Hello! Still alive (just). Here’s the Thank You card I designed to send out to friends and relatives to thank them for our son’s Christmas presents. Yes it took two months, that’s how pant-shittingly busy I’ve been. Done in a bit of a rush (in tiny patches over the last couple of months). Would like to work on some more but want to send it out now. Hoping to do an illustration a week from now forward.

After a rough few months starting to get my mental state balanced again. Recently made the decision to stop working all weekends and evenings and allow myself some time to work on creative projects of my own (and just relax occasionally). Working out relatively ok so far although not sure how effective this will be long term as already starting to slip on some deadlines. The next step is to learn to manage people’s expectations, mostly by no longer agreeing to unrealistic deadlines. I may be out of work by the end of the year but hopefully less unhealthily stressed out.

Have not yet got back to a point where I’m managing any real creative output but starting to feel more mentally ready to get some stuff done.

Anyway, part of my ongoing plan is to start trying out new things so after a hard first gardening day of the year I had a crack ad doing a stencil to decorate the shed. Used this rather helpful tutorial on Instructables. I am such a spod:

So, let’s say you hire a builder to build a wall in your garden. The builder gives you some advice about where he thinks the wall should go, how high it should be and what sort of bricks it should be made of. You ignore his advice because it’s your garden and you know your garden better than he does.

He builds the wall where you ask, using the materials you requested and at the height you felt appropriate. You decide you don’t like the position so he knocks it down and starts again in the new position.

This time you decide the wall is too high, so he does some builder stuff and makes it lower. But then, suddenly, you realise it looks stupid at that height in that position so you ask him to move it elsewhere. He knocks it down and starts again.

Oh no! It’s the wrong sort of bricks. It clashes horribly with the shed where it is now. You ask the builder to change the type of bricks in your wall to nice yellow ones. He knocks it down and starts again.

Damn! It’s too low, you can see the neighbours ugly child over it. Not a problem, the builder makes it a bit higher.

So you’ve got a nice yellow wall that carefully obscures the ugly children next door but doesn’t clash with the shed. But something’s not quite right. Oh, you can no longer see out of your kitchen window. You are sure the builder mentioned something about this previously but you opted to ignore him because you know your garden better than he does (silly builder).

One last time. You ask the builder where it was he thought the wall should go (and how high, and in what colour), he tells you again what he said at the start and you agree to it (of course it was completely your idea all along, he knows NOTHING of your garden). You finally have a nice wall that obscures whatever you need obscuring while not obscuring whatever it is you don’t want obscuring. You are happy, the builder is happy.

The question is, how many walls should you have to pay for? You only have one new wall in your garden so surely you only have to pay for the one wall?

Hello! I started writing this a couple of months ago (early September), but got interrupted by the birth of our son Alexander. To further complicate life we had an office move and some rather stressful work situations. It’s now nearly November and the first time I’ve looked properly at my website. I’ve decided against finishing the full review of the day, partly through failing memory but mostly, having re-read the unedited version it was dull as fuck. I want to post the remainder anyway because it was a truly ace day and it’s nice to have a reminder. This is why I am not a professional blogger.
……….

Our baby is due in the next few weeks so I’m confined to the local vicinity for the next couple of months. My first War in the Park was a great last day out of the summer and a good chance to catch up with London (and Southampton) friends who I really don’t see often enough.

I went up with Emily and Katie, unfortunately Lady K couldn’t make it as ready-to-burst pregnancy doesn’t fit in so well with guerrilla festivals and sitting on muddy ground for hours.

War in the Park is an annual outdoor event featuring poetry, spoken word and unplugged acts, the official description:

We take over a space in a park which we announce a day or two before.

We advertise it by hijacking phone-ins on Radio 1 and XFm.

We book the best acoustic acts and the most amazing spoken word artists.

We book rock, industrial, metal and electronic acts and force them to play totally unplugged.

We get people to burn stuff.

No prisoners.

This is WAR.

100% free, 100% untraceable, 100% uncontrollable.

This year WitP was in an abandoned playground in the corner of Burgess Park (Camberwell, just off the Old Kent Road).

Due to overplanning we turned up half an hour early.  Tried to find a cafe of some sort but didn’t know the area at all and were both too damn lazy to work out how to use the apps on our phones to find the nearest eating facility. We walked aimlessly down the Old Kent Road hoping to find somewhere that matched our annoyingly middle class requirements. We walked the wrong way for about 45 minutes, passing nothing but manky looking KFC clones, ‘Saunas’, assorted religious buildings (lots of ‘Holy Ghost’ churches), hardware stores but nothing edible. Walked back the way we came and found plenty of options two minutes from where we started. After a bit of procrastination we went into a Bolivian restaurant which turned out to be pretty much targeted  at the local Bolivian community. Food was excellent (mountain of roast pork, potato and something I had never seen before), occupants were friendly and had a chuckle at me when I tried the chili sauce which nearly killed me.

