monkey people are portrayed in the book is still evident in the film. Louis Prima, the voice and singer of the classic “I wanna be like you” was probably the inspiration behind the character.

So anyway, having deleted alot of stuff unnecessary to this post, I conclude it. That’s the most abrupt ending I can think of. Now go read something more interesting. lol.

So it’s kinda swung around and hit me in the face. Perhaps I’ll just stop being picky about stuff and write a load of dribble. Here it goes:

What I’ve been doing this past month is finishing off one mamoth project and starting another. Doh. I’m telling myself now that once this next one is done that is it for a while. Otherwise I’m likely to burn out… or possibly just drink too much beer on occasion. Neither is really helpful when trying to work, so I’ll need to work hard and play hard. And that means sticking to the schedule: Working when I’m meant to be working & Staying away from the computer other times.

Yeah, I know. Radical thought…

Having got back from 5 days away at my sister’s wedding, I realised there was much that I had missed, and more than half of it was unnessesary distraction, although still the sort of stuff I like to do, such as keep up to date on tech news etc.. but I need to pinch myself and just get the work stuff done first..

I’m going to aim to get this next project done before I go away to Athens again in late July, and then, spending lazy days in Placka drinking ice coffee, or beers as the warm evenings progress, will be a reward for compelting the project and finshing the punishing workload I inflicted upon myself.

Oh and I have several new tech books to read…

My introduction to Bob Marley’s music was an early one. We had a sort-of-hippy living next door when I was young, a pretty cool guy actually, and since I was friends with his son I used to end up going on many adventures with them, trecking through woods and biking around the countryside and the like. That’s partly another story, but it was during the summer months when school was out that he used to play Bob Marley’s music, literally ‘blasting from his urdy gurdy’ as my mother aptly put it.

I didn’t realise at the time who it was or what the music was about, I just remember it now as groovy music. It’s perhaps this memory that influences my enjoyment of the songs today. I’ve spent a number of summers constantly playing Bob while the sun shines, and you have to admit it is fit for purpose.

Now ‘Legend’ is a fine collection in itself, but if there are any of you out there that just have this album, I would encourage you just to go out to the store and grab one of the studio releases. You can’t beat just listening to some of the stuff as it was collected together in an album. There’s also a certain ambience that you get listening this way, and that is generally lost on ‘best-ofs’.

Sometimes Marely Lyrics are put to ingenious use against the music, none more so than the words of Hallie Salassie to the United Nations immortalised in the song ‘War’. That one song didn’t feature on Legend. Though ‘Get up, Stand Up’ appears on Legend we might forget, lost in amongst other songs of distinction, of its political nature; A rousing chant for human rights, used by Amnesty International as its Anthem.

I couldn’t imagine living without this music, and even though I listen to a lot of different stuff, Marley is a constant companion. Whenever you feel wiped emotionally, there is always some solace to be found, or a song to lift your spirits back up high again.

So then, this post wouldn’t be complete without my Top Ten. So here it is (links to youtube). You’ll probably know a few of these, and I haven’t gone for the esoteric ones that I like, so I present this as is, just a great selection for you to listen to today -May 11th- the day Marley died. Or anytime you happen to come across this post.

1. Forever Lovin’ Jah

2. Three Little Birds

3. Concrete Jungle

4. Natural Mystic

5. Soul Shakedown Party

6. Small Axe

7. Trenchtown Rock

8. Redemtion Song

9. Crazy Baldhead

10. Get Up, Stand Up

Got surveyor details back now going ahead with buying new apartment.

Started doing designs on 99designs.com

Finished learning new awesome guitar piece.

So yeah, it looks like i’m entering the property market for the first time. Given house prices in the UK are astronomical and that they are likely to fall this may seem like folly. However, the place we selected is very central and  modern, very much in demand no matter what the overall market is at.

So on to designing for 99designs.com. Now, many graphic designers feel that doing work on spec is the root of all evils. But consider for a moment someone like myself, who needs some way of building a portfolio, and needs experience with dealing with client nit-picking about such. Can’t get a better place to try out your muscle to be honest, so while those who decry the evil of 99designs will have their opinions, perhaps they should redirect them towards (what I feel the greater evil) TemplateMonstor.

It’s been a great learning curve actually, and I’ve gained some insights I would otherwise would not have, and also have some arsenal to add to my web design portfolio.

And yeah, I finished the Choro de Saudade by Augustine Barrios, the foremost composer for the classical guitar, and I’ll get around to YouTubeing it at some point for ya’ll to watch me play.

I did then spend a few nights away from code and Photoshop and watched some movies instead, and in fact not many were filled with the kind of bloody unrelenting vengeance I like. Still it seemed to do the trick, as on sunday morning I woke up, fired up the PC, opened my IDE and Photoshop and started blasting away in a furious burst and by the end had made huge leaps forward in the current project I’m working on.

To surprise myself further I then went and played guitar for about 2 hours, and seemed to be able to focus in on my technique and really play well, even spending time to work over complicated parts to get them just right. I’m now 4 bars of music away from completing one of the key goals for this month. Safe, it’ll feel good to tick that one off )

After that I started reading a book I had been meaning to get around to (Web Standards Creativity), and then later I even picked up a non-fiction book I had bought a few weeks earlier and started reading it while sitting in the sunshine. Bliss.

I’ve got a few more things I want to note about this whole thing really, mostly to do with the project i’m working on, but I’ll pass on that for now and just leave you with the fact that a little time off can really do some wonders! Don’t wait around pushing yourself to do stuff just because it’s on your list and you want to keep moving forward with things, take a freaking break and come back to it firing on all cylinders!

And as for the title of this post, well the above should speak for itself. The ‘it’ is what you want to do. Now you go do it too.

I know most people would worry themselves sick over something like this. Fearing mental illness or worse some voodoo spell, I however am just sick of it full stop.

I’m not a person that worries a great deal, and am generally laid back about stuff. I even have difficulty making up my mind on any given subject because usually I can see the case from any number of given ’sides’.

I’ve been trying to pin it down and see where this is coming from, and I don’t really have an absolute answer as yet. I know that I’m feeling a little fatigued from working all day and coding most of the evening. So I figure I need a break. But another part of me says press on and keep to the master plan.

Or maybe i’m feeling a social integration fatigue from facebook, twitter, flickr, friendfeed and the rest. Perhaps keeping up is depleting my energy.

It really bugs me because I think my concentration is affected. Wheras before I would focus on something that I was doing and set a goal for it, now I can’t seem to find the muse. I’m speaking principlally about my guitar playing in this example but since that is affected I’m not sure it’s completely down to computery jitteryness. (yup, I’ll go with that as a vaild ‘name’ for it)

Hopefully i’ll find what’s bugging me soon. Perhaps I need 2 hours of bloody unrelenting vengeance to help sort me out.