Writing every day – that’s what you’re supposed to do. it doesn’t matter what you write about as long as you just write something.

I’m doing my best with it. I’ve actually managed to take a break from motoring through the 3 web dev projects that I have to finish before Christmas and sit here, drink a big Sports Direct mug of coffee and write a few paragraphs.

That’s right – 3 projects to finish before Christmas. I’m not quite sure how I let myself fall back into the deadline hole again, but it’s certainly not a nice place to be at 3:30 AM.

The problem with being in the deadline hole is not the volume of work that has to be done, but the incredible mood swings it brings out in me as I stomp around the house and generally be obnoxious to my family. I complain of perpetual headaches, yet guzzle through a jar of coffee every two days. I complain of being tired but sleep for 3 hours a night. I complain about the constant interruptions but don’t get up and go and work in the office, choosing to stay at home to ‘get more done’.

I’m going to go on record officially that New Years Resolution number 1 is going to be getting back on the productivity wagon. My pseudo GTD/Pomodoro technique works well, but I’ll also be putting into place some pomodoro sized units of time into my diary and booking everything out again.

Another web dev friend mentioned that he holds me up as a good example of time management while freelancing when talking to other young freelancers, and that’s because he only sees the highly organised side that I pretend to the outside world is always going on back here. When he told me this, it made me realise that it was probably the best way to be.

Rambling on, I think the point that needs to be made is that you should Protect your time. It’s your only real commodity, and everyone is out to get it. Seriously – protect it with your life.

I’m perfectly happy to accept that I’m not much of a writer. I’m also perfectly happy to accept that auto-feeding all my Twitter status updates into my blog was probably a bad idea and the reason that I stopped updating it.

Rewind a second… Who am I trying to kid there? the reason that I stopped updating is because I didn’t have the time any more. Work became super-busy (which is nice) and Laura-Jane severely injured her back (which isn’t nice) leaving me pretty much on sole parenting duty for a few months over the summer. Anything that didn’t involve a two-year old or earning money to pay the bills pretty much went on hold. Networking, studying, the podcast, the videos, exercise, socialising – everything.

That’s not really the issue. Now Laura’s back is almost better, the problem is that I am still keeping everything else on hold. I find myself working whenever possible out of habit more than anything else, telling myself that everything else will have to wait until I don’t have any work to do.

Here’s the rub – I’m a freelancer. If I don’t have any work to do then that’s a pretty serious problem. To put it in context; I keep a running to do list, the last item of which is ‘get a job or sign on’ – this keeps it clear in my mind that being busy and having lots on is not just a good thing, but the permanent state that I should be aiming for. Therefore it follows that I just have to make the time for all the other stuff that I want / need to be doing. Either that or rule it out altogether.

I make time for my son. I can do that. The phone goes off, the inbox builds up and we play or go swimming or read stories or any number of other things. I need to make time the same to study. To exercise. To write. To record. I can do that too.

So this is me, making the mental decision to do so on the side of Christmas where it actually means something. I look forward to still being here in 12 months…

Yet another video blog that has absolutely nothing to do with web programming.

I hope you enjoy it and actively encourage you to get involved in the office skiffle movement. I’m not sure if there’s anybody in the office skiffle movement other than me at the moment, but we’re definitely changing the musical landscape.

Instruments featuring in this video are:

• Recycling Bin Bass
• Keyboard Washboard
• Stapler
• 30cm Ruler
• Rotary Pencil Sharpener
• The ubiquitous Flying-V Ukulele

Safe.

Continuing my foray into the video blog world, I pretend to invent a whole new genre. I didn’t really. Technically I think it was invented by Bob Dylan but who can really tell?

Pointless video really as a precursor to more pointless stuff, probably.

I’ve been meaning to get on these for a while now. I intend to cover some real basic PHP introduction stuff, maybe some dev app guides and so on. Obviously, the common WordPress hacks that people ask me to do.

For now though here’s me just saying ‘hello’ and introducing you to my hamster, Joe Namath.

You may have seen these stories in the news recently, relating to some attacks on Google, the German Government and Internewt Explorer.

The original news item
The subsequent reaction

I’ve tried as hard as I can to come up with something useful to say on the subject, but the only thing I keep coming up with is ‘use Firefox’.

So here we have it. Use Firefox.

We all have it drummed into us to use different passwords for everything, but how many of us actually do? and how many of those use more than 2 or 3 passwords over and over again?

If you ask yourself why not, it’s probably because you can’t / don’t want to remember lots of different passwords & that you don’t want to put your trust in 3rd party password manager.

What you need is a system that lets you use the same password for everything but also changes it for everything. Simple, huh?

Sure it is. Without wanting to give too much away here is my system…
A password should be constructed of 3 parts.. One is the passphrase itself which never changes, one is obtained from the site you are logging in to and the third is to do with time. Without going in to too much detail of how I do it, you might…

1. pick your passphrase. Something you will remember and something that ticks all the standard boxes of password selection. Not likely to be found in a word list (forwards or backwards), not your childs name or maiden name, 6-8 characters, contains uppercase letters, lower case letters, numbers etc. (EG Passw0rd – bad example but you get the idea)
2. Add the first/last 4 letters of the site you are logging in to. Pick the end, or the start or somewhere in the middle. Maybe just pick 2 letters. Maybe reverse them. Anything as long as it’s the same each time. (EG ‘Passw0rdTwit’ for twitter, Passw0rdFace for facebook)
3. Add the last two digits for your age. Or, for the financial quarter, or for the month, or the day of the week. Something you will be able to track. Personally, I like to use financial quarters because they are easy to track, repeat themselves over and over, help me to know if my passwords require a 3 monthly reset, and usually if I forget, there’s only a couple of possibilities if I can recall roughly when I set up the account. (EG Passw0rdTwit1, Passw0rdTwit2 etc…)

It seems convoluted and paranoid, but it’s pretty easy to remember once you get used to it. None of your passwords will ever be the same, and all you have to remember is the same phrase and whatever your personal system is.

Obviously there’s a 4th point – Don’t use the same system for your Banking or your master Email account. Either use a different system for really sensetive accounts, or don’t use a system for them at all. Just remember those ones!

I’ve been doing this for a while now and find it works quite well, but now I’ve shared with the world am going to have to change my system to something else!

Go Me…

Not strictly something she said, but something worth a mention all the same.

Sat in my chair the other night feeding our two week old son, and Laura-Jane walks in and wants to show me something related to babies on the internet. Awesome. I love baby stuff on the internet, it’s one of my all time top 5 stuffs on the internet.

Admittedly we both had about 2 hours sleep between us at this point due to our son deciding that he doesn’t want to be put down at any point between midnight and 8AM, but still it brought a smile to my face when I watched Laura-Jane sit down in front of my machine, think for a second, then type the word ‘google’ into Google, click on the first search result (i.e. Google) and then proceed to google whichever bit of baby stuff she was trying to show me. I forgot that part.  I won’t forget the googling incident for a while though…