Apologies for the lack of updates over the past few months; it’s been a busy time recently and blogging has, unfortunately, not been even close to the top of the ‘to do’ list.

I’m working on some updates at the moment, both to keep the content fresh and make it easier for me to add thoughts and musings whilst on the go.

Thanks for your patience.

I like to think I’ve never been a quitter. But in one part of my life I remain hopeful that could change. Cigarettes will likely shorten my lifespan – not to mention the insane cost of my daily fix – so the idea of giving up the habit is appealing.

When the opportunity arose to test the Sunrise Pro electronic cigarettes courtesy of the nice people at Paramount Zone, I jumped at the chance. And for the past couple of weeks have been trying them out.

When the pack arrived in the post  it contained the two part electronic ‘cigarette’, a pack of nicotine capsules and a USB charger. Yes, the e-ciggie is charged by your laptop. Just like your iPod. But without the white headphones.

Putting the two parts of the e-ciggie together brought to mind the Man with the Golden Gun and the product itself feels well-built to a high standard. After the swift process of construction, you simply pop one of the nicotine capsules on to the end where your mouth goes and, well, that’s it.

Pick it up, stick it in your mouth and suck. There’s even a reassuring glow at the ‘lit’ end of the cigarette to let you know it’s working. The smoke fills your lungs, without all those nasty chemicals that come with your more traditional tobacco-based ciggies.

A nicotine molecule, yesterday

But it’s not smoking. It’s not a cigarette. And, for me, the feeling was quite peculiar.

Yes, I was receiving the kick of nicotine my sadly-addicted body craved but the process left me initially feeling extremely light-headed. Too much of a nicotine kick perhaps? I’m not what you’d call a ‘light smoker’, often running through a cigarette in a matter of four or five puffs, so I was surprised at the internal reaction my electronic ciggie generated.

Eventually, I learnt to regulate my intake; similar to forgetting how to play an actual guitar when indulging in ‘Guitar Hero’, I had to accommodate the different style of ‘smoking’ to get the best out of the product.

But “the best” wasn’t for me. I’m sure that for lots of people, the nicotine rush from an electronic cigarette will be enough to sate their hunger, allowing them to step away from the demon weed. But I don’t think I’m one of them.

I’ll still use the electronic cigarette, indeed it’s become my first port of call when I realise in the morning that I smoked my last fag the night before (when previously a quick visit to the corner shop might have been in order). And, increasingly, I’m integrating it into my ‘smoking regime’, alternating tobacco with electronics. But a complete replacement? Not yet.

Not quite yet.

Maybe I’m not a quitter after all?

Many thanks to Fuel My Blog for arranging for me to receive the Sunrise electronic cigarettes.

I’m not obsessed with visitor numbers and the like for this site but I do occasionally take a look at the Google Analytics to see what people have been reading or using to find the site.

When I stumbled across this little nugget – a search term someone used to visit my web site – I happily admit to being a little confused.

On one level, I’m left wondering what the result was that Google found (it was this story if you’re interested) and – much more importantly – is the question of “why?!?!”

Is Canon working on something new? A hybrid of inkjet printer and TARDIS perhaps? Or has HP stumbled across some previously-unknown use for all those empty ink cartridges?

I think we should be told.

I’m a social leper. Constantly reducing my life expectancy and clogging my arteries with poison. I’ve tried to stop, I’ve attempted cold turkey, I’ve been hypnotised, even attended clinics and taken pills.

But I remain a smoker. Why?

I’m an intelligent fella. I know the damage it’s doing to me. So why don’t I stop?

I spent most of my pre-teen years trying to convince my Dad to give up. People of a certain age may remember Nick O’Teen, a villain and Superman’s nemesis created especially for a series of adverts in print and on TV. I wore my badge constantly, proclaiming my hatred of the evil weed.

Yet, somehow, at the age of 19 I became a smoker. There was no peer pressure. I just started. And I’ve still no idea why. So now I’ve been smoking for more of my life than not. Which is a sobering through.

Is it addiction? Definitely. Habit? Undoubtedly.

So I’m trying something new that will hopefully ease both symptoms, whilst allowing me to live a long and healthier life.

I’d heard about electronic cigarettes before, so when the opportunity to try them out – for free – came up, I jumped at the chance.

Sunrise Pro Electronic Cigarettes, provided courtesy of the nice people at Fuel My Blog, are going to be “road tested” by me over the next week or so. And then I’ll report back. Wish me luck.

Crikey. I didn’t see that coming. Just this evening, Disney has announced it’s agreed to buy Lucasfilm for $4bn plus change. And, at the same time, announced plans for “Star Wars 7″ – due in 2015.

“I can’t believe I’ve convinced Disney to pay so much money for Jah-Jah Binks,” wasn’t said by George Lucas. But it may have been.

No what he said was: “For the past 35 years, one of my greatest pleasures has been to see Star Wars passed from one generation to the next.”

Far be it for me to suggest he didn’t have to re-edit the films every time they were passed.

