typing the void

One thing I am extremely passionate about, are sites that include a crucial process, like joining membership or soliciting feedback or making a purchase, that think about what I might feel about their process. I can’t stand form fields with conditions (i.e.: username requires special characters) that I’m not told about until the form fails, [...]

WordCamp Australia, Day 1 Only about 75 people here, in a small hangar like cavern, quite appropriately called the big red box in canal street, Sydney. (Sorry, gotta complete my wordpress upgrade before I add the images!) On the bus home, hired macbook on my lap (don’t get me started on how my MacBookPro died [...]

I love IKEA! That’s a big thing to say after blogging nothing for a few months. In particular since it has nothing to do with the www, at least at first glance. But it does, in a way, because, in my mind, almost everything has to do with the internet. It does have to do [...]

What I want when I want it and all for free or with transparent pricing. We have not had a television in the house since about 2002, partly as it was a TV I acquired from a flat I moved into in 1991 (!) and it was a bit tired, partly because reception got a [...]

I Read an interview with Mark Shuttleworth, a personal hero of mine, in The Guardian last night. A fascinating story of how he wants technology to help people, but not in that overbearing, paternalistic sense but in a more fraternal, assistive way. Having done some very interesting things, like spending $20 million on a trip [...]

Carrying on from my theme about using the online world to support rather than supplant the physical world, I thought I’d tell you about these monthly meetings I have been holding since late 2007, in London. Called the Web Standards Meetup London, they aim to allow practitioners to discuss problems and successes with implementing web [...]

OK so it’s been written about by voices more dextrous than mine but I felt I had to have a go. I just wrote my paltry list of “friends” that I would prefer it if they did not send me any more invites to bite their Zombie’s Friends character, or tend their Lil’ Green Patch [...]

For those of you not in London, there is a very heated mayoral election campaign on at the moment, of comparable intensity to the current US Democratic party campaign. For the first time, there are presentable options to the incumbent and it no longer feels like a one horse race, as it was the previous [...]

Isn’t it great to be told that when a site does not work, it is YOUR fault? I went to skype.com to download the latest release for my Mac, went to the downloads page, and landed on the default Windows download page. OK, I’m used to this and expect it, even though I thought they [...]