andycollie.co.uk

Happy New YearSun 1st Jan

So the new year has begun and nothing has changed as always, we leave one year full of optimism and enjoying ourselves and the first thoughts of the new year are always quite often "what did I do last night?".

Everyone always starts off with new years resolutions with little intention of sticking to them, this year I've got two, one usual and one which is a bit geeky.

The usual is that I'm going to continue going to the gym, continue to work towards having some decent level of fitness and the other is I'm going to make more of an attempt to actually going to make alot more of an attempt at learning XSLT, I've taken the time over the last few weeks to look into it more but nothing serious and it is something I really do want to do so there fore from now on this year I'm going to study harder and make sure that I understand it more. I did it with CSS in a few weeks to get to a decent level of understanding and I can do it with this to, so here we go.

And finally, happy new year.

Late merry christmasMon 29th Dec

OK, so Xmas has now been and gone, we've all got our presents and waiting for the new year to begin.

During the holiday period I was up in Co. Durham with my family and visiting a few friends, I gave and received all my presents and sadly enough the part I'm most inpressed with are my new slippers (you'd understand if you seen em) or also my new shoes and jacket (I'm really getting that easy to please).

I gave both my neices and nephew their presents, took my nephew out with his new football but found it more enjoyable playing with his new remote control car (only because it looks the same as Uncle Andrew's yellow mini).

So now everything has been and gone I'd just like to say a late Merry Xmas to all of you.

Still developing my siteWed 17th Dec

So far I've had this design built but not quite finished for god knows how long now, I've been doing odds and sods to the site on and off but havn't really ever sat down and actually really worked on it until recently.

So far in the past 2 evening I've gone from having a photoshop psd of the page that I wanted to create to an almost complete working website, there are still bits and pieces to do to the site such as the artwork, contact and links pages but they shouldn't take to long to do.

So far since I've been working on it I've gone through and created the pages in static XHTML but I'm now looking into XSLT templates which for the size of my site will be a bit overkill but if I'm going to learn something I've got to start somewhere.

BokehMon 15th Dec

OK, so really right now I'm just padding this out with anything I can think of so I'm gonna talk about photography for a while.

I've been looking into something called Bokeh recently which is a form of photography where areas of the photo are deliberately out of focus, in the instances I've been looking at with certain custom lenses you can create specific shapes with the blurred areas such as the image example to the right.

I'm still trying to create a filter using this example on www.diyphotography.net which works with my camera and so far spent about 3 hours making a one on sunday afternoon for my camera only to test it out and find out I'd cocked it up. but it was atleast worth a try.

Hopefully it won't be long before I have a few fair tries which I can upload to show everyone, once I get the shapes right in the filter everything else should come easy to me but until then I can't really say for sure.

Work xmas partySat 13th Dec 2008

It was our staff night out on Friday which was held in the bar across the road from our offices, we had a free bar all night long although I did have to leave at midnight to catch the last train back to Newbury.

It was a great night out and loads of fun, a few drinking games involved, several cocktails which where all probably pushing 80% alcohol in them.

I did eventually have to leave at midnight and was surprisingly alright right up until the moment I got on the train and sat down, suddenly I went from stone cold sober to a typical Friday night drunk. I do remember sitting on the train feeling a little unwell and then the next thing I remember has to be about 35 minutes later with the train driver at the last stop prodding me in the shoulder telling me to "wake up buddy, its time to go" at which point I think I slurred something like "ith this newby" to which he just walked away. I then had to ride my BMX home from the train station which in itself was just as much of a laugh, even the straight roads had corners ;)

Macro'sTues 4th Dec

The more and more I'm taking photos the more I'm finding that out of all the different types of photographs I take I'm repeatedly coming back to macro's, I seem to love the whole thing of taking close up photo's. The best example I have of this would be the butterfly shots, I'm not sure if you can see the detail in the lightbox photos but in the full scale images I love the fact that you can see all the little details on them for instance hair on their legs, eye colour and so on.

I like varying in what I'm trying to take photos of but so far Macro's are definately what I continue coming back to repeatedly whether it's for animals, landscapes or just objects in general.