One thing I’ve been meaning to write about Nike + for a while now. Well actually theres a few things….

Firstly, I’ve managed to cut my 10km down to 36′55″! Wow. I know it’s me but I think that is amazing. I still remember when I was proud of completing a mile and doing it in 10 minutes.

Second, I’ve got a bunch of friends in to it too and we’ve got a number of challenges going. I wish I could display them on my blog as I show the few runs. Plus I wish i could show my average pace, best 1 mile, 1km, etc..

Challenges do rock. What a grat way to motivate people to work harder. Some of my friends weren’t interested in doing 10km or even really running to be fair but now they are out there every day (pretty much).  My friend Ade has lost at least 2 stone (28 pounds) which is great for him, and I was just wieghed by my doctor at 12 stone. I think that is the lightest I’ve been in about 20 years!

However, yet another problem I’ve run in to with the system is a danger that my run is cut short. Basically this has happen about three times. The most recent time was the most annoying - last saturday I went out for a proper long run, oe I’d not dnensince getting the system. I ran from Crofton Park out to the thames barrier and back to Grennwich along the river, then home. The whole trip clocked in at about 23km, but at 18km I paused at a kiosk to buy a bottle of water (it was a proper roasting day) and paused my iPod. When I pressed the button to continue to it said “Continuing run…” and then “Run ended…” and my run was over!  I am so pissed off! That run was the fist opportunity to break my distance record for a long time. It’s not often you have the chance to run that far. For one it take a lot out of you! But to not have it recorded on my Nike + account. Gutted!!!!

This has happened quite a few times too. Generally where I have paused for a moment to pull my top off. It is wierd how it happens too because the system initally appears to kick in to action but then stops for no apparent reason.

Has this happened to you? Is this a bug with the system? Be good to know because then we can pressure Nike to sort it out.

B

Oh, and by the way I managed the 23km in around 1′30″. Quite unbelievable I know. Must do the marathon next year…

Somehow it seem the only time I have to add to my blog is late at night. It is currently 1am on a friday night. I’ve had a fairly quiet night. went for a few drinks with Juan and Olly then came home as Yasia’s sister and partner have come down for the weekend.

They headed off to bed fairly early and me and yash watched The Three Amigos for while before Yash decided to hit the sack too. I will be joining her shortly but thought I’d just jump online and express a few views that have been holed up the past week or two. I must admit the Three Amigos had me laughing a fair bit. Don’t know what that says about my sense of humour which has certainly changed as I’ve got older, although it could be the wine.

I’ve friends who’d say it was either a classic or a dud as clear Steve Martin fans. I’ve never really been a fan although he has had his moments. Blowfinger (?) for example was, overall, a terrible film, but I still think it has one of the best comedy moments I’ve ever seen, which amazingly features Eddy Murphy. Personally I don’t think he’s done anything decent for about 20 years but the scene where his charater runs across the freeway is an absolute classic. It had me in tears and make the rest of the film vaguely worth watching. Basically beacuse you need to understand the context too as to apreciate the situation.

Anyway, moving on, I’ll split the rest of my ranting over a series of posts so that they can be suitable listed in the taxonomy.

For those of you who don’t know what taxonomy is,

• (a) it has nothing to do with tax, that you pay, and
• (b) it has nothing to do with stuff dead animals.

It is actually to do with the organisation of information, as in at a library, the use of meta tags, and results sorting. Hope that clears things up.

I’ve just watched the cricket world cup highlights. Wow! What a game. The game featured was England v The West Indies. Brian Lara’s last international game. I’m sorry to see him go although I never watch cricket so it really doesn’t make any difference but I hear he was an entertaining player in a game that could do with some excitement. But today’s game was worthy of a place along side such memorable occasions as Liverpool winning the champions league and Great Britain winning gold in women’s curling 6 years (I think) ago.

It may not have been worth anything but at least England went out in style and showed that there is quality in the team despite the bad press and critisism. Michael Vaughan lead the team well totting up a good innings. Then came along Kevin Pietersen who made a century but fell at the next. Finally it look like the windies had got the best of england but  then the crowd were silenced as Paul Nixon put in a quality performance falling short of the target by 3 runs with 3 balls to play. I have to say having started to believe england had it them to win I thought we’d thrown it away at the end but Stuart Broad saved the day hitting a four which pushed england 1 point ahead and winning the game.

Who knew cricket could be like this! Excellent!

I’ve just spent the evening digging through a pile of old cds and trying to clear out any of no value (some how they just seem to build up). And it’s a miracle! I found the cd containing my old rafcareers.com website which I built back in 2001. I’ve been wanting to add it to my portfolio since I put it together.

The site, or the version which I’ve added to the portfolio is the flash version. I also designed an html version, with the help of Tom Thorpe, when I worked at design net. The previous version had been built by Deep End but the COI weren’t happy with it so we got the contract to sort things out.

Having such a clear and obvious brand I developed the design around that and the idea of using an airbase to navigate around the site. It was a fun project to work on although we ran in to a number of technical issues, primarily with the integration of a ‘flight bag’ (shopping basket) to save jobs which users were interested in.

In the end though, the site launched and was extremely well received, making the cover story of Cre@te Online and being awarded 10/10 on The Web Review, on ITV.

Adding an archived version of the site to my portfolio proved to be a bit of a mare. When Tom burnt it to disc using his mac the formatting of the file names was changed to all caps and the names were truncated. So it has taken me a good hour to go through and rename the files correctly, opening all the different flas and seeing what loads where. As it stands I think I got most of it working. At least you can get a sense of what the site was like. I don’t think any of the games will work, or the downloads either.

So if you are interested click here to check it out, but remember it isn’t live so not everything works!

