I went with a school class trip (my girlfriend is a teacher), and it was good to spend some time with teachers and kids. I helped with some very basic techniques/demonstrations and assisted in picking fallen beginner kids up (as well as my girlfriend who was skiing for the first time and who did very well!), and also got to ski with more advanced skiers on a few occasions. By the Friday, my turns were definitely getting better, and I did a red run or two without trouble. It was great fun, and I’m pleased I went.

The original reason for my trip to England was a two-day business meeting with a client and developer colleague. This happened Thursday and Friday of last week, and was really enjoyable and encouraging despite my having a cold and finding the length of our sessions a little long at times. The two gentlemen who myself and my colleague were meeting are extremely interesting to talk to and work with if you’re into visual methods of communication – this is what their business is all about in the context of teaching/learning – and I’m excited about the things we’ll be developing together.

When booking my flights for the meeting, I decided to stay on for a few days to allow me to visit my family. I’m sleeping at Ian’s (my brother) flat, and have spent some time with Mum and Dad, too. I think Mum really enjoys treating me to some of her home cooking, and so far I’ve had two meals from her: a lovely curry and a roast pork with apple sauce. I’ve also met some friends of Ian’s flatmate at a local pub, which was fun.

Only about a week after I’ll get back home to Germany, I’ll be off again to Austria for a class ski trip with Britta, a few other teachers and about 70 kids. I’ve only done a bit over a week’s skiing myself (slightly more snowboarding), but I got to the stage where I could consistently enjoy a good blast down a slope, so I hope to be of help to the beginners that will be among us.

Unfortunately, a fair bit of the time that’s left in between these trips in January will now have to be devoted to system maintenance/repair, as the PSU in my workstation PC blew up earlier this month. I’m hoping that the rest of the system will be okay once the PSU is replaced, but if, for example, the hard disks are shot then I have backups of data including client work. I wanted to get myself a new workstation anyway, and am in the process of deciding whether to buy the components and build it myself or to buy a pre-built system.

I’ve also been getting a lot of enquiries and requests for estimates for new work, at least some of which are going ahead and are required over the next few weeks/months. (I also had to let one potential new client know I couldn’t help them due to lack of time, but they said they hope to have more work for me to propose on in the future.) So it’s all go. Or, as my father always says when he gets back from the office, “busy, busy, busy!”

As a result, I am closing my Amazon account, as has Daniel Ellsberg and, no doubt, many others. This involves sending Customer Service a message from within one’s account pages.

Once I manage to set up an alternative means of payment for one of my domain name registering service providers, I shall also be closing my PayPal account for the same reason.

Here are my goals:

1. getting up earlier weekdays and improving my daily schedule;
2. progress in learning German;
3. lifting dumbells or training with my Power Ball (alternate days).

Today is our first day, and so far I’ve marked off 1 and 2.

Getting up earlier (6am today) has meant my eyes have been feeling tired, but I made good progress through my to-do-list and felt like I’d accomplished a lot by 4/5pm (even though I took about an hour-and-a-half out for lunchbreak stuff) – I won’t need to work late tonight like I often have done, and I’m feeling quite pleased with myself. I’ll be getting an early night tonight, and hope I soon adjust to the change.

For my German, I’ve reminded myself of and relearnt the regular verb endings, using ‘kommen’ as my example. I need to make sure I reuse what I learn as I have the type of brain that forgets things easily unless they’re in constant use.

That just leaves either lifting my dumbells or using my Power Ball, which I’ll probably do while we watch a film.

This list is probably going to be of more use to me (as a reference to check on my progress) than to you, but maybe you’ll see something that catches your interest so I’m including explanatory notes.

Use open source software more, proprietary software less

I’ve been using the Ubuntu operating system on and off for quite a while now, but for the last few months I’ve been mainly working in Windows. If I can change this and work in Ubuntu I’ll be much happier as I’ll be better secured, have more useful features available to me, use a more streamlined operating system with less annoying fluff, and be less locked in to a monopolistic vendor (Microsoft).

