A New Location

After a happy time on the wordpress hosted platform, the time has come for a little more control of my online identity. This means that from now I’ll be posting over at http://yeknaa.co.uk – same thoughts, just a different location.

A series on writing, developing a style, and editing (not by me).

It seems as though what inspires me to write, is abstinence. So when I do write, then it’s about writing or my lack thereof. For a while now I’ve been feeling the urge to write something. I’ve been so busy with my head down working, that I’ve not had the time to really indulge in anything outside of my day job. I’ve not been reading, or looking outside my little window. Yet those are just the activities which add the most value to my role at Orange Bus. Somethings changed. I’ve suddenly found (read made) the time to do other things.

It was from doing those other things that I stumbled upon Jacob Kaplan-Moss’ writing. Something he seems to be doing a lot more of now, than he used to. Currently he’s writing a really good series of articles on “Writing great documentation“. I’ve found the piece on editing, to be of greatest value. Possibly because it’s my weakest area. I could definitely use an editor for my writing, or failing that, at least employ some of the techniques he mentions for self-editing.

I’ve not taken all of his advice, in editing this piece, but I have at least taken the time out to edit, re-edit, and look at it in a place other than the place where I wrote it.

British Touring Cars Championship Media Day

Kicking about Rockingham circuit testing out Orange Bus’s new deployment of Kyte TV’s live broadcasting technology. As sponsors of Tempus Sport, we’ve developed a new concept of streaming live pit video and interviews with the team and drivers (Harry Vaulkhard). Today it’s the media day and we’re testing the kit, and the team’s testing the car.

Check out Tempus Sport BTCC, take a look at the new website we’re working on, and the footage we’ve captured today, and we’ll see everybody @ Tempus Sport on April 5th 2009 for the BTCC season opener.

Here’s a few pics of the day so far.

Too busy to write and read?

Seems like that’s been the case! I don’t think I’ve posted once this year, nor have I been keeping up with my feed reading addiction, and now I’m afraid to open up the reader. I think what I’ll have to do is call this post the first of the year, and what a well though out post it is. Then open up my reader (NetNewsWire), and mark them all as read. That should alleviate the burden of having too much to read and do. I’ll take a guess that in marking them all as read, not much will change. Apart from I’ll feel a little better, and a little lighter!

Educating clients to say yes…

My day job as a Director at Orange Bus, a digital web agency, involves a lot of communication with clients and a fair amount of setting and managing expectations. If you’re in anyway involved in managing, building or delivering client projects then you could do a lot worse than spend 35 mins watching this video on how to engage your clients and get them saying yes!

The number 4

New @ Orange Bus, Kristian has posted 4 things on 6 subjects. I like to distill everything to 3’s (as that’s all my mind can cope with), but to conform here goes my 4’s:

 

1. Name 4 jobs I have had:

• Director @ Orange Bus
• Mad Scientist @ IBM – (Hursley Laboratories)
• Shelf Stacker @ the company formerly known as Safeway’s
• Paper Boy – Grahams – Corbridge

2. 4 movies I could watch again:

• Le Grand Bleu
• Taxi 1 or 2 – Jon Luc Besson (again)
• Night Watch then Day Watch
• Point Break

3. Name 4 places I have lived:

• Corbridge
• Leeds
• Southampton
• Alnwick

4. Name four tv shows I like:

• Scrubs
• Prison Break
• Peep Show
• Dragons Den

5. Four places I have been on vacation:

• Verbier (Switzerland)
• Lima (Peru)
• St Cloud (USA)
• Barcelona (Spain)

6. Four web sites I visit every day:

• The BBC
• Techcrunch
• .. thats it.

At first when I saw the 4 things I thought that’s not a bad idea. But way too many fillers – 4 places you’ve lived, 4 places you’ve been on vacation… They really say nothing much about you (as long as you have 4). 4 Movies that says’ a lot about you, 4 TV show’s. Same! There’s plenty of other 4 or 3 things that reveal plenty about you, perhaps the question should have probed a bit deeper…?

Wassup

Brilliant re-incarnation of those famous Budweiser ads.

The Smoking Rolo Sideshow

A few of my pals running through some fields in the Northumberland countryside. Excellent video guys and a great album Mr G special shout to the Frithmeister on Bass. Check em out on MySpace.

No Better Time to Start a Startup

There are always new ideas. But if you have a specific idea you want to act on, act now.

Paul Graham – Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy

That line more than any other got me to thinking or to acting. For a long time I’ve thought that it doesn’t matter about the economy, many great businesses have grown out of hard times – take Disney as an example of this. It’s when bright, intelligent, motivated people are compelled by circumstance to follow their dreams.

I may or may not have mentioned this, but I’m a partner at Orange Bus, a client focused digital agency, based in Newcastle Upon Tyne (UK). For a long time we’ve had the desire to develop our own applications/ services that are independent of our client work. Now we love the work we’re doing for our clients, but to own something, and drive it down the road you want to be on, well that’s something entirely different.

And so it is in these hard economic times, times which have seen Orange Bus grow by a factor of 5 in the past 2 years. That we (me) have made a start scratching our own internal itches. Rapid growth has brought with it issues that we just didn’t have when we all sat around the same table. Mainly communication and process centric.

Initially I thought we’d spec this out and then outsource it, as we have very little internal resource available at the moment. I understood the issues we faced, I had in my head a solution to the problems, and I had the thoughts of others to guide me. Armed with that, and the thought of writing a specification detailed enough to allow the work to be outsourced, I turned to Django and made significant strides and a rough working solution to part of our problems in an evening.

And so it begins. We’re looking to develop applications to help manage the whole process from new business development through to project development, delivery and support. We want to do this in a way that is simple, easy to track and transparent. Seamless CRM + Bug Tracking + Support, and then the piece of the puzzle that I’m particularly interested in, and along the lines of Managing News, is software to help organise and communicate information amongst our team. A sort of collaborative feed reader on steroids.

And so with the help of Django, and a very annoying itch. We’ve begun the process of developing our own applications. No outsourcing, just pure unadulterated in-house pleasure.

Stone Balancing Man

Really relaxing. I live next to a beach it has some stones on it, and I’m in need of some relaxing. You’ll be able to find me balancing stones this weekend > here.