Fabulous Service From Rickshaw Bags

April 15 2012

Those of you you who follow me on Twitter or know me in reality will know I have a mild obsession with finding the perfect laptop bag. Well last year I found that bag in the Rickshaw Bags Commuter 2.0.

I’ve used and owned many, many laptop bags over the years, and so I feel I can say with authority that the Rickshaw Bags Commuter 2.0 is the perfect laptop bag. Yes you read that right – the perfect laptop bag.

From its magnetic closures, to its removable laptop sleeve, to its array of pockets and pen hoops, to its quick adjust strap there isn’t anything I’d change on the Commuter 2.0.

At least I thought there wasn’t, and then, one day recently, I found myself on the Rickshaw website, and saw their new Performance Tweed materials.

When I ordered my Commuter 2.0 I went for a rather conservative all black appearance, but having seen the new tweeds I really rather fancy a bag finished in tweed; it appeals to my sense of Englishness.

But which colour? I couldn’t decide between the Graphite and the Tuxedo, and having been recently stung by online colour matching issues I didn’t want to risk ordering a custom bag from the USA only for it to arrive and not be what I hoped for. I dropped Rickshaw Bags an short email explaining my problem, and asking if they were able to send me samples of the fabrics, at my cost of course.

A few days later an Air Mail envelope arrived sealed with a Rickshaw Bags sticker, and containing both samples and some lovely, rather old school, cardboard tags identifying each sample. What fantastic service.

I can’t recommend Rickshaw Bags products highly enough, and now I can say the same for their customer service also.

Now if you’ll excuse me I’m off to order my new bag in Tuxedo tweed.

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Photo 366 – The First 100 Days

April 11 2012

After 100 days of my Photo 366 project I thought I’d pause and review how it’s going.

When I started the project I said:

I think my Photo 366 project will be a challenge to keep fresh with interesting photographs. I commute to London at least four days a week, well I say London but my employers recently moved to Angel; a Northern suburb of London, and possibly the most uninteresting, and un-photogenic area of London I’ve visited. So finding subjects worthy of photographing and not resorting to repeated pictures of the London skyline will be a challenge.

So has Photo 366 seen me out and about looking for interesting photographic subjects? If I’m honest not really.

The area I work in is still as uninteresting, and un-photogenic as it was when I started, and I haven’t felt inspired to explore it any further. But my project has made me look around me more, and notice things I might not have noticed before.

Many of the photos are of railway stations or from trains; two places in which I spend too much of my working days.

Beer, coffee and food all feature prominently, but given my well known love for them it’s perhaps not a huge surprise.

The surface of my desk at home also makes several appearances, as the days I work from home have been some of the more challenging ones; hence a number of shots of ‘something on my desk‘.

I’ll admit there have been a few days where I’ve almost forgotten to take a photograph, which accounts for a some of the less imaginative shots.

So after 100 days am I still enjoying Photo 366? Yes I am.

Whilst I want to make more effort to get out and look for more interesting shots, I’m also enjoying recording my day to day. I particularly like recording events from specific days in a photograph such as, for example, my 100th photograph Orbital live at Cambridge Corn Exchange:

Coincidentally I deleted my Instagram account on day 100, the day that Facebook acquired them, which I hope from a photographic standpoint will see me taking photographs that rely less on 70s effects and more on subject and composition.

I’m looking forward to the next 100 days.

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Draplin

April 10 2012

I’ve seen many many designers, and creatives, and developers, and web guys, and “serial entrepreneurs” speak at conferences, but there are few that are as genuine, as funny and as inspiring as Aaron Draplin.

I was privileged to meet Aaron briefly last year when he brought his Tall Tales From a Big Man tour to Manchester; it was one of the best talks I’ve seen.

Aaron recently presented at a Creative Morning event in Portland Oregon. Take 50 minutes to watch the video, you won’t regret it.

If you have some more time then watch Why America Is Fucked, and for America insert pretty much any country in the Western world.

Oh, and conference organisers – stop booking the usual suspects and book Aaron Draplin.

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My Farmhouse In Japan

March 20 2012

A film about place and memory, a farmhouse in Japan, and the lives of the people who called it home.

A wonderful film via Millican’s blog The Cave

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Redesign

March 15 2012

I’ve been looking for a new theme for my blog for months, and found nothing that matched my fairly simple, yet exacting, requirements, so I thought I’d try and build my own.

Now given my rather patchy knowledge of HTML and CSS, and my non-existent knowledge of WordPress I knew this would be tricky – but I didn’t realise quite how tricky.

I tend to read most websites and articles using either Reeder or Instapaper, and that clean, typographically focussed style was what I wanted to realise for my theme.

I started building an HTML prototype and quickly found a number of errm ‘gaps’ in my coding knowledge. My good friend, great designer, and all round splendid chap Richard Wiggins very patiently helped me fill those gaps and get my prototype to the stage where it was time to make it into a WordPress theme.

Ahhh WordPress.

It’s fair to say I had rather underestimated what would be involved in making my design into a WordPress theme. “I just have to drop a few tags into the right place” I thought to myself. If only it was that easy.

WordPress does have some simple standard tags and elements you can use within a theme, but all are completely non-customisable, and in many places rather bloody stupid. All of the documentation on WordPress.org assumes a much higher level of knowledge than I possess, and again is limited and full of gaps.

All of which led to many moments of despair and pathetic whimpering. But, slowly, and surely I bent WordPress to my will and finally emerged victorious.

Having conquered the beast that is WordPress it was time to revisit the design which still wasn’t quite ‘right’. It was the selection of the wonderful Meta typeface family that finally made it work; specifically the combination of Meta Web Pro for the body and Meta Condensed for the headings.

It was great fun working remotely with Richard whose IM messages of “Make it blue! Make it blue!” transformed key elements of the design. Of course it was even more fun working over a beer or several in his local pub; beer being something I owe Richard rather a lot of now.

Richard then took over and finalised the design adding the real polish including the lovely navigation arrows you see to the sides of your screen, unless you are on an iPhone then they magically appear at the bottom. Which is because Richard also applied his responsive web design magic to my humble design adding yet another layer of shizzle.

If it hadn’t been for Richard’s help and encouragement this redesign would never have seen the light of day. He’s a brilliant designer – hire him NOW.

There are still a few old posts I need to tidy up but I’m very happy to be able to launch my new design.

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Stealing Time

February 19 2012

Time is like an invisible bottle of water, at the very beginning you suck up every drop you need, soon you find that sharing is rewarding and fun, then it become your responsibility to share and you wonder how much is still available for yourself, at this point if you can’t figure a way cut down the demand, you will either break down, give up yourself or you have to steal. I steal.

From a great article from Patrick Ng.

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