Category Archives: Uncategorized

“Everybody get out, the shop is closed!”

Well, perhaps not, but I seem to be doing other things at the moment, hence the lack of real-life updates in the last while. But you can all stop nudging me (and I’ve set those to go straight into the trash now, so you’re out of luck in the future), because look: I speak my wisdom unto you!

In short: the new job is a new job, with all the attendant stuff. More when I’ve got a better handle on it.

I am going to see Kodo tomorrow. If you are not, then I pity you (unless you saw them tonight), because Kodo are one of The Best Things Ever. If you do not love Kodo, then take your soul back and ask for a refund, because yours is defective. And in a week and half’s time, I am going to taste very fine chocolate during the day, and then possibly go clubbing in the evening for the first time in fuck knows how long.

Other good things: The roof in my room is fixed, and I’ll even be able to hang my curtain back up some time in the next couple of days. (I may not be sleeping much until then, of course.) I have recently re-read all my Powers collections, and they remain ace.

And that’s your lot. Any questions?

The Value Of Professionals

Blowing the trumpet one last time for work for at Sanctuary, and further proof that anyone going out-of-house there (as happens all too often) is on the bad crack:

Fan response to the new Robert Plant site (and in it’s own thread here) – starts about halfway down the page, and is almost uniformly positive. I take a certain amount of pleasure in the fact that they’re willing to believe that elementary things like the mailing list might actually work now (because I know they will) where they didn’t before.

And as I should have said last time, while I’m personally proud of the functionality (some of it a lot tricker than it looks, since the CMS has to be operable by the barely-skilled), the credit for the thing looking so bastard pretty should of course go to the estimable Mr Clandillon.

So, in summary: we’re bloody great, and should be given all the prizes and the adulation of your women.

This entry was originally published at my workblog.

Meant to say something yesterday…

My workblog got the news, but I forgot to mention it here: I’m done at Sanctuary, and to be honest, the level of joy this brings on is hard to articulate. I’ll miss my immediate colleagues, who were a good laugh, but I’m so glad to be out of the music business I can’t tell you.

In 15 months, I have added one URL to my CV. And that only went live ten minutes before I left the office yesterday. (Robert Plant’s site if anyone cares.) One, out of five major projects I have worked on in that time. The rest have been held up by Sanctuary’s internal politics, which goes some way to explaining their less-than-a-penny share price as I walked out the door. As one might imagine, one project live in fifteen months is not the sort of thing that I like, as a professional web developer. It looks bad for me, and takes away almost all the pleasure I take in my trade – what I do is build tools for people to communicate with, and if they’re not being used to communicate, then what’s the point of the work?

But I’m done now, and will be starting at WAI on Monday. Roll on taking pleasure in going to work again.

Atomic Batteries To Power!

As some of you may know, today is my last day working at [crisis-hit/ailing/beleaguered] (delete as appropriate) Sanctuary Group after 15 months with this. With about 15 minutes to go before I leave, the first website I’ve worked on for them (of any size – I don’t count the wee puff piece three page sites for individual albums and the like) has just gone live.

Robert Plant (Grand Wizardy Bastard and Lord of Elves) has just got a new website. It’s taken 15 months, and in the process has cost him something like 23 grand. It might interest you to know that our quote for it, when we were asked about it, two weeks after I got here, was about 8 grand. But his management went with other people, who did the job badly (and charged for it), then had to come back to us to get it done again. They also hired an outside animator for the flash bits of the new site I’ve just linked to, and hard to pay him almost as much as the rest of the site cost, just for the animated bits, because they didn’t agree an up-front cost with him, and so just got charged at day rate.

Every other major project (about four of them) I have worked on for Sanctuary has got bogged down in the internal politics of the company, and has yet to go live.

So, let’s recap: in a year, I have added one URL to my CV. Everything else was held up by office politics. The one URL I have added cost nearly three times as much as it should have because of management incompetence. I could use my time here to write a “how not to deal with new media” book. This is doubly ironic, as the new media team at Sanctuary are world-class – they’re seriously good and switched on people, who are just hampered by the fact that they’re in service to idiots who fear change, and who won’t take risks or in some cases, decisions.

Thank god I’m going back to agency work, where people actually get things done.

This entry was originally published at my workblog.

Links For Wednesday 25th January 2006

This entry was originally published at my workblog.

Contact

Where you can find me on-line this year:

Words:
alasdair.biz – my workblog. New media, technology, and general digital culture shit, plus the odd link I just think is funny. Updated most weekdays. LJ feed available at als_workblog. RSS feed at http://www.alasdair.biz/feed.
black-ink.org – short fictions. Only updated a few times a year, when I can’t get a thought to sod off without writing it down. Every so often, I promised myself I’ll do more, but I never seem to. Once I get the LJ feed reconnected, it’ll be at black_ink_feed. RSS feed at http://www.black-ink.org/feed.
alasdair.livejournal.com – personal life, hobbies, random crap, social interaction. RSS feed at http://alasdair.livejournal.com/data/rss.

Pictures:
Electricana – my main photoblog. An image or two most weeks, assuming I’ve had time to take the camera somewhere. RSS feed at http://electricana.livejournal.com/data/rss.
Flickr – the flickr account I use to hold images/power the photoblog. It gets a few more photos, if I’ve put a set up, and generally has a bit more organisation, but lacks the commentary/decent comments functionality of the LJ version. RSS feed at http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=19821795@N00&format=rss_200.
Electricana.org – my portfolio site. Cherry picked images (and not many of them) from my photoblog, the ones I really feel represent the best of my photo work. RSS feed at http://www.electricana.org/index.php?x=rss.

Other:
last.fm – my last.fm account. Just in case anyone cares what I’ve been listening to lately.
upcoming.org – (some of) my social diary. Things I am (thinking of) doing. Gigs, shows, general stuff.

I’m in the process of building one website that’ll bring a lot of this together in one place, although I can’t think of a good domain name at the moment. Anyone got any suggestions?

This entry was originally published at my workblog.