Due to the fact that I got married, moved to Beirut and still don’t have internet access, update on the ‘Kode have been kept to a minimum (also internet at work blocks my website, so that’s been a bit of a pain as well, trust me I would love to discuss what’s been on my mind).

Add to the fact that I’m off to Malaysia for my honeymoon and well things will probably remain pretty quiet until after I get back towards the end of June. Hopefully we’ll have a phone line, proper internet and we can start calming down and getting down to the job of creating.

I’ve been writing for nearly a week now on a regular basis. Most of the time it’s just words falling out of my brain and onto the page. On the side however I’ve been working on a pretty long post, that I knew had a point to it, but honestly I didn’t know where it was actually going.

The ultimate goal of this post was to define the need for this site in a world that doesn’t read ‘blogs’ anymore. The idea was that I change with the times and this site becomes more than me talking about my bonsai tree (which I love, but nearly killed) or my favourite iPhone application, rather it will be talking about these issues, however done in a completely different way, with a very different focus - it will become clear once I’ve actually posted that article, I assure you.

The thing that’s really struck me however is the fact that I wouldn’t have reached my goal and ultimately my focus had I not actually written all these other words and effectively made some space for the idea to come to the surface. The outcome of this particular post will be a complete shift in they way content is written and presented on this site, as I shift it and it becomes something different. In a changing world it’s important that one understands when you have to move on, adapt or start over.

In this case the ‘kode will remain giving some personal thoughts, and providing links, but ultimately it will be much more focused. How long will it take before I can deliver this vision, I’m not sure. I get married in a little over a month and as you can imagine we’re racing to the finish line trying to sort out all sorts of things, so I’m assuming that it won’t happen until after the wedding, but alas if I do get some time to complete these things I’m definitely going take that opportunity.

Today is a slow day. Three days off, I’ve decided I’m not going anywhere today, except maybe to the supermarket (and that I’ll do pretty early today). The rest of the day I’m going to spend reading, writing, drawing, coding, in different bursts.

One of the things that I’ve realised is that I can do certain things in bursts of up to an hour. I have to train myself to be able to actually accomplish something, anything in a hour, because honestly after that initial hour things get a bit stale. On the odd occasion that I’m actually engrossed in what I am doing and moving forward, then obviously I should continue (if of course I can do it), but after that first hour I should just move onto something else and maybe come back to it.

You know that time inbetween creating something and not finishing it, you reflect, ideas keep coming to you and you have this thirst to complete it, because your time is limited on it. You’re feeding the thirst and hopefully that will mean that you’re also more productive in the long run.

Damn, the whole news years thing came and went by and I didn’t get a chance to finish off my end of 2010 review. Still got a couple more posts on this.

Reading

The countless articles I’ve read online and in the various magazines I’ve bought over the year don’t get counted. The tweets I’ve read and wasted more time on, don’t get counted. That said, I am a bit embarressed to confess that on more than one occasion I would by the Economist (which I honestly believe is one of the best magazines for getting information on what’s going on in the world) and not actually read much of it, past the cover story. I think what I’ll try and do is, once a month try and actually get through an issue of the economist. Every week is a tall order, but once a month should be ok.

I also bought a few issues of Wired. The typical price in Lebanon is 19,000LL, which is approximately $12.5, around 8.5 quid, which is nearly double the cover price. Which is probably why I’m going to try and limit myself to reading this magazine once every couple of months.

I didn’t get into any new magazines over this last year, which is strange. I keep wanting to buy a Computer Arts, or a Mac World or something like that, but always end up putting it back on the shelf, as it just feels like a lot more disposable than the price tag requires.  The one nice thing that gets imported however is ‘The Guardian’ weekly. This is a digest of all the top stories in the Guardian provided in this A4 stapled format, which is easy to digest on a Saturday morning. It’s definitely something I’m considering buying more often in the future.

I guess I’m not being controversial here when I say I’d like to read a few more books. How I go about this is going to be interesting. Maybe I need to train myself to read at least 10 pages before I go to bed, multiplied over 30 days gives me 300 pages, which is roughly the size of an average novel. Sure some books are larger, but we’re generalizing here. Obviously best laid plans and all of that, but it could become a way of life.

It’s an interesting experiment, and will guarantee at least one book a month minimum.

Shifting towards something a little more personal, the biggest part of 2010 and the most impactful.