My only hope, as a member of the original Star Wars generation is that, well, Disney doesn’t give us anything as awful as “The Phantom Menace”.

Goodbye old friend. You’re the one who told me about the news. The sports results. And what was on TV later. Looking back now you seem so old-fashioned. And maybe you were. I had to sit and wait whilst you cycled through various pages, waiting for the one I wanted to see.

Your blocky text. Your peculiar sub-editing. Your gaudy colours. All of these things make you seem very 80s.

We lost touch over the years. I’ll be honest, someone new came into my life and I briefly forgot about you. But when I heard the news of your inevitable demise I paused for a second to think about the good times we’d spent together. And I smiled.

38 years old is no age to pass on. But your time had obviously come.

Goodbye Ceefax. Thanks for the memories.

Regular readers will have noticed a few changes ’round here. I’ve spent some time re-formatting pages and re-designing the site. And I think it looks very nice indeed (let me know what you think, input and opinion always gratefully-received).

As with anything like this, the problems only start to surface once you start digging around a bit. Seeing how things work in context, as opposed to on a scrap of paper.

Being a devil may care kind of chap, I’ve done some of the final tweaks live, as opposed to on a copy of my site running locally.

(I would *never* suggest doing anything so foolish on a ‘proper’ web site but I like the rush of adrenalin when I realise a minor tweak has taken my entire site down, and it needs to be fixed quickly).

During this process, one thing has become blindingly obvious to me: I wish I’d planned the original site better.

When I first began building my web site, back in 1876*, I did everything by hand. Every last line of code was written by me. And a great experience it was too. But times change, and – as you get older! – you realise that there are better things to spend your time on; so I converted the site to run on top of WordPress. That meant that after building the templates (essentially, home page, blog post, other page, search results, archive results and an error page), everything else was handled through the content management system.

That’s just as it should be. Concentrate on the content, without worrying about the layout (it’s already taken care of).

Having a content management system means that all the content – words, images, videos, links etc – is stored in a database, allowing me to easily change the design without having to worry about putting the ‘stuff’ back in.

Which is fine if you put the stuff in in the first place.

Would you believe how many of my blog posts didn’t have a single image within them? No, me neither until I designed a new site which requires an image to be associated with every single story.

I could have taken the easy road and only worried about new content but I’m a sad and lonely perfectionist at times. So I went back through every single post over the past five years and added a relevant image if none were there before.

The system I settled upon is – to misquote Blackadder – so clever you could stick a tail on it and call it a weasel.

When the content management system goes to show the story snippet (as you’ll see on the home page and various other ‘overview’ pages), there’s a simple instruction that says – right, is there a ‘featured image’ for this story? No, right, in that case grab the first image you find within the story itself. Got one? Ok, whether it’s a featured image or ‘grabbed’ automatically resize it to be no more than 250 pixels wide? Done? Finally, crop it to be no more 100 pixels high. Now show it to the nice lady or gentleman viewing the page.

All this is done in the space of time it takes for an ‘overview’ page to appear in your web browser. Clever, huh?

I’ve also put categories and tags front and centre (a glaring omission from earlier versions of this blog). And, again, you wouldn’t believe how many posts had neither.

I think I’ve found them all.

The point of all this rambling and showing off is that there is no substitute for planning. Not just for the site you plan to launch but anything you can possibly perceive being required in the future. Planning a web site isn’t for the back of a fag packet. Every minute spent planning saves – in my experience – 2 minutes when you come to build the thing. A well-constructed content management system (whether completely bespoke or built upon a platform such as WordPress) should ask for more information than you think you’re going to need.

Who is the author of each story? You might not need it now (I probably never will) but you may in the future. Need to show information about that person? Ask for it now, it doesn’t need to be shown on site – but if it’s stored in the database, then it’s there for if you ever choose to use it. Product information? Schematics? Links to relevant 3rd party sites?

If there’s a chance you could *ever* decide to show some information to the viewing public, stick it in your database. Plan for the future. Plan for possibilities (no matter how slim you may think they are now). For me, adding pictures and tags etc to a few dozen blog posts was, at worst, a pain and a mild diversion. Imagine if your blog has grown to 10k posts, or your product catalogue contains millions of entries? Yes, there are ways to tie multiple databases together (and often it’s a preference for reasons I won’t bore you with) but isn’t it better if that decision is made for reasons other than “we never thought we’d need that” ?

And now to create the smartphone-friendly version.

* Or thereabouts.

Whilst listening to one of my favourite podcasts (The Nerdist), guest Tom Hanks made reference to The Bee Gees “Sgt Pepper”  album selling more copies than The Beatles original. A horrible statistic but one which I can imagine being true. Unfortunately.

I’d heard of the film, and knew it’s basic history but never actually heard any of the songs. But first, some background (thanks Wikipedia…).

The album was the soundtrack to a 1978 movie called – unsurprisingly – “Sgt Pepper’s Lonley Hearts Club Band” which stars the Brothers Gibb as brothers Mark, David and Bob Henderson as members of the aforementioned band.

It gets worse.