Went to see 300. I really enjoyed it. So I’d give it 4 out 5.

Not much of a plot but I’m a sucker for fantasy in all its tackiness. Then again stylized visual effect was amazing. You definitely need to see this in the cinema. Yash enjoyed it too although the story had no depth. Clearly watching a bunch of young men with 8 (not 6) packs had something to do with it. I must say it certainly got me wanting to hit the gym.

I would sum it up as Gladiator cum Lord of the Rings because the cinematography was excellent. Wonder how long it will be until a gay porn spin-off is made? ‘3 hungdred’? That is crap but you get my meaning.

Beyond the film, the website is well worth checking out. Obviously created in the usual vein of film microsites using flash and all the rich media, but the finish is top quality and it reflects the style of the film perfectly. One item of note is the video footage of the cast in training to get their bodies in shape for filming. Serious stuff. I’d both love and hate to go on a boot camp like that. The end result and feeling of achievement would be immense but the pain of getting there would be unimaginable.

Wow. It has been a long while since I last posted anything. If you are reading…
Sorry but I lost my connection here for about a week. All thanks to Homechoice. Their box desided to pack up and I had to wait almost a week for an engineer to turn up and replace it. The funniest thing was we ended up trying three boxes and five remote controls before we could get it working again. Shows what good quality hardware they provide.

Well anyway for now I haven’t got the time to change although it looks like Talktalk offer a better deal. Will sort it out shortly. I looked through all the different providers and it works out that Homechoice or Tiscali as they are now offer a pretty good deal but I’m fed up with the shit service so I’ve got to find something different. I’ve just tried out a freeview box and it picks up a bunch of random channels but I think I’ll switch to that as with Talk talk I can then get a monthly cost of about £20 rather than near £40 with Tiscali and BT. Will update as thing develop.

Aside from all that I’ve just spent most of the week visiting my grand dad in the isle of white. Hence the lack of communication. What a perfect week to take off. The sun has been out non-stop and we’ve really enjoyed the week. Went down to the beach. Amazing how many people were d0wn there. Beautiful although the sea was freezing…

As it goes I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff I want to write about but it is 3:30 am so I best go to bed. That’s wants happens went you’re off line for a week…

If you happen to have a spare 5 minutes I suggest you check out my friend Carl Hubbers’ blog. He is currently ‘on tour’ with his kiwi mates sailing round the Caribbean following his fellow country men as they surprise everyone with their knowledge of cricket, even beating the English in the first game.

Despite spending every day on a boat he has managed to update his blog daily with tales of their tomfoolery. Check it out…

It’s coming up to the end of the day and we are all sitting round reviewing our sites performance using the IE accessibility tool bar. I now have a reason for using IE. It appears a lot more detailed and useful than the firefox version. Funny considering IE isn’t standards compliant.

All in all today has been very productive and enlightening. I now feel qualified to assess a site’s accessibility compliance and will first put this knowledge in action by reviewing this site. I’ve had a chat to Mike and we will put together a presentation for the rest of the UX team covering the high level aspects of the subject.

I hope I can remember everything. There is a supporting document too which covers everything we looked at and breaks it down in a easy to use format. I will summarise the details on this site shortly too.

The fact is there are so many things you can consider when approaching accessibility but you just need to decide how rigid you need to be for your particular project. As Trenton said, the W3C guidelines are exactly that. They are not law. They are supposed to be there to guide you to produce the best possible site reaching the widest possible audience

Here’s a couple of tips to get you going…

Tip #1
Put a space between home and page when writing the word home page as screen readers can’t pronounce it properly.

Tip #2
Don’t put colons at the end of items such as labels. They become very repetitive and boring.

It has certainly opened my eyes.

It is lunch and I’m taking a break from a day of training on accessibility. Mike Holt and myself have come along for the day to put some knowledge behind our new titles ‘accessibility guru’. Well that is how it has been described within the UX team. I wouldn’t put myself on that pedestal but hopefully by the end of the day I will know a bit more than I did yesterday.

The course is being run by a guy called Trenton from www.webcredible.com. They do a number of courses based around web standards.

We have spent the morning looking at exactly what accessibility is about, who it effects and how to use best practices and techniques.

Going well so far but lunch is over so I’ll update later…

Holy moly! It has finally arrived. The day is almost upon us. Abercrombie & Fitch will finally land this side of the Atlantic on the 22nd of March!

For those of you unaware of this fashion giant, they are an American label which produces what I would class as classic ‘college jock’ clothing for men and women. I discovered their clothes on my first trip to the states and fell in love straight away. The detail and cut of the clothing is excellent. Somehow they always seem to get it right and the quality means it never looks cheap. These days you see everyone trying to copy the style all the way down to Primark. Ultimately though you can just tell the difference. Maybe it has something to do with the people wearing the clothes too. As until now the only way to get hold of the stuff was by going to the states or buy the odd item that found its way in to a random little boutique somewhere. That has meant it hasn’t saturated the high street. It remains to be seen what will happen now they have a store here.
Saying that, it will be on Saville Row which indicates they are definitely targeting a certain demographic, namely that which can afford to shop down Bond St. Which says to me that the clothing will be way over priced. I guess you could say that’s a good thing. If you have the money to pay or, like me you travel to and have friends in America. The bonus of this situation to me is that, given that they stock the same items, I can go in and try things out for fit then have someone send me the same thing from the states, or pick it up while over on business. Perfect!

Knowing me though, I won’t have the patience to wait and will just buy it regardless.

Anyway, only 8 days to go. I might have to make an effort to check it out on the opening day. I wonder if it will be a free for all. They have certainly been marketing it around town these past weeks.

To be continued…