mcaulay has more ink

Today for the first time in 10 years, I got my ink on! I sorted my design and got my apointment booked with my good friends at draconian tattoo. Here is the result, permanently residing on my left inside wrist...i LOVE it!

5 comments - Posted by mark at 8:25 PM - Categories: General

Graeme Benzie is blogging

The newest addition to the east coast interactive team has gone and installed wordpress. Graeme works with server side technologies and Actionscript and is a bit of a clever sod when it comes to making the 2 speak to each other. Doubtless there will be a few usefull bits and pieces pop up there so definately one to keep an eye on.

You can read all his latest articles/news etc here: http://www.datafake.com/blog

0 comments - Posted by mark at 1:09 PM - Categories: General | Launches

Best Man Duty

Last night I was asked to be a best man, this is the first time I will have had the duty and am looking forward to it. My good friends Bruce and Emma are getting married a couple of months before Kathryn and myself next year and I've already asked Bruce to be my best man which now means that I have 2 stag do's to look forward to in short succession....oh dear!

If anyone has any ideas or advice for a best man, feel free to comment here...the stupider the better really!

1 comments - Posted by mark at 9:35 AM - Categories: General

That June thing

Yep, every year I bang on about how i'm going to not drink for the whole month of June etc and after many....MANY years of not even surviving 10-14 days, I have a new idea this year...somewhat tied to this late post.

I'm going to not drink for 4 weeks, starting after this coming weekend....why these dates?...well, someone decided to run a coldfusion conference at the start of June with the promise of beer so already my June no drinking was scuppered...that amoung other things, including an art school launch, has caused me to re-think my dates (not that i've ever actually managed it but there you go!).

So, my attempt this year will run from the 15th June  to the 19th July...who reckons I can do this then?

0 comments - Posted by mark at 10:05 PM - Categories: General

no smoking day

Just thought I'd put a mention up that today is no smoking day so congratulations to all those who have quit and good luck to all those who will be doing so today. I have now managed close to 160 days without smoking and feel so much healthier...and better off financially....plus...smokings for losers. (my method is still going strong as you can see!)

0 comments - Posted by mark at 11:32 AM - Categories: General

IE8 to play nicer

On hearing that Internet Explorer 8 was supporting standards better, I have to admit that that my initial reaction was "yeh yeh, of course they are...what's the catch?" and right enough there was a catch. As default, IE8 would be using the IE7 rendering engine and to use the new, better standards supporting IE8 engine, it would be neccessary to include a meta declaration in your document head to tell IE8 that you wanted to use it's shiny new rendering engine. In principle, I must admit that I like a part of this idea, being able to target a rendering engine for backwards compatibility seems to be a good idea to me....but there's the problem....for backwards compatibility it's a great idea(IMHO), problem is we're talking about a future rendering engine which will become a current rendering engine when IE8 is released, and I wasn't the only one who had a problem with this, seems that a lot of noise has been made by developers about this method being the wrong way round...surely the default rendering engine should be the most standards compliant one no?....well it appears that microsoft have had a little change of heart and I'm happy to say they've moved it around...IE8 will use the IE8 rendering engine by default and it will be possible to target pages at older rendering engines (IE7, IE6 etc) if needs be. Well done microsoft (you never thought you'd hear me say that did you? haha)

1 comments - Posted by mark at 9:50 AM - Categories: General | Ranting

Be more alert in the morning

I posted previously about how I was now eating a healthy breakfast every morning and am happy to say that i've stuck to the routine and definately feel better for it. It has also, I believe, been instrumental in helping me lose weight. So in the continued search for perfect "hit the ground running in the morning" ability, I have decided to try one or two other things as well. Yesterday I was having a chat with Alex Barton and his suggestion was to just get up when you wake up, now he didn't mean just sleep forever until you finaly wake up, most mornings I wake up before my alarm goes off and, like most other people I imagine, I immediately think "still got another 10 mins before I have to get up" so I'll try and go back to sleep. This morning I woke up roughly 15 mins before my alarm was due to go off so I took the opportunity and got up. Not only did it lessen the morning mad rush, the increased time I had on my hands meant I could relax a bit and instead of panicking about getting everything done, I could focus my mind on what other things I wanted to do today...sat at my desk now after a nice relaxing morning and some breakfast and have a clear idea of what I need to get done today...job done. The next thing I'll try is some form of excersise, I have to admit that the prospect of getting up 30-45 mins earlier to go for a run is a little daunting at present so i'll leave that until the weather's better...hey if you lived in the north east of Scotland, you'd understand!

0 comments - Posted by mark at 8:19 AM - Categories: General