Click the image for full screen (text on image as well as here!)

These two images are at first glance, very similar… They are both business cards for JustMac.

The top image is a screenshot of the source Adobe Illustrator artwork file for JustMac’s new business cards. The timestamp on this file is the 19th of June 2006 (although the metadeta suggests it was created on the 12th - took them a long time to design copy the layout)

The image below it is an image created by myself, and remaining my property that was created on the 12th January 2006 as a “proposed idea” it was never agreed on nor did I officially hand over that image to JustMac although I have no objection to their use of it. just of VivatorStudios taking credit for my design.

VivatorStudios claim on their website (formerly: http://development.vivatorstudios.com/portfolio/ci/) [Update 29th July: VivatorStudios have removed this website - mirror here VivatorStudios Corporate Identity Portfolio] to have “deisnged a new corporate identity to be reflected in letterheads, and business cards” (using my design is one thing, claiming it as your own is quite another!)

Funny because when I created that image I had the following IM conversation with someone who was later to become a Vivator Studios “staff” member.

20:15:14 rossmck:
	What do you think of this one...
20:15:17 rossmck:
	http://homepage.mac.com/rossmck/cardcol.png ?
20:20:24 *********:
	oooo
20:20:29 *********:
	bit big 
20:23:09 *********:
	nice tho

I personally think they’re very similar

Any and all views expressed in the comments represent those of the original poster only. I do not necessarily agree with, nor approve of, the comments attached to this post however promote free speech so long as it is not of an offensive or inaccurate nature. Any content which is illegal or obscene will be removed, I will not however censor the opinion of those who choose to contribute.

As many of you know I’m currently looking for work since leaving JustMac.

The recent proliferation of blogs today gave me an unusually personal insight into a position I may be applying for, including the current employee’s reason for leaving, and what he thinks of his employer. I can only assume his employer doesnt know of his blog (or how to use Google) or he may well be dismissed before he resigns.

It does make you wonder how easy it is to find more about what people actually think. Most company websites will list some of their key personnel on their website. In turn, googling for those names (particularly the IT Managers!) will tend to reveal some sort of personal page - a blog, a MySpace profile, LiveJournal etc…

It also seems clear that people do actually blog about their work. Ok, so I did it with JustMac - but there are two key differences there; Firstly, most of the early postings referred to JustMac purely as “the shop” even the photos didn’t give too much away (much as you’ll find it hard to find my car registration in the photo gallery!. Secondly, it’s slightly different with a business that I helped to manage.

Almost everyone I know mentions work in their blog, usually anonymously. Some will even accidentally give away information they didn’t intend to, or shouldn’t, by way of photos.

Remembering that blogs, and the internet in general, are a globally accessible publishing space… Should we really put things up here that we wouldn’t want our employer to see?

Well I came home to a pleasant surprise today, the DIY faeries (well probably Dad!) have laid about 2 feet of floring!!!!

Bedroom’s starting to look more like a proper room already

(p.s. for those of you who don’t get the title of this post think of a more traditional scottish (read: lazy) way of pronouncing floor… beside’s it’s a good pun, because it does have more flair with a floor… terrible when you’ve got to explain them!)

Update: Can you believe the audacity of these people?! - Read Marika Klambatsea’s representative’s response to my opinions, and quote from the Scotsman! Apparantly, I’m too young to argue with them… and yet more nonsensical comments after the link

Stranger still they seemed to want to promote the “avantgarde musician composer and singer” and even took the opportunity to criticise a reviewer (who they seem to think was an interviewer!) from The Scotsman, you can read my response on the original page - Marika Klambatsea - Calamity Jane : Letters to Her Daughter :p

It is currently 31C (90F) in Glasgow.. That’s the same temperature as Corfu and Athens at the moment. Hotter than Lisbon.. and only 6 degrees lower than Madrid!!

This is not the sort of weather we are accustomed to, besides most of those countries have air conditioning in a fair number of homes! Well at least I dont miss the central heating working! But equally, I can’t sleep!

The Met Office predictions are that, probably tomorrow, the temperatures across the UK will break the all-time record with temperatures in london reaching (39C / 102F!). Additionally, Research conducted at the Met Office, shows that there is a significant human contribution to these heatwaves because of global warming over recent decades. This is a sign of things to come, with the current temperatures expected to be considered normal by around 2050.

