European Vacation

So here I am in sunny Vienna having returned from a 24 hour trip to Prague. The above photo is of the Volta winding through the city and the numerous bridges that span it. I have to say it is a nice looking city, but I found the Czechs a dour and miserable people. They are also con artists. We were done out of several Euros along the way.

Anyway, we are back in Vienna now and about to head out to the Museums Quartier. Laters.

Demobbed

That's all my work done for ten days. I now head off to Vienna with Megan to check out all Vienna and Prague have to offer under then pretense of visiting Megan's sister.

In other news I have heard precisely nothing from iflorist.co.uk on the story of the missing roses and the hefty wodge of dosh it cost for them to fuck up Valentine's Day with their litany of falsehoods and broken dreams. Perhaps that is excessive, but it amazes me that they take an order clearly addressed for delivery to a hospital ward and then claim they don't deliver to hospitals. Surely hospital deliveries make up a good percentage of their business! Lies. Compacted by the fact that they have failed to even contact us about it or even make arrangements to be delivered elsewhere. As it is, nothing less than a complete refund is acceptable and bollocks to the flowers. Folks, the moral of the story is that it is worth the extra cash for a local and personal service. Never ever use iflorist.co.uk.

Enough of that, tonight I have tickets to see Hot Fuzz at Exeter's new Vue cinema. I have been reliably informed that it is a terrific movie. As if anything by the Spaced boys could be anything else.

I also discovered a gem of a music downlnad site. Emusic.com is a legit DRM free download site that deals solely with good indie music. You will not even find mention of the multitude of Pete Waterman and Simon mateyboy's manufactured groups and tarts amongst the emusic catalogue and for £8.99 for 40 tracks is also somewhat of a bargain! At the mo they have a free trial for 35 downloads and I urge you to try it.

Work In Progress #1

A false dawn perhaps, but I am beginning to catch up on some of the design work that has been sitting on my desk for the past couple of months. Jamblo has started pushing out some designs for us as well, so hopefully it won't be long before we are caught up again.

Today, I got an email from a governor of Caen Community Primary about their website and thought it must be high time that I got to it. The chap had sent us a CD containing all the photographs we were to use and some rough Photoshop layouts. It was just a case of tarting up the layouts he'd sent and setting up the Dreamweaver templates and CSS and away we go. It has a couple of issues I'm not keen on. The Flash image on the front is annoying, the font is Times New Roman and some of the banner photos they wanted to use are resized... the wrong way. Overall though, it's not too bad.

The site hasn't had final approval yet, but hopefully that won't be long in coming. For now the site is viewable at www4.devon.gov.uk/eal/schools/caen/

Tomorrow will see me ploughing through the endless mire of updates that we get, but hopefully I'll be able to complete another design to show off.

In the meantime it is nearly hometime. Or it should be. Instead, I am off to my girlfriend's mum's place for Megan's grandad's birthday tea. No doubt I shall be moaning about my expanding waistline again later before heading off to the skittles match.

Neverending Story

Another working week draws to a close and this week I have dealt with around 200 email updates for our schools and services, visited Meavy Primary and made two websites live (www.dunstone.plymouth.sch.uk and www.combe-martin-primary.devon.sch.uk). Trouble is, there's another six sites to be added to the board on top of the eight others already on there!

This week hasn't been all work and no play though. On Wednesday I entered the multi-table poker game at Rileys in Exeter. Twas a most excellent night and I done well enough to get to the final table, coming in a commendable 3rd, picking up £230 for my efforts.