Life

In life you can never have everything, and when I moved over here, I knew that I was giving up a ton of stuff, but crucially I was also getting something that I can never get in England, and that’s family, mine and Yasmine’s. Once again this is a double edged sword but it’s one that I am extremely grateful for and really enjoying at the moment.

I love the fact that I don’t really have to cook, unless I really want to. I like the fact that I am generally taken care of in that department completely and totally. Be it my future mother in law, Yasmine, my aunts, whatever. I like the fact that I don’t have to iron, except on the rare occasions. I love the fact that the country is small and I can get around relatively easily.

I don’t like the banking sector in the country, nor do I like the stupid traffic in Beirut. I don’t like the insane drivers, nor how they force me to act while I drive on the road either. I do like the weather generally, although I do actually wish it would act like the seasons. We really honestly didn’t feel any autumn, nor are we honestly feeling the winter either. I guess this is all part of the global warming effect which I should discuss in more detail in the future.

Work

There are a ton of things that I want to institute in the office. Something will take a good long while to get them going, while others will be more immediate to implement. The best thing I learnt while working for any company is the following:

Don't ask for permission...rather ask for forgiveness

Do it first and then claim ignorance later. It’s not like you’re trying to upset anyone, rather trying to push any company forward is a tough thing that takes persistence and time and effort to change something that many people don’t want to change.

Continuing with my year end review, I talked about blogging in general, now I get down to this site in particular and creativity and projects in general.

Website

I keep wanting to update with a lighter version, but I keep coming back to the darker colours and staying put. I know I will probably go for a slightly lighter motif pretty soon. Also I’d like to clean up the code finally as it’s a bit of a mess really. That’ll be the first thing I would like to do in January 2011. The design will pretty much remain the same, the underpinning will get lighter, the colours will change and I’ll probably add more doodles and images to places.

I guess I’m definitely of the mind to continue with the evolution of the site rather than a complete revolution. It works for me and it’s lasted the longest since I launched this site.

Creatively

Then there was this little drawing, which then got made into a glass painting which I get to look at every day.

I managed to make a few logos, some of which were actually used in the physical world, which again I thought was fantastic to see.

As if all of that wasn’t enough I got to complete my first draft and having been slowly hacking away at the second draft. It’s not as far along as I want it to be, but then again when was it ever going to be? Being this far along is reward enough. At least I’ve not given up on the dream. Given up on the dream, I’ve not worked this much on it ever. I’m waking up every morning and actually moving the process along.

Then finally, out of nowhere, I’ve even started off and created a little new robot character. I know I have a love for these things. It was completely by accident and it was inspired by me wanting to use my iPhone for something other than just consumption. I wanted to use it for creating. I am in the process of drawing a small backlog of pages so that I can start soliciting it on a weekly basis, which should be a nice distraction from all the other stuff that I’ve got going on at the moment.

When put like that, the output doesn’t seem too bad. There are a ton of projects I didn’t get to start, which I put the idea down on paper but never got around to. Ultimately however things actually were completed.

One of the things that I’m going to try and do next year is put rough deadlines. Even if I don’t meet these deadlines, at least I’ll push myself in the general direction of actually doing the work. Yes I might get a bit stressed while I do it, but that’s ok, it means I can look back on the year and be happy for what I completed. Actually completing projects is what keeps me happy. I’m also definitely going to buy this book.

Feeling drained after that long trip to Syria yesterday (and back). It’s the first week where I don’t have a deadline at the end of Friday. I have to issue something minor, but by and large it’s not that tough a week. Thank fuck. It’s been pretty damn intense these last few weeks/months, but we’ve come through, and people are relatively happy with what we did.

There are elements that we could do further, edit, change etc, but ultimately we’ve done a pretty solid job for the 3 months work we’ve completed. Now I’ve got to haul my ass out of bed and take a shower and get outta here. Can I be bothered? Can I fuck.

For all those wondering what the hell is going on the ‘Kode and this larger (than normal) number of posts in such a short time, it’s basically an experiment I’m going through for the month of December. Today was a bit of an off day, on account of me being out of the country so to speak and not having the time.

Ultimately my goal is to post about 3-4 posts a day and try and break my all time record of 51 posts in a single month. Yeah I know, it’s not quantity, it’s quality, well I’m striving for both. I’m striving for something fun and random, where the signal to noise ratio is decent.

