Having just returned from @media 2009, my fourth visit to the London based web design and development conference (and reportedly the last in it’s current incarnation), I find myself reflecting on what I’ve accomplished in my career over those four years, my greatest achievements and failings.

Among those I would call the proudest moments would certainly be crafting my first corporate website using my, at the time, limited css skill set. The struggle and feeling of accomplishment in crafting something that only a year previously I would have considered impossible was nothing short of exhilarating.

But wherever achievements stand proud, failures lurk not far behind. There are many things that have been lacking in my development over the years. An inability to overcome my crushing difficulty with social interaction being first and foremost. A long time ago I used to be quite an extrovert, but I think my focus on non-social activities has withdrawn me from public to an unhealthy extent, this is exacerbated by a fear of ‘not being smart enough’ to hold the attention of my peers and friends.

Truth be told, I’m not as smart as I could be, I don’t engage my brain as often as I should do. Challenging myself to meet goals has always been something that I’ve rarely followed through on, part of that is evident in the uneven state of the content on this site.

So what’s next?

Well it all starts with one major change, after 21 years, I’m giving up on monthly comic books. As much as I love comics, I’m losing interest in the continually repeating story lines and the price of normal issues has risen to the point where the drain on my time and wallet just doesn’t seem as worth it anymore.

So the money and time that would go towards comics is now going to be devoted to expanding my library of sociology and industry books. I’m starting off with Robert Wright’s ‘The Moral Animal’ and Malcolm Galdwell’s books ‘Outliers’, ‘Blink’ and ‘The Tipping Point’ and see how I go from there. I’m of course open to suggestions, so feel free to drop me a line with some choice reading material. Hopefully, broadening my horizons in this respect will help improve my confidence in social interactions somewhat.

The next step I’m planning is a complete overhaul of onezom, I started this when I was 19 years old and a lot of the archives here are, quite frankly, cringe worthy. While I appreciate that we should write for permanence on the web, I need to take ownership of this content. The process I plan to undertake will involve reading through everything here, deleting most of the posts and re-writing/categorising any gems to match the new tone of the site. Obviously any posts that are re-written will not retain their original timestamp or comments.

From that point on my focus will be to write articles that are interesting, informative and a little more personal that I’ve attempted before, challenging myself in creative writing, illustration, design and photography unlike ever before, to strike a path that feels right to me and allows me to progress to the next level.

So here ends the first phase of one zombie in a billion.

Thanks

To the many people who have influenced me to move onto this next step.

• Mum and Dad
• Uncle Gordon
• Leigh Anderson
• Karsten Moerman
• Peter Still
• Joe Lear
• Yulia Kovanova
• Fred Fogarty

And those who inspire me through their work and presentations

• Andy Clarke
• Jason Santa Maria
• Simon Collison
• Leah Culver
• Daniel Burka
• Jeffrey Zeldman

Found this amazing video via Binary Bonsai. Why aren’t Microsoft making OS interfaces like this today?

zom wants some crunchy brains!

Then I add the following to the reapeater item template code.

<li <%# currentPage(Eval("Url"))%>>

After doing that, the final stage is to add the following to the .cs file of the menu user control. This code compares the url output by the SiteMapProvider with the CurrentNode url of the page. If it finds a match, it adds the class to the list item.

protected string currentPage(object tURL)
{
 string cnURL = SiteMapProvider1.Provider.CurrentNode.Url.ToString();
 string cp;
 if (cnURL == tURL.ToString())
 {
   cp = "class=\"current-page\"";
 }
 else
 {
 cp = "";
 }
 return cp;
}

That’s pretty much it! If anyone has a more efficient way of doing this, drop me a line or comment.

It’s been in development for a while, so I figured I should just get it out there and bug fix as I go along.

In that regard, watch out for falling code and leaky abstractions.

Main Goals

• Work on my drawing and 3D skills and build a better portfolio (the awesome new A4 wacom intuos tablet my family bought me should help with that!)
• Learn guitar (my new fender is another sweet gift from the family)
• Concentrate on building a better fitness and dietary plan.
• Update my site more often.

Side goals

• Take up at least two sports activities in the next year.
• Read at least one book a month, if not every 2 weeks.
• Experience more diverse books, films and music.
• Create an animated short using flash.

I’ve not set anything too difficult this year, hopefully that should make these easier to keep. Anyway, to all those reading, have a great New Year!

I’ve been playing around with textures in photoshop, and I’m quite pleased with how this artificially aged photo turned out, the original is on my flickr account as “Cabs from Museum Window“.

Anyhoo, part of that exercise involves streamlining my jquery javascript for the pre-population of form fields on this site, so here’s what I’ve put together:

$("form label").each(function(){
		var forminput = "input#" + $(this).attr("for");
		var labelmsg  = $(this).text();
		$(forminput).attr({"value":labelmsg});
		$(this).hide();$(forminput).each(function(){
			$(this).focus(function(){
				$(this).attr({"value":""});
			});
		});
	});

Right, the script looks for <label> fields on the page, then I build a string that lets jquery pick up it’s associated input field. From there the lovely jquery pixies grab each the text of the label, pre-populate the field with that text and finally another function clears the field when you focus on it. It’s nice and low calorie, enjoy.

Self note: need to think about a nice style for the <code> tags…

I’m loving this music video that Ljudbilden & Piloten produced for Minilogue’s Animals. Very inspirational, I recommend heading over to the vimeo page and switching on the HD version.