I first became aware of their new release, as I’m sure most of you did, when they started popping up on telly as part of an iTunes promotion. At first I found the ad really irritating, a minute of shameless self-promotion. Unfortunately, as I watch an increasing amount of telly, the ad had made it’s way in front of my eyes a fair bit and it began to eat away at my subconscious and I started to take a shine to the track. After some to and froing, I decided to take the plunge and load up the iTunes music store to spend a whole 79p on the full track.

So what did I think of the full track? To be totally honest, not a lot. I still find it oddly catchy and I’ve listened to it a few times since I bought it, but it’s nothing special. The best way to describe it is when you see movie trailers for comedies and they show the best gags and punch lines in the trailer. You get to the end of it and know you don’t need to go to the effort of seeing the full thing.

If your a fan of Coldplay then please don’t fill my inbox with hate mail, I’ll still buy the new album when it comes out, I just hope they’ve tripped on their shoe laces as they left the starting blocks.

Oh, here’s the iTunes ad if you haven’t seen it. Save yourself 79p.

The idea is simple, as many geeks as possible gather in Royal Leamington Spa on Saturday 9th August, bringing along family, friends & space monsters. The day event consists of chilling out in the English sun with the aim to have a laugh with fellow patrons. The evening event will consist of two guest speakers who will supply us with some tasty knowledge to take away. As I understand, the guest speakers are unconfirmed as of yet so I’ll not divulge the names I’ve heard floating around, in case I get lynched by The ‘Pack.

I’ll post an update once the speakers are confirmed, so check back soon. Or if you prefer, head over to the Geek in the park ‘08 site and sign up to the newsletter.

Hope to see you all in August!

It’s been a rather laborious process of trial and error to get to this point. The last two iterations had elements of this design but never really settled right with me, what I wanted to achieve with the design and the site as a whole.

I’ll not go into the intricacies of how I arrived at this final design, although I will say that it’s been a very natural and easily adaptable process, from the initial sketch to the final site. I’ve taken my time, attacking parts of the site one at a time, which allowed me to really focus on some of the key parts of the site that I really wanted to shine. I’m very used to working on projects that require time to be spent on various areas of a site in a very short space of time, this more modular way of working had proved pretty successful, for me personally.

There are some parts that I wish to improve and adapt but for now, I think I will really try to let it run along on it’s own, allowing me to focus more on fleshing out some of the ideas I’ve had recently for blog posts, so expect to see more on here in the near future. Along with new blog posts, I hope to include a fresh piece of artwork to tie in with the story. This will hopefully get me thinking more about what I’m posting and take away the temptation to write small posts about what I had for my lunch.

As ever, I’d love to hear what you think of the site so please feel free to drop me a line.

Here I go…

Taking this on a bit of a tangent, be sure to check out the August issue of .net magazine as my site will be appearing in the Reader’s sites section of the mag. It’s not an interview, or a full on piece, but I’m still chuffed to bits that it’s being included. I must be doing somethign right!

As you may have noticed, I’ve redesigned nocturnalmonkey.com, installed Wordpress (with some help) and incorporated my own stylings to the template, something much easier than I first thought. Since then I’ve been spending a lot of my time away from the computer. I’ve been trying to get my act together so I can start looking for a few freelance gigs, designing and printing new business cards and letterheads and the like.

I’ve also been putting a lot of design and layout ideas down in my sketchbook, all of which were initially intended to be used for my site but have decided to let the new design settled down for a while. The sketchbook ideas I’ve done will sit on the backburner and probably be used on other projects down the line.I’ve also got a few things up my sleeve for the next few weeks…

As of this writing, there are still a couple of pages of content to add to this site before I can really sit back and “chill-ax”, but even when that’s done, I can only stop for a breather. I’ve a little personal project I really want to get started on. It’s sort of a daily blog with doodles, you can read a brief overview of the project here. There will be a more in depth description of the project on the site when it’s done so check back in a few weeks and it should be up.

One more piece of quite exciting news and is still to be started properly is a commission for some artwork. I’ve recently been in contact with Si Jobling, by day, a fellow web monkey, founder of the multipack and by night a superhero DJ combatant of silence going by the name of ‘OnePhatDj’ (sorry to blow your cover mate), putting out a regular podcast of funky house. He’s started to commission artwork to release with his podcasts and has rather kindly asked me to contribute to an upcoming issue.

I’m doing the work for free which may sound crazy, but hold your horses skipper! In return, I get my artwork out in the world and will be seen by lots of lovely people but more importantly, I’m doing it because he’s a top bloke and has helped me out a lot in our brief chats in MSN. So, go check out his site, subscribe to his podcast and in a few weeks, you’ll get to see the fruits of my labour.

That’s about it for now so I’d best stop procrastinating and get on with some work. S x

I’ve been toying with the idea of keeping a blog for some time now. I’ve used blogs in the past, even a WordPress blog, but I was never happy with any of them because they all sat in layouts that I had little or no control over. I’ve known for a long time that WordPress is customisable if you install it on your server, but I’m just not that technically minded, however simple it is.

As I’m looking to doing a bit of freelance web design work, I felt I needed an outlet to report on all my goings on and hopefully get feedback on the work I discuss. So, I called upon the help of a colleague to sort out all the MySQL stuff that I don’t know, a bit of jiggery-pokery and voila! the site was up. I’ve been having fun customising the blog to tie in with my new site design and I don’t think I’ve done too badly for a first attempt.

I’m a little tired from working for five hours straight so I’m going to go watch some telly before I go to bed. Leave me some feedback if you like : )

S