I guess the reasons is because I’m actually enjoying blogging again. Not this limited 140 character BULLSHIT. Sorry but twitter has killed off any meaningful communication on the web as I used to once know it. There are some great sites out there, but by and large there is too much short spurts of noise. I was happy to acknowledge twitter killing the blog comments. You can see it all over, but what I am generally opposed to is the lack of creativity in people’s posts. It’s like all their energy has been devoted to something less meaningful.

I don’t care people communicating in the way they way, it’s just such a shame that it’s nearly killed the way that I used to like reading. So this is my attempt to rekindle the act of blogging for the sake of blogging. Putting an idea forward, and DEVELOPING it in more detail. There is limit in these things (at least for me) and I’ve spoken about this before. 4 paragraphs or thereabouts is about the correct size.

So join me on this journey to reclaiming the blogosphere. Cluster Fuck, Twitter Fuck.

Just got back from Syria for a day meeting. Apart from the long trip and the limited food (they never feed us at these meetings, which is FUCKING annoying), one of the most striking things about this meeting, is the number of languages on the table. Five of them. German, English, Arabic, Russian and Turkish.

Seriously, I have been in soo many meeting over my time, but never anything quiet like this. I’ll have some more thoughts on Syria in a minute, this being my second time, and me basically having an understanding of what to expect from the place.

Well, clearly the country just bypassed the whole autumn thing and just instantly went to winter. The temperature is still on the high side, but at least it is chucking it down. The thing is that in Lebanon when it rains, lets just say, it’s definitely not fucking around. We are talking buckets, we are talking Noah type rain here.

My only issue, and it’s a small tiny one is the noise that comes from my neighbour’s buildings and the piss poor job they do of securing their shit. The wind is a howler and it’s not forgiving in the slightest.

Been thinking about this for a while now. When Facebook first came about, I loved everything about it. As time has gone by however I have been moving slowly away from the service. I’ve noticed this trend with other people as well. It’s one of those things where a lot of the shine has gone from the service and now you’re bombarded with utter crap in the news feed, about farmville and other shitty game applications.

The thing is though, that FB still provides these words with a decent viewership, ie all of my closer friends that have made it into my circle of friends on Facebook, as well as the like 40 people that read this blog regularly.

Which in a round about way kind of brings us to that thing that used to be an integral part of every blog, the comments.

The annoying thing? Some of the comments about these posts remain on FB and not on this site. I guess the nice thing is that you have a series of places to share communications with, rather than a single location, but alas I am a nostalgia freak. I like what is old, and normally go back to the old on occasion to drink from that well.

Communication is now scattered. It’s all over the place, because there are a million and one places that are vying for our attention. While that is good in general for people to have options to find the thing that they like the most, it’s also makes things a lot more … spread out.

It’s not that I like living in the past, but I like to relive times that were generally fun. The time where blog comments were common place and people interacted with more than 140 characters is long gone. There are specific havens on the net where this continues, but as a blogging community that has left us I believe.

One of the reasons that I’ve had less time to spend on the net. I spend a few minutes here, and hour there, but ultimately I no longer live on the net like I used to. I tend to spend a lot of free time drawing (which is great) and I end up trying to relax from the day I’ve had.

You choose your battlegrounds, you choose your poison. I am not 100% into Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Was never really into Delicious or Flickr. Don’t really like Tumblr all that much either.

I know that’s where all the kids are these days, but I feel that I am happy with this unique little part of cyberspace. It’s all mine, I control it’s destiny, it’s in my hands to build it or break it or change it. It’s not a competition, it’s a manner of expression, and after all that’s why we’re all here right?

So yesterday I made to purchases. The first was the Pogo Sketch stylus. The second was Brushes. The obvious reasoning is to start making a comic on my iPhone. I know probably not the best medium for this thing. Maybe getting an iPad for that sort of thing would be better, but I’m not getting a first gen iPad (that’s another post for another time).

I’ve actually have several drawing applications on my iPhone, but I’ve found that Brushes is the best for actually creating, even if the icon sucks many many balls. Adobe Ideas doesn’t provide you with enough options for the brushes (you have one), and Sketch Pro (from Autodesk) I found to be incredibly annoying with it’s unresponsive zooming in and out. This is a major issue on a small screen as you’ll be doing that a lot to get the finer details. Also the layer system on Brushes just works nicely and five layers should be about enough to deal with things.