Peter Frampton plays Billy Shears, Sgt Pepper’s grandson and leader of the aforementioned Lonely Hearts Club band, with Steve Martin as Dr Maxwell (of “Silver Hammer” fame) and Frankie Howerd as Mean Mr Mustard (more observant Beatles fans will notice that the latter two songs are from “Abbey Road”).

Now, I have nothing against any of these people – I quite enjoy “Frampton Comes Alive!” for example – but I was nervous about what I would find when I went Googling.

And possibly rightly so…

However, not being one to let my judgement be clouded by one example, I thought I’d jump onto Spotify. Ah, nothing there. Well not to worry… iTunes… nope. 7Digital? Nada. Amazon?! Import copy for £20 available from the States (album) or NTSC/Region 1 DVD for £30.

I don’t like to make sweeping judgements but when I can’t (almost instantly) listen to a piece of music through a popular music service or buy (in the UK) a copy of a CD direct from a reputable seller I make an assumption. It’s probably crap and nobody wants to hear it.

Ah… found this. It appears I was right…

It knows what you’re looking for. It can ‘read’ your emails. It follows you as you wend your way around the web, taking note of the web sites you visit, the products you show interest in. It stores your work documents. It knows what you like – and don’t like. Holds your calendar. Shows you how to travel to a new location. Provides you with video entertainment and news.

Big Brother exists. It’s called Google.

Whilst the company may have the publicly stated aim of storing and linking every piece of information ever recorded at any time throughout recorded history; it doesn’t hurt to occasionally remember that it makes the vast majority of its money through advertising. And the more it knows about “us”, the more information it has to target us with adverts.

Now, I’m not for one second saying we should all boycott Google’s many services (says he writing this blog post through Google Chrome on a blog which uses Google Analytics and receives email via GMail), I just think that sometimes it doesn’t hurt to remember that all these services we use on a daily basis are free for a simple, single reason.

We’re not the customer. We’re the product. The value of our personal information far outweighs the cost of providing us with services such as GMail and Google Docs.

And the same is true for Facebook: tell us about yourself, tell us everything, and we’ll show you highly-targeted adverts based on this information.

This is the new economy we live in. And it allows companies to ensure – as far as possible – that their advertising dollars are spent punting products at people with more than a good chance of being interested in them.

The famous John Wanamaker quote (“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted — I just don’t know which half.”) is becoming increasingly-inaccurate.

So we have a choice; we can continue to receive these bountiful goods from the Internet Gods for free, and in return accept that much of our ‘private’ information is being collected, consolidated and use to create a new niche demographic – or we can start paying for the services direct.

I say direct because we’re paying for them anyway, through the cost of the goods we buy; where else would the marketing budgets come from?

As someone who works in digital marketing, the ability to target very, very, very specific groups of people is something that simply wasn’t possible when our adverts appeared printed on dead trees. And that makes for a more efficient marketing spend.

But, as I said, I don’t think it hurts – as a punter – to recognise your position in this equation. A thought that regularly comes to mind when I see another Facebook scare scam about the company charging for its service or complaints about the appearance of adverts in a Twitter stream. We’ve accepted the trade-off, “something for nothing” in effect. If “we” don’t like it. There are alternatives…

I’m a little worried. Maybe I should sit down. Catch my breath and think things through a little more.

No, it’s no use. I still feel the same.

I quite like the new Microsoft tablet. There I said it. I’ll hand my “Apple Fan Club” membership back shall I?

Named Surface, it’s a nice little thing. It includes a full size USB port, and the internal storage can be expanded by the addition of a microSDXC card.

But I still have a feeling that Microsoft could still clutch defeat from the jaws of a potential victory.

The standard version of Surface runs Windows RT, which is essentially a cut-down version of Windows 8 modified to run on what is essentially a large phone. Nothing wrong with that in essence, as you’d could argue the iPad is precisely the same. No, the confusion – and marketing fubar – is the existence of the professional version.

Because it demonstrates the limitations of the standard version.

“Surface Pro” runs a full version of Windows 8, which means it can run all the apps PC owners know and love; Windows RT can only run apps which are created specifically for it, though it does come with a built-in copy of Microsoft Office to soften that blow.

The professional version has also a higher resolution screen (equivalent to an iPad 3, the standard has an iPad 2 resolution) and a much faster CPU; in essence it has a laptop chip, as opposed to a mobile phone chip in the standard.

And it’s by comparison with its “big brother” that the standard Surface starts to look lacking; there is after all no “iPad Pro” to make the standard iPad look inferior.

Without its big brother around, the standard version of Surface looks pretty damn good. But in comparison it looks like a pale imitation. And with the standard’s pricing on par with an iPad 3, then there isn’t even a compelling financial reason to buy it either.

I do like the idea of the Surface and its got some nice little touches but it looks like an iPad mini or Kindle Fire HD will remain the only other tablets given consideration in the Brown household for the considerable future.

Which is a shame because I fervently believe that product competition is a good thing; it encourages advances, forcing the best to get even better.

But right now, I don’t think the Surface is enough. Though I’m hoping I’m wrong.