MMMmm Selecto, drink of the desperate.

Stopped on the way back to the park for supplies. We bought a 2 litre bottle of something that looked like a soft drink called “SELECTO!” it was technically a soft drink but was fucking horrific and contained sugar than should be legal. I managed to drink the entire bottle throughout the day for lack of any other option. The next day I had a bastard of  a SELECTO hangover. Not great.

We were about two hours late to WiTP, we wandered around aimlessly looking for it eventually bumped in to Yvonne and friend who pointed us in the right direction, conveniently right beside where we had started in a disused playground area with a raised area to one side, almost like a magical glen of drunk musicians and poets.

The gig itself was marvelous, a great mix of bands and poetry, unfortunately I don’t remember the names of most of the acts but everyone was ace. We turned up just as DeathBoy were about to start, Adam on acoustic guitar and Scott (cheating a little) using a battery powered speaker for backing. Lost Again, Parasite and So I Said You Died, DeathBoy worked well as an (almost) acoustic act managing to get across the energy and emotion pretty well without amplification.

Next up were the bombastic Bleak with typical style Anton took to the stage area wearing a cowboy hat, mirrored shades and smoking a large cigar. A more traditional setup than many of the other acts a Bleak acoustic set is not far removed from a Bleak plugged in set. The band played a storming set of their very own style of blues rock with Anton storming round the park in his  theatrical manner, during the set he held up a herbal viagra pill and swallowed it with much ceremony. Musically they were as together as ever with Tim perched on the stage/raised area doing his usual guitar wonder, Yvonne devoid of her usual full drum kit giving it some on a hand drum and Rachel’s backing as brilliant as ever. This was Tim’s last Bleak gig (and IAI gig) before moving to Berlin, very glad I made it.

I Am Immune opened with a rather too pissed Pete apologising to the audience before they even started both for his state of drunkenness and that they were an electro-rock band so might not work so well as an acoustic act. They held it together pretty well to start with, with Pete balancing rather precariously on the raised bit above Tim and winning the day by turning round during the set yelling “I’m taking it to the bridge” before legging it to the little wooden bridge behind the staging area.

…. and it’s two months later and I can no longer remember much detail from the day. I really enjoyed some of the poetry, which is a nice change. This Is Radio Silence were staggeringly good. A poet chap convinced the audience to help him achieve the first ever poetry based stage dive. My camera died just before This Is Radio Silence came on. We got home in on piece and it was a lovely day.

Here’s some photos… The full set is on flickr here.

Scott DeathBoy

Adam, DeathBoy

Anton, Bleak

Bleak

Pete, I Am Immune, Taker of it to the bridge

… and then the camera died

Links…

• DeathBoy
• I Am Immune
• Bleak
• This Is Radio Silence
• War In The Park
• Parrilladas Del Sur (The Bolivian Restaurant)

Look, we made a baby.

Hello! I am Alexander Matthew Barker, I am in charge now.

Thank you to everyone for your kind wishes, especially to Damon for this hugely appropriate message:

You’ve done well and I like your baby. But could you just make a few changes? The baby’s head needs to be made a bit bigger and rotated approximately 73 degrees counter-clockwise. I’m also concerned that my clients won’t know how to understand a baby with two arms. Give it eight arms. The smile isn’t right either. And with the nose, I found this awesome flashing clown’s nose on another person’s baby. Use one of those instead. Also, My daughter is an expert on babies and she thinks you should have given the baby more ‘pizazz’ – so do that too. And get these changes back to me by this afternoon please.

This grew on our apple tree! I might eat it and see if I get super powers.

For my birthday we went for a walk round the assorted attractions/historic monuments of Runnymede. We visited the Air Force Memorial first (after accidentally interrupting doggers in the car park). The memorial is a beautiful work of architecture and incredibly peaceful and moving. We managed to not destroy the peace. Didn’t manage to see the other monuments as got a little caught up with the logistics of the day and failed to get a cream tea as the cafe was packed. Had a look round the gallery opposite the tea rooms which I absolutely love.

Big thanks to those that came along.

Some pics of the Air Forces Memorial.

Full set of the Runnymede Air Forces Memorial.

Having another massive camera clearout. Here’s the first set.

Sometime last year we went on a big hike around Bledlow Ridge with Emily and Katie, while walking we kept hearing weird loud noises which we couldn’t place, eventually worked out it was a steam train on the Chinnor & Princes Risborough Railway. Emily found an ad for a Nature journey so we planned a picnic and a trip along with Max, Fi and Caden. Unfortunately Emily and Katie couldn’t make it in the end.

