Archive for January, 2010

Glasgow Osteopaths

  • Written by Colin
  • Posted January 30, 2010 at 8:48 pm

Last year when starting my yoga practice, I decided to make sure that my back was good and healthy.  I had abused it for years drinking, dancing, and LOTS of slouching.  I decied to see a chiropractor and an osteopath.  Yes there is a difference.  A chiropractor works your spine while an osteopath works the muscles that hold your spine together.  Ok that’s probably an over simplification.

Well because of where my yoga teacher is based, The Natural Health Service in Glasgow, I was able to contact Asif and his crew of osteopaths.  Real nice people, all willing to help and offer advice.  So when I saw their website I had to offer my services. Read the rest of this entry »

8 Comments
Filed under: Websites, Yoga

Yoga January

  • Written by Colin
  • Posted January 29, 2010 at 4:17 pm

I have to admit, one of my New Year’s resolution was to push my home practice more and more and more.  I wanted to get to a point where I was doing 1hr of yoga every morning before work.  Am up anyways.  I have a what some call a perfect body clock, and others a fucked up body clock.  Its mine.  I fall asleep easily at 21:30 onwards and won’t wake up until 05:00 and most often never later than 06:00.  I basically get my full nights sleep and I always feel great…in the mornings, night times is something else. Read the rest of this entry »

3 Comments
Filed under: Yoga

Burns Black Grouse

  • Written by Colin
  • Posted January 22, 2010 at 2:48 pm

I have just put live a new website for a client in my day job.  What has happened in the past is I have just added a link to a growing list of websites but because most the sites I do are seasonal or short lived, by the time anyone looks its a dead link or the site is only 1 page.  So I have decided to add pics of the sites I do to my blog.

The creative, html and css was done by the talented Mark McMullen in my work, while I did the backend coding.  Its a real nice website and hopefully you read this in time to play with it…it’s an exclusive!

[update]

We ran out of the freebe whiskey well before lunchtime on the Saturday after it went live.  5000 hits to the website in less than a morning.  Overall we had over 22,000 hits on the site when I came in to work Monday morning.  And nothing went wrong!  Bonus!

1 Comment
Filed under: Programming, Work

My One On One

  • Written by Colin
  • Posted January 18, 2010 at 10:12 am

Yesterday my first homer of the year went live – http://www.myoneonone.com. It is a rebuild of a friend’s yoga website, the old one was badly designed, badly built, and the client was left to do what she wanted.  Now most client’s should be left to do what they want, but within set guidelines.  This new one is clean and simple.  Never going to win design awards I grant you, but nice, clean and billion times better than it was!

The old site was built in Joomla, and the Joomla backend didn’t work at all, whatsoever! And my point is made again about open source. It breaks too easily! Ok not all open source is crap.  jQuery rocks.  And maybe I have never had a good experience with open source CMS engines – Umbreako anyone?  But what my friend had to deal with to manage her website was beyond bad.  But its dead, its gone, and long live http://www.myoneonone.com.

No Comments
Filed under: Meditation, Websites, Work, Yoga

Avatar…3D or not 3D

  • Written by Colin
  • Posted at 9:47 am

Well its an easy answer. Yes in 3D. It’s amazing in 3D but the question is really, would I go back to see it in 3D? That might be a no. It’s great in 3D and something you have to see. However once you get used to the 3D-ness, is there any real point? The movie still dictates where you are meant to be focusing and in 3D this is hard to get used to – something floats past your eyes, very closely, you are automatically going to try and focus on that, but as it is in the movie the focus is elsewhere in the scene, so you try to focus on a blurry object. And that got annoying.

I don’t want to shit on the movie, I actually really really liked it, but the small things of trying to get used to a 3D movie spoiled it slightly, in my opinion. Next time I watch it, it will be in standard 2D. Sky TV in 3D…hmmm bit far.

1 Comment
Filed under: General Rants

Timesheets : timesheets.com

  • Written by Colin
  • Posted January 12, 2010 at 7:41 am

Timesheets Galore!

The next timesheet application I found was http://www.timesheets.com.  It is quite easy to sign up to  and you get a decent amount of time to evaluate for free.  Other than the fact you can sign up and rent webcams and finger print log ins – big brother is really watching you and I don’t mean Davina McCall (the host of Big Brother for non-brits) – this is quite a good solid piece of kit and keeps a good eye on your time. Read the rest of this entry »

No Comments
Filed under: Timesheets

Timesheets : Replicon

  • Written by Colin
  • Posted at 6:36 am

For years now I have developed timesheet systems.  From a desktop VB6 to a web based c# mvc app.  And each time I build it, it gets simpler and simpler.  It has to.  In this world you have 2 types of people.  One is the admin, the person that deals with spreadsheets and accounts on a daily basis, that loves to see columns of numbers adding up.  The second is the user.  They don’t care.  They don’t actually want to use timesheets because they see it as pointless!  So you have to build something where the user doesn’t need to think.

Read the rest of this entry »

3 Comments
Filed under: Timesheets

cufón

  • Written by Colin
  • Posted January 11, 2010 at 2:37 pm

For a long long time I have been trying to find a simple to use text replacement script for website.  sifr did a real good job when I first played with it, but the problem being that it loaded a flash file for each block of text your were working with, so if you had a slow internet connection or your font was large, then things become slow.  And you had to have flash!  So that rules out my iPhone and probably most other mobiles.

Read the rest of this entry »

No Comments
Filed under: Programming

Testing tests

  • Written by Colin
  • Posted January 8, 2010 at 5:26 am

I am renowned for not testing my code to death.  Cause it worked before I assume it will work again :)   Not so just recently.  In tiny, I changed my code so that user’s Id’s were guids instead of ints, as I saved the id in a cookie, by having it as a guid would be much more secure – people can’t just go around changing cookie values and getting into other accounts now ;)

Read the rest of this entry »

No Comments
Filed under: Programming, Timesheets

Alison and Mike McVey

  • Written by Colin
  • Posted January 7, 2010 at 10:07 am

For years now I have been painting toy solders, not so much in the last couple but since I was 10.  I once met Mike McVey at the Games Workshop roadshow in Glasgow when the store was still on Queen Street.  Back then he was an awesome painter, but now…shiiiit!!  What’s worse, his wife is even better!

Check out there work at http://studiomcvey.blogspot.com

He also sculpts and sells his own stuff at http://www.studiomcvey.com/.  But Mike or Alison, if you ever read this blog post…fully flash websites are bad bad bad, but that’s my programmer’s opinion.

1 Comment
Filed under: Painting & Wargames