Custom Shelves Pt1

I pretty much live at my desk, both at work and when at home.  When I'm not working at home, I'm probably playing games, faffing with personal software development, personal development, catching up with friends / family or just plain surfing around on the web achieving nothing.  I also have lots of "junk".  It's not junk, of course, it just has specific place and purpose; "place" being mostly piled on my limited shelf space.
Limited space no more.  Move over <insert preferred contemporary furniture outlet here>, Paul is going designing!

Security and the Corporate ID card

Feeling wordy this morning, though it probably won't last!  Whether cyber security is starting to burrow into my subconcious or it's just that I watch so much Burn Notice, but it amazes me how many people wander around with thier company ID passes in high visibility places on thier person, for the journey to work. 

You can generally get name, position and company name from a casual glance or two.  If I ran a company that employed ID requirements, or even worked for a company that did such, I would put forword a scheme.

On website or similar branding:
"Average Joe Public is invited to email us if you see our employees out and about.  Tell us their name, and where you saw / met them and we'll give you a £5 <insert current socially favorable voucher vendor here> voucher."

The £5 would of course be subsidised in its entirety from fining the said employee (after validation of course) for being stupid / negligent...
Thier ways would soon change.

The Future of User Input (aka Gesture Is Dead)

I travel a lot for my job. Occasionally I find myself travelling with Sayyed Shah; friend, fellow developer and long time co-worker since day 1 at Neutrino, in his kindness as he gives me a lift most of the way home.
On one such journey, our conversation drifted to that of User Input and as such serves as catalyst for this post, Sayyed deserving as much credit for eliciting the thoughts from my head for this article as me.

1-BK Presents: Chilli-butter Smoked Salmon with Beans & Carrots

Part of the 1-bowl kitchen project.

So having finally found that my phone is not thoroughly stuffed (just the current SD-card) I can now take pictures again with my phone.  Lucky for me as it means I only needed to spen £20 instead of £400 on a new "not-iPhone".
Unlucky for all of you, as I now have the means to start my 1-bowl kitchen log...

Laxxors 1-bowl Kitchen

I do a lot of hotel living as part of my job.

"Ooh" says the populous, "that's fancy, lucky you."

"Err..no" says I, "really it's not.".

Alright, so maybe the first month or so was OK.. and occasionally switching hotels if there is no room gives different scenery and a change in menu but past that you quickly tire of the same food, week in week out and you end up leading quite a solitary life-style.  Couple that with the fact that we all know that not all food is cooked equal, sometimes it is an effort just to ensure you eat in a day.

Time to correct this.  Time to shift from the unhealthy pub food I've been eating and make an effort to cook something better.

Introducing, "Laxxors 1-Bowl Kitchen".

Though of course, there are clauses...

User Physics and the Quest for Perfect Software

This post was inspired by the words of Bob Schukai (Twitter @iammobilebob) when I attended the AppsWorld event in Earls Court, 2012 and he spoke of measuring your Users actions to determine the hot and cold spots of your software (among other things - I had hoped to share in greater detail my thoughts on his session but alas the audio recordings never seemed to materialise from the event organizers).
It's been a little while since then (though it may be longer still before I publish this.. who knows how long it will take to write) but I still keep finding myself considering what was said both when using and writing software.

Charity, but not before profit.

Adverts are starting to get to me recently.
Some because of their blatant assumption that the viewing public are mostly made up of morons, others because they don't make sence or that they were obviously devised by the same group that did "that other advert".  But this post relates to "charity packs".