All of this is my attempt to create a daily comic from my iPhone. I’m going to try and build a few weeks worth of material (don’t even know what I’m going to be drawing at the moment) but hopefully it’ll be fun while I continue to toil away at my other comic book work (on the 7th page of my second draft, slowly but surely people, slowly but surely).

Just to let everyone know, I can now be found firing shots (pretty shortly) on Dribbble. (Thanks to Chris for hooking me up with an invite).

My god, it’s been a good long while since I’ve posted here, and honestly there is sooo much good stuff to talk about. The main issue I guess is that now my thoughts are distributed across the net. From Flickr, to Facebook, from Twitter to Instagram, to Google Reader. It’s no longer concentrated in one spot.

Also, I don’t update with personnal stuff, which really is what this blog was originally meant to be about. It’s a long form of expression, something that none of the above are.

So here’s the first bit of news, I’m officially engaged. Yeah, pretty sudden, even for me, but I guess, when you know, you know. And I knew very very quickly with Yasmine, from the first date I knew there was something up. Hopefully I might get her to start blogging on here as well.

Now all I need is a Habari app for my iphone and I’m good - yeah I got myself a brand spanking new iphone, which I love of course.

OhLife - If you start seeing more blogging action here on the ‘Kode in the coming months, it’ll be thanks to this site. Over the years I’ve used different methods to actually communicate online. First it was a newsletter to my friends as a long bastard email. Then it was this blog. Then it was Facebook for a while and a bit of twitter. Now, now it’s nothing really. But I love writing, and I love maintaining this site. Writing an email to myself every day, with my most banal things is a good way of getting back to blogging again. At least that’s the thought process.

One thing I love about the OhLife site is just how beautifully put together it actually is. It’s a single column design (just the way I like it) with subtle backgrounds and little details everywhere. The colour scheme is calm and the little bit of red brings out everything as well.

The guys have been smart enough to make sure to allow you to export your entries as well incase you wanna do something with them, and setting up an account is exactly as it should be, completely painless.

One of the things that I’m hoping to cut by at least 20 minutes is my commute. Currently it takes between 38 and 40 minutes (including parking). The part which took the most was actually from Saida to Beirut which took a little more than originally anticipated. In contrast once I was in Beirut the drive to Dora area took no more than 4 minutes or something silly like that.

Truth be told I can live with that kind of commute for a little while. I’m guaranteed a place to sit, don’t have to wait for the next train to come along. Don’t need to be squeezed getting on and off. No sweating like a bastard because it’s 35 degrees down there in the summer. Sure I get the odd asshole who cuts me off, or yells because he thinks the road is his own and can go anywhere he damn well pleases (without indicating), but it’s a small price to pay. The commute is about 10 minutes more than it used to be in London.

One of the things I’ve done is actually started downloading some audiobooks and lectures that I’ve been meaning to listen to for ages. As I wanted something relatively light, I’ve started with the first Harry Potter audiobook. After many many years of people TRYING really hard to get me to dip my toe in this universe, I’ve finally taken the plunge thanks to Stephen Fry’s amazing voice and reading abilities. To be honest with you, I wish he’d read all of my audiobooks. The man is amazing at it. I’ve heard about 3 chapters so far and it’s all very predictable so far and really can’t see what all the fuss is about.

Let’s finish the first book, since at least then I can claim to have given it some of my time before I write it off. Let’s just say the concept has never really appealed to me.

It’s 5:55 in the morning and I’ve just woken up to get ready for work after 6 long months away from a regular gig on the basis that I was on sabbatical. You don’t change your life all that often, but right now that’s exactly what I’m about to embark on.

I’ll probably be blogging more often and maybe doing a compare and contrast between life over here and life in the UK. The first difference at the moment is that rather than waking up and getting ready to go to work by walking to the Golders Green tube station, I’m waking up and getting ready for a 28 minute drive to Beirut.

Not sure which is better, which is worse, but what I do know is that it’s completely different and there is something of a novelty issue associated with it. Wish me luck everyone.

