Oliver Jackson is a blogger, web developer & designer living and working in Edinburgh.
Kerry and I are off to my parents today for three days of festive cheer and present giving and receiving. Hopefully the fog/leaf/flood bound UK transport system can get us there in one piece, with more luck than Nick & Steinunn.
Shawn Brown is a Cartographer. He draws maps, awesome maps. If I could have a vast, dramatic change in career I’d be a cartographer (or maybe a steam train driver). I’ve always been fascinated by maps, their construction and just sitting pouring over one. My Dad made sure I could map read and navigate from an early age and has a rather large collection of Ordnance Survey maps as well as an interest in surveying and drawing plans of abandoned underground workings. OS maps are very, very nice but it is a shame the licensing issues are such a mess in the UK. If map data was licensed like the USA then I’m sure we wouldn’t have the quality of maps that we do, but would the openness overcome that?
Pirate Hip Hop with a stop-motion animated video. Need I say more?
Kerry and I are off on a wee break to sunny Whitby tomorrow for a couple of days. Expect a slew of piratey/sea-side photos when we get back 
Update: Here are the photos
Yesterday was the wedding of our friends Ian & Jenn. It was an excellent day, superbly well organised and we can’t thank them enough for inviting Kerry and I. I took lots of pictures and a few are up on Flickr.
An advert tartgeted at gamers?
My parents were in Alnwick for the weekend seeing Jools Holland at Alnwick Castle. I got the train down to see them yesterday, Alnmouth station is only an hour on the train from Edinburgh. You can’t go to Alnwick without going to the awesome Barter Books, one of the largest second hand bookshops in Britain. The place is huge! It’s based in Alnwick’s very grand Victorian railway station and has gazillions of second hand books on a myriad of subjects. All pretty reasonably priced, unlike some places in Edinburgh where you can often get the same book new on amazon for a quid more. They’ve also got cases of old first editions and antique stuff, all very nicely presented. Plus a large reading room with newspapers, seats everywhere and very cheap coffee and cakes that you pay for on an honesty basis. It’s a book geeks dream. We could easily have spent the whole day there but we managed to drag ourselves away after an hour and a bit. We had lunch in the courtyard at The Art House which did nice food but the service was a little slow. After lunch we wandered into the town square where the Alnwick International Music Festival was happening and wandered among the trinket stalls listening to Mexican dancing and Lithuanian harp playing. A good day out with some cracking weather.
The book haul:
Saturday was Kerry’s birthday and after the initial present opening and such I was dispatched for cake. Now, this couldn’t just be any cake, it had to be cake worthy of Kerry’s birthday. Coming home from work I kept noticing this strange (but kinda cool) German bakery that had opened on Leven Street. Honestly, you can’t miss it, they hang giant pretzels from their canopy.
So I ninja-ed over there and managed to get some slices of delicious cakey goodness. One black forest gateaux and one strawberry tart, yum yum. Just as I was paying they brought out some fresh Brioche, still warm from the oven, which just looked to good to pass up. With this haul of goodies I set off (carefully) home but not before I popped into the Chinese bakery next to the Cameo, as recommended by George. I got a Beef Curry bun which was a strange combination of sweet steamed bun and quite hot curry inside. Not so sure about that combination but they have plenty of others to try. Needless to say, the German cakey goodness went down well when I got home. An interesting day for food…
So I’m doing one of those ‘update’ posts which is never a good thing. I should be maintaining the flow of awesome olly information, not just forgetting to blog and doing it all at once…
I played and finished Half-Life 2: Episode 1, which was just more of the same goodness really. As it was a smaller package I felt a lot more involved in the plot and the gameplay just seemed a bit tighter than Half-Life 2. The addition of the ‘commentary’ points (just like a DVD) was a neat touch for game geeks and adds some extra replay value. Still playing lots of Battlefield 2 which is just awesome fun, and the RPG style ‘levelling up’ makes you not want to stop. I also picked up a copy of Splinter Cell 3 which is very slick so far, plot is a little contrived, but good sneaky fun.
Went down to Kerry’s parents in Selkirk for the common riding a couple of weeks ago and that was a good laugh. There are some photos in my super-hip flickr stream. Just got back from my sister’s graduation ceremony in Durham but that’s another story (as the Rev W Awdry would say).
On the work front we’re having fun attempting to roll out VOIP in the office. Totally not helped by the face that there are no good SIP soft-phones for OS X. We’ve had to use SJPhone which is free and has all the features but looks like a 1st year CS student’s test Java swing app. Not the best thing to put in front of the boss and say “teh futar is here!”.
I’m still punishing myself by coming home and doing even more web dev outside of work. Work on the re-design of this site is progressing, honestly. I might even have it done some time next week. I’m jumping on the Microformat band wagon and integrating hReview into my ‘review’ blog posts plus lots of other goodies. A while ago I took the plunge and modernised my last design of npht.com (the older style is visible on the education site) which had always been a stop-gap measure. I’m much happier with this version, it is much more flexible, I’ve integrated wordpress better and it leaves lots of room for expansion.
Oh yeah, I’m now 25. The big quarter century. Thanks to everyone who congratulated me and sent cards etc. I got some nice goodies and a pile of DVDs in the HMV sale.
Some other events:
I promise, this will be the last of the ‘update’ posts…
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