Slightly disappointed to find out it was a diesel train rather than a steam train when we showed up (none of us had actually read the advert properly) but it was good fun. It was very different to our expectations, we had expected a planned tour with items of specific interest pointed out, what actually happened was the train moved very slowly for an hour or so and we were all told to yell if we saw anything exciting. We saw a deer and a shedload of red kites. Good fun really. Bit of a walk down the road to find somewhere for our picnic then we went home.

Full set of Chinnor & Princes Risborough picnic day here.

Our train

Got back into the bad habit of leaving weeks worth of photos on the camera, also not really had much of a chance to take too many photos recently. Work has been a shit. Processed a load today, some more to come when I next get a chance.

Went for probably the last proper expedition of the year with Scott a few weeks back. Torn between doing a tour of London or Salisbury Plain we decided it was far too hot to go into the city so escaped to the plain again. Tried out a couple of places we hadn’t been before, including the best pub-restaurant I’ve ever been to – The Boot Inn in Berwick St. James, the food, the service and the setting were all pretty much perfect. Didn’t take many photos on the firing ranges as covered them in enough detail in the past.

Crofton Beam Engines

One of those places we had seen tourist signs for ever since we’ve been visiting the plain. Stopped to have a look for the first time. Pretty interesting piece of engineering, as far as I can ascertain it’s a big steam powered engine in a building that was used to push loads of water uphill. I could be wrong, I did take a brochure/guide but it’s somewhere in my mess of an office. Lots of shiny machinery mixed with a picturesque landscape. Full set of Crofton Beam Engine photos here…

Scott interfering with the machinery

Berwick St. James

Pretty awesome little village. Could happily live there. Asked the nice lady who runs the Boot if she ever misses the noise of city/town life (she used to live near me), she looked at me like I was mental. We explored the church a bit then moved on.

The Boot Inn

St. Alban the Martyr

Another location we’ve driven past many times but never been inside. St. Alban the Martyr is a military chuch in Larkhill. Nice lady showed us around and pointed at items of specific interest, slightly awkward moment when she asked if we were military and what our interest in churches was (no & they look nice). Very impressive inside with some great windows. Full set of St. Alban the Martyr photos.

And finally…

Look at the size of this fish we spotted off a bridge in Marlow. Any idea what it is?

Recent attempts to work smarter rather than harder have been an utter failure. As the business grows and we get busier and busier I’ve needed to look at our business practices and workflow. It’s so far not worked out so brilliantly.

I used to write a fair amount of our tools and all of the frameworks and code for our websites and applications. Originally this was because there was little option, there were no free or cheap versions of the tools we needed and the frameworks available were challenging at best. Of course this wasn’t all bad it gave me a greater understanding of the underlying technology and probably increased my coding skills far more than downloading plugins and other people’s code ever would. But, as many people pointed out it did make development a relatively slow and arduous process which in the new age of Agile Development would see me left behind.

It took a while for me to change my ways, I still have an OC like obsession with understanding exactly how everything works and will still rip a framework or plugin to pieces on occasion to make sure it does what it claims. I’m now a complete jQuery convert and massively happy with WordPress. I went halfway with PHP, I tried a bunch of frameworks but just couldn’t get on with any of them so wrote my own, it took about six months (mostly research) but works perfectly for us and allows us to put together full online applications in a matter of hours. It’s not ‘finished’ and never will be, I constantly add to it and improve it but it’s lightweight and flexible and does exactly what we need (and nothing more).

So with frameworks for php, javascript, actionscript and a shedload of standard setups for html and css I’ve embraced the agile, flexible world. Next step was to improve workflow and project management. This is where it’s all fallen down a bit. I really don’t want us to go back to the bad old ways of writing every tool ourselves, I need to sleep sometimes. I’ve spent a lot of hours over the last couple of months researching and testing project management and workflow tools and I have not found anything I would be happy to use. There’s a lot of dross out there combined with a lot of well written but feature-weak applications. The grind now is that I could have probably used the time better to have written something in-house. I still don’t want to but if I can’t find the right tools soon it may be the only option.

We now have two choices: 1) Use a whole bunch of unrelated tools in a haphazard manner, tying them together with apis where possible or 2) write it ourselves.

Working smarter and faster is fine if the quality tools are available but if you have standards you may be better off doing it the long way.

In case you may be able to suggest anything, our primary requirement right now is a decent project/task manager which supports:

• Multiple projects per client
• Client access
• Recurring tasks. This is the absolute most important feature
• A wiki

That’s it. To be fair we did find one piece of software that covers it pretty well but it was way outside of our current budget.