Residency #139 - I will be applying for one of the residency positions. It fits PERFECTLY with what I’m doing at the moment. By the end of May, I should have the entire story properly roughed out with dialogue and hopefully a few pages and several (if not most of the character designs) for my graphic novel. It’s funny how things sometimes fall into place. Even if I don’t get the residency, this will still give me a deadline that MUST be met and create a package that can stand on it’s own two legs. If I’m not mistaken there are 24 positions available, 8 for Paul Pope, 8 for Craig Thompson and 8 for Svetlana Chmakova. The deadline is the 21st of May…much later than my sabbatical is over, so plenty of time to finish by then.

Of course if I do get one of the positions, it’ll be a pretty big battle to actually get another 3 weeks off from work so soon after my sabbatical…but we’ll cross that bridge if we really have to when we get there.

Six years of Broken Kode. Here’s to many more.

I’m travelling down to the homeland (for lack of better word, Lebanon) tomorrow morning. It’s the first time in nearly 5 years and much I’m sure has changed (or maybe nothing has changed). Either way, expect a bit of radio silence from the ‘kode in the forthcoming week, while I sort out our home down there, the internet and EVERYTHING else that I need to deal with (really boring shit like bank accounts, passport, identity cards, buying a car, boring shit, but essential shit).

See you on the other side.

I can finally start talking about my sabbatical, as last night was the first time I felt slightly restless, which basically means that I’m calm and my brain isn’t being bombarded with work related thoughts. Until 2 weeks into my ‘sabbatical’ I was still having the most boring work dreams you can imagine. I’d wake up with a bit of a smile on my face since I didn’t need to do anything with that dream and my reality was the opposite, for once.

Now I’m back to not remembering my dreams, which means we can hunker down to get some work done. Maybe that’s why I’ve woken up at 5:30, because my body is telling me:

Get up you fool, we've got work to do. You've been sleeping till 9 for too long you lazy bum.

The sabbatical effectively starts today (at least in my mind). There are a couple of things that I’m hoping to achieve in this short period of time that I have in front of me and 6:30 in the morning is a good time to start as any.

After a moment of pure madness, I went back to WordPress, only to find that actually the creature comforts that I had become accustomed to in Habari were not present. It had such a detrimental effect on me that I could even post small links. The bookmarklets didn’t work, the thing felt heavy and I couldn’t wrap my head around the various elements of the code that had passed me by.

I’ll be writing more about Habari in the coming months as there definitely is a lot of work being done, but it just needs a bit of, consolidation of sorts.

If you’re reading this in your feed reader, then have a look at the site, which looks a little bit different, as I’ve also updated to version 9.

Although not an immense milestone by most blogs estimation (especially the professional blogs which pay you by the post), I think 1300 posts on ‘Kode is a significant achievement to sit back and take stock of. 1300 posts is roughly 216 posts per year, which is a little over 1 post every two days for the past six years. Truth is, there have been some pretty busy days and some very quiet days (nay months) over the years but overall there has been a consistent output of ideas, thoughts, critism and links over the years.

Changes

However the biggest change I’ve made here this year is removed comments. Comments were really sporadic in general, and the only thing I could count on was bloody spam. Getting rid of the spam has been great, but of course it’s also meant that if in fact I wanted to have a discussion with anyone then it’d have to come from an email, or on twitter.

Design

Future

Scott McCloud On Criticism - Great idea/thought by Scott regarding criticism. I’ll try and keep this all in mind as I will be putting myself out there for said criticism and to be honest I’ve been know to offer my own harsh brand in the past…

Wow, can you believe it’s October already? Seriously where the hell has this year gone already? Yesterday we watched Godfather and ate chocolate santa. Seriously chocolate santas are already in the supermarkets, WTF? The countdown has begun before I move out of Golders Green after 7 years and go on walkabout. Loads of shit to sort out before then, which all basically starts this week as I order by boxes and self storage options and start getting rid of clothes and unwanted stuff that have accumulated over the last few years. It’s not too bad (yeah you might hear me complaining later on this week) but I know I’ve got my work cut out for me.

In other quick and dirty news, we went and saw Joe Sacco at the ICA this week, which was brilliant, since he met everyone later on and did some signings, which was really cool. His latest books sounds like it’s going to be amazing, so I can’t wait (Footnotes from Gaza). We saw a few images and it does look like it’s going to be a keeper.

On a completely separate note, I’m looking for a good font creator/editor for Mac. I’ve not found any that won’t break the bank (I’m looking in your general ugly direction Fontlab). Fontographer is no longer part of macromedia/Adobe, but surely there’s a nice indie developer out there who has made something that can be used to make a font? I refuse to believe there is nothing else out there.