Editing (X)HTML, CSS, XML, PHP and Javascript (the bread and butter technologies that I use in my work) can all be done fine in Ubuntu (likely using gedit or Aptana Studio), but visual designing and graphics work is something I’ve found I need Adobe software, such as Photoshop and Illustrator, to do.

Once I have a faster computer, maybe I’ll be able to do graphics work in a virtualised Windows from within Ubuntu. Better yet, I’ll find actual alternatives to Adobe applications. When I’ve previously tried GIMP, I couldn’t make myself persevere with the interface having got used to Photoshop. I also plan to take a look at Inkscape for website designing and web graphics.

Further reading: Free Your Computer with Linux (at The World of Stuff)

Learn the Dvorak keyboard layout

I currently touch type with the usual QWERTY keyboard layout, and learning to do so was one of the most useful and time-saving things I ever did. I would now, however, much prefer to be able to use the better optimised Dvorak layout.

It’s not so much that I want to type faster than I currently can (though that would be fine) – it’s more to do with not wanting to make awkward and inefficient finger and wrist movements. For example, ‘Regards’ is a word I often type at the end of an email, and with QWERTY the left hand has to type all seven letters. The Dvorak layout was designed to be easy and efficient, unlike QWERTY which was designed to stop typewriters jamming.

This will be a generally daily endeavour, perhaps half-an-hour every day. Ideally, I’ll initially keep my QWERTY touch typing ability so that I can type at a reasonable speed while I’m learning Dvorak.

Further reading: The Dvorak Keyboard and You (at The World of Stuff)

Read some books

I’ve found reading books to be a great way of improving current skills and learning new ones (as well as using the web to keep up-to-date with web-related technology and news), and of keeping myself positive and motivated. A good story is also something I enjoy very much.

In progress

The Handmaid’s Tale

There is Nothing Wrong with You: Going Beyond Self-Hate, A Compassionate Process for Learning to Accept Yourself Exactly as You Are

Where’s Stig? (like Where’s Wally? but with Top Gear’s tame racing driver – yes, I’m a big kid)

To start

Build Your Own AJAX Web Applications

The Principles Of Successful Freelancing

Designing With Web Standards, Third Edition

No Nonsense XML Web Development With PHP

A Short History of Nearly Everything

The Wishing Game

Continue building freelancing success

I was pleased with the acceleration in amount of work which came towards the end of last year, and I’ve got a fair mount of exciting and interesting projects to be getting on with. Together with some advancements in the industry, this means I’m very much looking forward to continuing developing my web design business.

To this end, I think I could do better in communicating 1) my products’ results, 2) my products’ technical quality, and 3) my main skills and approach. I also feel doing this in a friendly and straightforward way is important. My current website was intended as a temporary design and I’ll be coming up with something more comprehensive/betterer.

A first for me was creating and launching a site using Magento, an ecommerce webshop system: Model Learning Shop. I have another custom Magento design in the works for a new client, and with a bit of luck I think this will be an area in which I can help many others with, too.

Meet people

With work being busy, and my ability to be happy sat in front of my computer, it’s very easy for me to stay in. Living in Germany near my girlfriend’s family has ensured I’ve had a fair few laughs with good company, but it’s also important to get out with some other friends, so that’s what I hope to do more of.

I’ve already met up a few times with English-speaking people here in Cologne (a great thing to be able to do), and I’d also like to be able to communicate better with the natives. Which leads me on to…

Learn the German language

I have learnt some bits and pieces of the language, but can’t hold a proper conversation which is, of course, necessary to properly integrate! Britta, my girlfriend, has kindly got me some learning resources, including Take Off In German (Oxford) which I’m spending half-an-hour on each day.

German was not my best subject at high school, and there are things I don’t yet understand (e.g. cases), but like most things, with perseverance and time it will be achieved!

Use RDFa

A concept which has inspired me very much recently is that of linked data, and RDFa is the technology I will use to include machine-readable data in websites.