Makes for a few interesting news stories though … It was 23C yesterday morning at around 9.30, and due to a small pile-up on the motorway dozens of car and bus passengers were seen wandering around the M8, sitting chatting on crash barriers…

“Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam. “

Just recently stumbled across a website entitled “The Man In Blue” who seems to be an absolute genius with CSS and JavaScript and XHTML and all that sort of thing, he has a number of examples of some really quite clever layout techniques that I will almost certainly adapt for future web design projects of my own.

But amongst all the practical stuff he also has SSCrabble, a full implementation of the Scrabble board game (with all the rules) in an entirely CSS/Javascript/HTML webpage, no flash is used and there’s also NO IMAGES used in the game… Quite remarkable from a techncial point of view… and also a good way to kill time… So why not go and Play Scrabble

Well the hall’s almost done (the walls that is… just skirtings, facings and flooring to go!).

We’ve also painted given the bedroom it’s first coat (with extra thanks to my little brother and sister!). Already it makes a big difference, but for the fact everything’s in the middle of the room at the moment and I have to climb over loads of stuff to crawl into bed, not to mention i’m sleeping right next to a gecko tank

Getting there…

This is getting beyond a joke, so much so you can now check the live outage history of my UKOnline ADSL Line through a nice little tool I made to log these outages. (I’m aware that web page is going to grow exponentially over the coming days, so at some point i’ll implement some sort of search filter…)

My internet connection should run at 22Mbps, in practice it’s closer to 20Mbps. Today it seems closer to somewhere between 1 and 4Mbps… when it’s even connected.

For the last few days I’ve been suffering random drop outs and when it does get a connection it barely creeps above 4Mbps! … Indeed it’s been so sporadic tonight that I actually got disconnected in the middle of typing this rather short rant, which I only started typing after managing to reconnect (again!)

Aaaaaargh!

Google Mail for Your Domain has launched in it’s early beta stages, I had a couple of invites for it (one of them being for JustMac, but that’s not of that much use to me since JustMac.co.uk now goes somewhere else of course!) however I’ve been experimenting with the service and I’m impressed…

When you first sign up you create an admin account (they encourage you to take something like admin@yourdomain but in practice it can be anything), this leads you to the “Dashboard” which will have a big yellow warning on it about your MX records being wrong!

The first thing I noticed (other than the MX warning) is my account type is “Free” (Free Account - Up to 25 users) which gives some indication that there will always be a “free” level of your own domain GMail service, and if you want more than 25 users you’ll have to pay Google some money… seems reasonable enough to me.

You can create users, change or reset their passwords, and view when the last signed in and how much of their 2GB quota is remaining from this dashboard. It’s worth noting that you cannot create users “abuse” or “postmaster” as Google monitors those accounts to address abuse reports. You can, however, get a copy of anything sent to them.

You can also create “email lists” these special addresses can go to multiple other users of your domain. They cannot, however, go to any eMail address outside of your domain name.

There’s a few other little perks, you can change the colour of the sign in box that your users see (nothing else…. just the colour of the box :P), you can also use your own “fancy logo” to replace the Google Mail one in the corner of the pages your users see and you can enable and disable Jabber chat for your users.

Other than those cosmetic changes, the interface your users see is identical to the standard GMail interface but with some references to GMail replaced with the name of your organisation.

The jabber chat function is also really nice, this enables your users to use ANY Jabber client with their them@yourdomain.com account … although it does require the addition of a few SRV records to your DNS.

GMail for Your Domain would probably be well suited to most small businesses, and as it handles both eMail and Calendar needs it could easily completely replace systems like Outlook used in most offices. All we need now is GoogleTalk to gain some sort of VoIP implementation and Google can probably just about provide all of your communication needs (although I doubt they’d stoop to GoogleFax as it’s supporting a basically dead format, but it would be nice to have your fax number linked directly to your GMail inbox!)

All in all it’s an impressive beta that, like most things Google produces, will become an impressive product.

p.s. Google Calendar is available to all your domain users too.