A little over a year ago I wrote this, which basically explained what I wanted to do over the year that passed. What’s funny is that I completely forgot that I wrote that (having a blog for as many years as I do, does make events/posts blend into each other). Anyway 1 year later, I can report that I have definitely been moving in the right direction. The first thing I did was go to an art class at Central St.Martins. While the actual lessons taught me sweet fuck all, I learnt soo much from some of the peeps in the class (ok mainly from Mike) but most importantly I remembered what it was like to feel excited about making comics.

A couple of days ago I finally completed my first full comic book story. It’s a four pager for the Observer competition and it’s basically 2 months of my life. Is two months a lot of time to complete 4 pages? Well I was doing other things inbetween, like working, holidays (where I couldn’t take my art with me) etc. Also bearing in mind that some of the things that I did, I’ve either not done, or not done in a while.

This little experience taught me a lot about how difficult making comics can be, but also how amazing the feeling is when you’ve completed the story that was just a thought in your mind, as you built it, cultivated it, nurtured it, watered it, fed it and then ultimately moulded it.

I did need to take a few shortcuts to achieve the deadline. So I ended up computer colouring and lettering; even though I wanted to do both of these things by hand.

With this project firmly under my belt, it’s time to shift focus to actually start drawing more. However there has to be a deadline. A year deadline is not good enough. It’s too far away. It has to be broken down into smaller chunks. Where I do burn the midnight oil to achieve that goal. Could be 5-10 pages per month? Fully pencilled and inked. That’s a little over a page a week.

The thing is I also want to try my hand at some sci-fi as well. The only way I can think of is, to simply write and draw a panel to this other story every day. 1 small panel. The nice thing about that is that I will end up getting speed and it’ll help me try new styles and new ways of doing something different without it affecting a much larger project. It’s all building towards me having my own distinct voice and style and breaking away from influences.

Either way, it’s all exciting times, especially considering I go on sabbatical for 6 months so I have the chance to pursue all the above.

For those wondering why things have been generally pretty quiet around here, it’s due to the competition which I have been beavering away at. I still have some minor tweaks to make and some additional inking to do, but by and large all 4 pages are done. Just got post production to get on with now, special effects (colouring) and sound effects (lettering). Here are the first two pages inked.

How to get that perfect shave - Some good tips in there. Like shaving after a shower (or making sure you wash your face in hot water for a few minutes) and the use of a badger brush.

The Observer and Random House Graphic Short Story Competition - Definitely going to be entering this year. The only, only thing I need is the story, four pages long.

It’s been nearly 4 1/2 years since comments were officially not part of this site. Back then it was because I couldn’t actually host them on my own site, until of course I moved to WordPress and during the blogging revolution of the early naughties. So what’s changed? Twitter and Facebook. Both of which have brought the internet to the world that hid themselves from it, but they’ve practically killed the blogosphere, or at least how it used to operate.

The funny thing is turning them off was on the cards for a while now. I’ve noticed this downturn for about a year now (probably a few months before I even moved to Habari as my blogging engine of choice).

Does it upset me? I guess it’s a different kind of change. While sometimes I like twitter, there’s too much noise for me on there. Also the fact that everyone only speaks in soundbytes does annoy me. I can’t read people’s thoughts about things because they’re limited and effectively people’s voices on the internet are silenced.

In the meantime I’ll be here writing more than 140 characters and hopefully sharing some good links from around the net. If you want to comment on something, drop me an email or you know…send me reply on twitter (maybe I’ll even integrate that twitter reply thing that Michael is attempting at the moment).

Thought I’d write down a list of all the areas that this site still needs work on. This is for my own personal use which I’ll be checking back on over the next few months to see what I’ve completed and how long it actually took me to complete.

1. Add a feature image at the top of the site (integrate design to suit).

2. Add gallery section. Either going to be via Picasa or a self hosted version. If self hosted then it'll need to be integrated into the design of the site.

3. Sort out the way comments are presented.

4. Write code to remove comments as a default (but allow previously posted comments to remain seen).

5. Add a decent contact form.

6. Integrate the forum design into the site properly (instead of using the general vanilla flavoured colourings).

7. Sort out the CSS file to allow a simple IE6, IE7 template. Also include some form of message to point peeps into getting a better browser.

