ECI MD in boxing champ shocker

Just got made aware of this little nugget...seems that at the now regular "games night" with our neighbours and all round good guys, intersum, this one held on Friday (25th Jan 2008). The console of choice was the Nintendo wii and one of the games was wii boxing. Stuart, the East Coast Interactive Managing Director(sporting the blue sleeveless shirt and fighting from the far corner) somehow managed to defeat Intersum's George (the guy who looks like he's kicking arse in the foreground). Must try harder guys ;)

0 comments - Posted by mark at 10:59 AM - Categories: General

The most important meal of the day

I am two weeks into making sure that I eat breakfast every day, sure this means that I now get out of bed at 6.30am but I reckon the benefits far outweigh an extra 45 minutes sleep. There are tons of studies, info, research and opinions on the web both for and against the notion that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Here is my opinion based on early morning studies on a daily basis for the last 14 days. I have been eating wholegrain cereal and grapefruit and can honestly say that I am more alert, more productive and no longer inclined to stuff my face with junk food during the day. Coupled with going to the gym, playing football and that I've quit smoking for over 100 days now, I really feel that my new healthier lifestyle is beneficial (I'm not getting carried away here, I still enjoy a few beers), not to mention that my weight has started to come down and I have lost over 3kg in weight(thats 7 pounds to you non-metric people). I sincerely believe that eating breakfast has made this happen, after all it makes sense, the earlier you eat, the more time your body has to burn the calories off, the healthier you eat, the less fat you amass and the more exercise you do, the faster you burn those calories. I remember working with a guy who was really lazy, I mean exercise was a swear word to him yet he insisted on eating breakfast and apart from the fact that he never moved from his chair all day except to go out the front door to smoke or to nip up to burger king at lunch time, he never seemed to put on a great deal of weight. Another person I used to work with had a big weight problem and in all truth was obese, wholly due to stuffing their face with crap food during the day, doing zero exercise(preferring to drive everywhere rather than walk, even half a mile!) and mostly only having tea or coffee for breakfast. Most people these days know that caffeine has the ability to mask hunger so before you know it you're actually REALLY hungry and you'll be more prone to eating lots of bad stuff and hence becoming grossly overweight. Now I'm no expert in the fields of diet and exercise, I've been very careful to take the correct advice from others that know their stuff, including my doctor, the trainer at the gym and several of my friends who are a bit "healthy". I am feeling the benefits now and if you were willing to make one change for a healthier lifestyle, I would encourage you to start with a healthy breakfast...the most important meal of the day.

0 comments - Posted by mark at 8:37 AM - Categories: General

Mike Duguid blog

I work with Mike at East Coast Interactive and we chit chat about all manner of web and multimedia technologies every day so it's good to see that he's launched his own blog. You can be sure that there will be some interesting articles up there so remember to check it out. http://mike.duguid.co.uk

0 comments - Posted by mark at 11:23 AM - Categories: Launches

Wedding date updated

right...100% definitely getting married on the 14th November 2009 at Norwood Hall in Aberdeen....not changing our minds again...

7 comments - Posted by mark at 4:31 PM - Categories: Next Gen McAulay

Cheers for personalised wine

Further to my launch post for branded beer, just wanted to say cheers for personalised wine, an addition that my family in particular is bound to use a lot! Of course, the personalised wine is also using an ECI built online designer to make the personalization of these products a snip. personalised wine on the branded beer website Current Branded wine website

0 comments - Posted by mark at 11:43 AM - Categories: General

stop smoking method that really works

Today I am celebrating 100 days of not smoking! If you saw my previous post about stopping smoking, you'll know that I took a slightly different approach from the usual patches, gum, hypnosis route and instead told everyone I know...and I do mean EVERYONE, from family, to people I work with, to professional connections, to people I admire and respect, to pretty much everyone I know that "smoking is for losers" and "only a w****r couldn't stop smoking" etc etc so that should I ever have the urge to light one up, I quickly think about the living hell that my personal and professional life will become and decide against it....it really works! 100 days have now passed and the urge to smoke fades more and more and it's far easier than it ever was before, I had tried stopping smoking countless times before. From using nicotine patches to "cold turkey", I even had myself hypnotized which worked well but apparently had a shelf life as one day I just started smoking like I'd never even quit in the first place. Basically I always gave in but now that I have put my reputation and general happiness on the line, its amazing what I can do. As a side note, blog posts like this one help a lot too...what an idiot I'd look if I started smoking again now! (see how this works?)

0 comments - Posted by mark at 8:08 AM - Categories: General

looking back at 2007

We recently had a meeting at work looking back over last year, seeing what we worked on, looked at what we learned and made some decisions on the kinds of work we will actively seek out in 2008. This was a very worthwhile exercise and each of us was a bit surprised about what we'd learned....I thought I'd post what I'd personally learned as a blog post so here it is.

Coldfusion

I'll start with Coldfusion. Almost one year to the day ago, I picked up the Coldfusion 7 web application constructor kit book and decided I was going to learn it as my programming language of choice. I am happy to say that its been really enjoyable and straightforward to find answers to questions, an added bonus was the Coldfusion community. I've made contacts throughout the community who offered to help me along the way and have proved invaluable. I can say that I am now savvy with the basics of Coldfusion development and although I am still learning, I am comfortable with the language.

PHP

Continuing on with PHP from previous years, I learned a bit more about it in 2007 while working on several projects. Working with a programmer who already knows most of the stuff I needed to learn helped a lot...cheers Mike.

XHTML / CSS

Next up is standards based and accessible xhtml/css. Anyone who knows me will already know that I have been an advocate of this for many years (6 years if you're counting). Throughout 2007 I continued to build my knowledge and experience and more importantly, learned how to tie it to both Coldfusion and PHP backends more effectively.

Flash / Actionscript

Moving to the Flash player...I picked up a couple of books on Actionscript 3 and have been familiarizing myself with the syntax while building little silly apps. I have also picked up the Flex bug and have worked my way through a book and several online tutorials. I see BIG things happening with Flex down at east coast interactive in the near future...particularly when we get it tied into Coldfusion. Our resident "king of flash" will prove invaluable as we drive this forward.

Video and Animation

2007 saw a number of video and animation projects come through the east coast doors and this is something we look forward to continuing throughout 2008. I had the chance to build on my video and animation knowledge, adding after effects into the fold. We built some frankly "kick ass" presentations for companies of all sizes and received unexpected praise from some large organizations which was nice!

Development Environment

I switched my development environment last year also. My development server now runs Apache 2.2, PHP 5, Coldfusion 8 and MySQL 5. I have swapped Dreamweaver out for Eclipse and have added Flex into the equation. On my "work machine" I run windows XP with Ubuntu linux virtually. On my "home machine" I run Ubuntu exclusively. Linux has a lot of bad things said about it but I have found that if you take the time to learn a bit about it, it's a nice system to work with and I don't have any plans to switch back to windows at home....I may buy a mac but thats another story!

0 comments - Posted by mark at 9:59 AM - Categories: General