Web pages as they commonly are at present, are documents consisting of textual and other data, linked only by connections (hyperlinks) themselves. Each web page is essentially a standalone document. When the data on a page itself  is linked, and different websites refer to external data in a machine-readable fashion, entirely new ways of using the web become possible.

One of the most easily appreciable benefits of linking our data is the increased efficiency when searching for information. Instead of searching merely with keywords, relying on a search engine to take a stab at what we mean, we can explicitly define the entity in which we are interested. One example would be searching for a person; if we search using the keyword concept our meaning is ambiguous, but if we search by defining a specific person (defined, for example, by a url which represents the person in question) we will only get results relevant to that particular person, no matter how many people share his or her name.

With another advantage being that search engines such as Google and Yahoo Search Monkey are starting to include linked data in their results (and drawing attention to products that use it), now is the time to start making your data available with RDFa if you haven’t already.

Further reading: Linked Data Guides and Tutorials (at linkeddata.org)

Contribute to our environment and worthy causes

The annual BBC Children In Need event is something that my family and I have traditionally watched and contributed to, but I’d also like to include other charities which target other very important needs where possible.

1% for the Planet is “an alliance of businesses that donate at least 1% of their annual revenues to environmental organizations worldwide.” I came across it a while back but didn’t check out the details. The website has been updated since, so I will look into it further and hope to sign up if I’m happy it’s run well.

A non-profit charitable and educational foundation which launched on New Year’s Day is Foundation Beyond Belief. I like the sound of the way it’s set up:

Foundation Beyond Belief is a new non-profit charitable and educational foundation created (1) to focus, encourage and demonstrate humanistic generosity, and (2) to provide a comprehensive education and support program for humanist parents.

The Foundation will highlight ten charitable organizations per quarter–one in each of ten categories. Members join the Foundation by signing up for a monthly automatic donation in the amount of their choice, then set up personal profiles to indicate how they would like their contribution distributed among the ten categories. Maybe you’d like to give 25 percent each to human rights, poverty, education, and the environment. We’ll distribute it accordingly. By year’s end, you will have helped support a dozen organizations in the areas you care most about.

Blog

You’re reading the first post of my new blog, and I want to continue blogging throughout the year. I have a few ideas on things I want to write about/highlight, which hopefully some will find interesting.

I’ll be signing up to Project52 to give myself a good target of at least one post per week.

Aside from my own blog here, I’ll also be writing (assuming I can think of something to share) for a local English-speaking community blog, which will hopefully be a good way of connecting with people.

Improve website creation workflow

I’m a “hand coding” (I use that phrase reluctantly as writing (X)HTML, XML and CSS is not coding – it’s marking-up and styling) kind of guy when it comes to web pages, and I like to be in complete control of the markup behind each site I create. What is necessary for one site may be bloat in another. There are, however, many things which apply to most sites, so I’ve recently been doing my own little “framework” from which to start new projects. I’ve also decided to try using CSScaffold – a CSS framework with provides some great features without creating bloat.

In short, I’ll be able to give important considerations such as accessibility the attention they deserve while reducing the time taken to complete a project. The next website I do will use this framework as a starting point.

Buy a new computer

My computer was good when I got it, but that was a while back. I want something faster and quieter.

Relax better

I think I’m fairly good at mentally switching off when I want to, but sometimes I find I’m combining relaxation time with work time, rather than making sure I take some set time out. Sometimes urgent things require immediate attention, of course, but in general I’m going to try to relax better, as well as work better, where possible.

Exercise

At Christmas I got a set of dumbells and a Powerball! With half-an-hour on each (perhaps while watching something interesting/useful) I should be able to improve my upper body strength considerably, and put some weight on in the form of muscle. I’m 182cm (about six foot) and only 64kg (a little over 10st.), so a bit more weight would be good.

Play games

Thanks to a load of bargains on the Steam games platform I have several modern games which don’t run well on my now under-powered PC. Once I have a new system I’ll be devoting a little time here and there to some quality gaming – something I used to do a fair bit in my younger years.

And a Happy New Year to you!

All the very best with your 2010 and whatever you choose to do with it.