8. Tart up the 404 page.

The great things I’ve found about the current design is that it allows me to get on with just linking to good stuff around the web. It’s not been designed to provide a showcase for my stuff, but that’s going to have to change or at least I’m going to have to think about a way in which I can tweaks things to not feel out of place. Building on the foundations I’ve set up.

Been a while since I’ve written anything significant on the site, but alas I’ve been busy with the task of creating Aitus Moralis. The big significance is that after nearly 6 years of talking about this story, I’ve finally finished the first fully pencilled page of the book. I’ll probably post it at some point once I’ve sorted out the best way to show my artwork in an easy to maintain gallery (I’m leaning to using Google Picasa at this point in time).

This is significant because I’ve managed to do this page of art while working. This kind of dispells the thoughts that i had previously that my brain cannot cope with splitting engineering in the day and artwork in the evening, but actually it can.

The real issue is finding the muse to get on and do it. I found it by going to a course. The energy of the people around me creating artwork was enough for me to actually get on with it and move forward. I’m still learning but if you don’t draw you’ll never learn, you’ll never get any better. Nobody created their masterpiece from day one, or even day two, but you have to start somewhere .

Life can sometimes feel like one big massive MISSED opportunity. Currently that’s all I can think about. Everything that I’ve wanted to do, everything I’ve wanted to have, everything I’ve wanted to be, everyone I’ve wanted to be with. Which decisions were the important ones that got me here. I think about where I am and the road I took to get to this position.

I try to get some sleep but these thoughts keep haunting me; which then reminds me of Bobby Gaylor’s Suicide. My favourite line from that song is definitely ‘sleepless summer nights that seem to go on forever’. I hate those fucking nights. I hate these fucking nights.

I feel like I’m walking underwater most days.

My biggest hate however is thinking like this because I have a lot to be thankful of. I’ve been at a pretty strange place in my head; all I want to do is get over this dark period, however all I can concentrate on is where I missed.

That’s what I want to be surrounded by right now. Creative brains drawing, sculpting, moulding, painting, etching whatever. Over the years I have definitely understood that your enthusiasm and energy is boosted by those around you. You gravitate to people with positive energy because they make you want to actually get on with life as well. Your surroundings play such an incredible part in this.

For years I have been lamenting the fact that I’ve not been able to get creative with my art. I’ve not been able to nurture the graphic novel that I’ve been writing for nigh on 5 years now. The truth the story is all the better for this incubation time because although the idea was sound (the very basic idea) the execution was lacking.

Yesterday I went and saw a collection of student movies (this isn’t a review of the work that was presented, but more of an observation, when you have no budget, the story has to work cleverly within these constraints - which i don’t feel was captured). The one thing i took from the evening however was the collection of minds in the room and how they all fed off each other.

So I’ve decided (and I don’t know why I didn’t think of this earlier) to try and find a studio to share with a bunch of artists. Now if it was up to me I’d round up the crazy Danes, maybe a couple of Americans get a big warehouse in London on the waterfront and have us create awesome stuff, pushing each other creatively…something which clearly cannot happen.

I’ll be sure to post the results of my research in my hunt for a design studio to get creative in.

It’s 12:34am and I can’t sleep. I’ve got this uneasy feeling in my chest and I feel like I’m underwater. Random thoughts buzzing in my head as I try and kick them away. Chris Isaak’s Black Flowers playing in the background calms me down, but even that’s not helping me escape the demons of the day that linger in my thoughts, hovering, waiting.

I know something is not right. Like animals that are restless before an earthquake, I lie here waiting for the storm to subside so that I can continue.

In the sky cold air, tears of mine, I am heaven, I am euphoria.

The problem is that 2008 lacked focus for these areas, so it’s time to provide them with a slight bit of structure. I doubt I’ll be able to meet these deadlines, although I might try and attempt to do something about it, the harsh reality is that life will no doubt get in the way; however it’s better to have some structure than none at all.

Japan Photo Album

Finish the script

Clemency

Character Designs

Broken Kode

So I woke up this morning and it honestly felt like 10-15 bed-trolls hijacked by body while I slept and preceeded to beat me with the blunt edge of a feather. Every bone in my body was on fire and my head was about to explode. Of course this happened to me a couple of weeks ago, but luckily I actually hauled myself out of bed ready to tackle the day…kind of. Of course what I hadn’t counted on was forgetting my ipod shuffle, until I got to the tube station.

Now this tiny little bit of kit is like an extension of my morning routine. I NEVER leave the house without it. It’s like going out of the house without my keys, wallet, phone and shuffle. Like my day wasn’t going to be hard enough, I had no tunes to pull me through the graveyard shift (post-lunch). What can i say I’m mediterranean, I need a siesta after lunch. trust me I’ve complained several times to get siesta couches, but alas it falls on deaf ears.

This got me thinking to things I’m generally dependant on and that constitute as habits bad or good. My realisation is that I’m a very methodic person, in fact so much so that if the police were tailing me I’d be caught on the second day.

Nothing new to add to the general conversation of redesigned website to be honest just that this is what has been going on with my thought process lately (ok from yesterday). I’ve been sitting on a redesign for the ‘Kode for many months now. It’s been going on for so long that it’s kind of embarrassing to talk about. So much so that I kept flitting back and forth between designs last year in an attempt to get my act together.

However what I’ve gone and done now is gone back to the design I’m most proud of, from both a functional point of view but also from a code base. It’s a solid and relatively light code base which I’m pretty happy with. There are somethings that I know I can do better with however I don’t have the energy to start from scratch and don’t want to dive into someone else’s code really, especially as I want to be able to tweak this to suit my own needs completely.

So I’m going to be tweaking and adding something new to this site every day. Some of the tweaks may be pretty drastic to be honest, while others will be less than obvious. I’ll bring the copy in my static pages up to speed. I’ll sort out some links that are dead. I’ll start to sort out my categories properly and generally bring the design in an evolutionary method to where I want it to be.

I’m through with these drastic redesigns, maybe a slow burn approach will present me with something that I find more enjoyable to use, as my enthusiasm for writing is directly linked to the look of my site. So if you’re reading this on your feed reader, you might want to check the site from time to time to try and spot the differences.

It’s not a question of getting everything right the first time out, it’s a question of slowly evolving and adding and tweaking in a methodical and periodic fashion.

I was thinking about this today and basically, blogging involves removing the additional thoughts that are in your head that take up valuable space. Things that you should think about but not necessarily keep in your brain knocking about. That way it leaves you with more time to do other things, like in my case watch ‘The Wire’ (best police series EVER created) and read a few books (got a couple of reviews for books you really should read) and most importantly for my sanity, create things. That’s when I’m most happy, when I’m creating stuff.

The issue with me is that that part of my brain has been laying dormant as I began thinking and doing a bunch of other things that seriously didn’t really add to my being,…overall…in hindsight and all that. Part of the problem I guess is that I’m not angry enough at stuff, so it’s time to start getting angry again and flex that muscle again. It’s time to start creating again, it’s time to start blogging again, none of this 7 posts a month bullshit.

To the internet. So last week we were offline at casa Khaled. Yes, that’s right, no net access whatsoever. At first I’ve got to admit that I was REALLY angry. Not at anyone but at the situation itself. I mean seriously, my computer felt like it was neutered. I felt completely cut off from the world and all because as it turns out one of the cables coming into the house decided to collapse on itself. Maybe because it finally decided to give up the good fight because of the cold weather? Maybe it was because the workers outside moved it a fraction and it was to frail to deal with it, either way I was cut off.

This has happened before to be honest, however this one I was a bit more composed with the whole thing. I was actually able to deal with a few things that I’ve been meaning to deal with for a while; like do a bit of writing, do a little bit of drawing and generally do a couple of things that I’ve been meaning to do for a while. One thing I did miss was this site. I realised that I need this place for venting, something which i’ve been doing a lot less of in recent times. One of the main reasons I continued to blog was because I liked the cathartic process associated with brain dumping, because after all that ALL I’m doing here. Sometimes I rattled a few cages, sometimes I make a couple of people smile, so I think I’ve found that spark that I need to really start making the words on this site start coming alive. So as of tomorrow, you can expect a lot more ‘Kode action coming your way, daily even.

It’s also time I kicked WordPress like a bad habit. Seriously, this shit takes FOREVER to log in. Once you’re in it’s kind of OK, but honestly SLOW as a fat man in water. Some things in 2.5 are nice, but alas I’m thinking too damn little, too damn late, I guess I will write something about it at some point.