Right now, my verdict to Marmite is –

I still hate it.

Incident 1: Return of the pest

It all started a couple of weeks ago when Mimi at home decided to constantly stare at the washing machine, and even sleep by it when she can. It happened once before when she was living at another flat at High Street Kensington. I wasn’t there, but story goes that she started to stare under the fridge, until suddenly one day she presented a nicely dead mouse to her royal owner.

How sweet.

And it turns out she was right again. My guess is that the cold winter drove the mouse¹ into hiding indoor—probably chewed its way through where the pipes go out of the walls. You can see a video of her chasing the little creature here.

Incident 2: Stop following me around!

I can’t quite remember what i was searching for on initially (as you do), but before I knew it, I found myself downloading a Java app that tracks the pointer of your mouse. So I let it run free for a day, and this is what I ended up with.

You can pretty much tell what’s happening here:

• I use the top and  bottom right corners a lot because that’s the hot corners for Show desktop and Exposé
• There’re a few horizontal ‘scratches’ at the bottom, where I have a habit of hovering over the Dock before launching a particular app
• You can pretty much tell where the icons are on the dock, given a set of dots lining up nicely along the bottom, with the ones towards the left hand side being used more
• The lines at the left hand side are parallel and horizontal, because I have a second monitor on the left, which the app doesn’t capture
• There isn’t a particular area of the screen that I use more, except the general centre area

One thing I’m not too sure of, is what the size of the dots mean. I mean, there’s this large dot at the right hand side of the screen. I don’t exactly remember repetitively clicking a particular pixel on the screen, or holding it.

Well, you can find out more about the app here, and let me know if you find out anything interesting about how you use your mouse!

Ever since the launch of co-creating the future, Tom has been doing quite a good job as an editor to keep it alive. Almost every time I walk past him he’d be drafting up something for the blog – or at least it catches my attention when I see the WordPress interface on his screen. So I thought as a blog owner, I should be doing a better job at keeping StillLive.NET, well, alive. As busy as I do get at times, I should certainly regard ‘blog keeping’ as part of the house keeping.

So here we have it. Thursday is now: Blog Day! And because I only decided to do this less than 24 hours ago, I haven’t really thought a great deal about what to write. I guess I’ll start with Launch48!

Last Wednesday, I picked up Adil’s tweet on Launch48, and registered to attend. According to the Launch48 website…

The aim of Launch48 is to bring together participants from different backgrounds and levels of experience in the web industry to think/plan/develop and launch one or multiple web apps in one weekend. That’s right, in 48 hours! 

Compared to perhaps watching one or two films over the weekend, and perhaps writing a blog post or two, I decided this would be quite a good learning and networking exeprience. And I was right! Friday night started with a round of 21 pitches. Bravo to all the people who had a go at it. I would’ve had a go at it, except my main concern back then was: would I be doing design, developing, or marketing? When 21 pitches came down to LocalCoupon (now VouChaCha), Charity Pie (now MyCharityPie), i like u coz, and Decisions Decisions, we had to go our separate ways and decide on an area of expertise. At the end I decided to try out the design department. Why? I wanted to try taking a pure design role in a  project, and see what that’s like really. Then, I joined the Charity Pie team. (For more descriptive information on the projects, you can check out the blog posts on the Launch48 blog.)

The next day, Julian from Dennis Publishing kindly showed us to our individual ‘HQs’. The team introduced ourselves to each other, and work started to get delegated.  Not that taking on work for other departments would’ve been a wrong choice, but choosing to go into the design team was definitely the right move. I LOVED IT! The design team was absolutely awesome, and the nature of the ‘job’ itself brings me instantly to a state of flow. Thus, I’m temporarily not considering taking on hardcore developing work, but will still be interested in learning the development side of web design and applications. At the moment, MVC and AIR/Flex would be the top of my list. As for the design side of my to-learn list: Adobe Illustrator is, although quite complicated as a Photoshop user, interestingly fun. Definitely have to learn how to use it more professionally.

Despite being pushed to launch an app prototype by the end of Sunday, quite a few people did wander about to see what other teams are up to. Well, at least people from other groups did come up to our design hub quite a few times. As anticipated, the Launch48 event was short of designers. I can’t quite imagine graphic designers to be interested in this kind of event, unlike UI and UX designers. That’s why we were all grouped together as ‘designers’. So, having hogged 4 designers in our team (which is a large design team compared to i like u coz who didn’t have any designers), all the other teams ended up coming to us for one form or another of design work: logo, UI, graphic etc. Too bad we couldn’t help everyone to the end, but taking on multi-mini-projects at the same time was quite an experience in itself.

By the end of of Sunday, most teams finished their app in their own ways. VouChaCha had a working Java application developed and installed on a Nokia N95. i like u coz and Decisions Decisions both had a working platform. As for MyCharityPie – I guess our idea was bigger than what we wanted to achieve in 48 hours, which was bigger than our team – we had a working back end system, and a thought through UX and UI design, but didn’t manage to string them together.

Too bad.

Still, it was a lot of fun. The teams continue to carry on with their design, development and marketing campaigns, and the networking opportunity was priceless. Thanks again to Adil and Ian, and we’ll see everyone again on March 20th when all teams come together again to meet angels and VCs!

Oh, did I mention that the design team ROCKS!?

Professional

1. Lean to use Illustrator to an intermediate level
2. Create a simple Flash-based website/webapp

Using the pen tool on Photoshop has always been a weakness for me, so in 2009 I plan to practise using the pen tool a lot more with Illustrator, creating vector graphics. And as I continue to embrace the power of JavaScript libraries, I think it’s only fair that I allow myself to dabble in Flash as well and see what it can do apart from creating animations and play video.

Personal

1. Get into a regular sleep routine
2. Exercise 3 times a week

2008 has been a rather ‘unhealthy’ year for me. Having moved out to live on my own, working at home has meant that I’m pretty much working at the oddest hours, and sleeping too. Adil gave me a nickname: ‘napster’ at one point for the number of times he’s heard about me taking long naps during the day even before he met me. The Lent attempt to drop the habit of laying in failed. I’ve also been less engaged with the dance rehearsals and lessons. Now with Virgin Active charging me £64.95 per month, exercising 3 times a week is only fair.

Side projects

There’re a couple of projects that I want to either round off some existing projects, or start on a couple that I’ve been having in my mind.

1. EnTrip mobile See Entrip.
2. Weight-gain tracking Although it’s not a resolution to gain weight, I believe a regular sleep and exercise routine will allow me to put on weight anyway. So, I spent a couple of hours last night puting together an application to track my progress. This should be rather interesting.
3. File transfer interface This is to allow myself to upload/download/share files that I wish in an unlimited way with public/private privileges.
4. Something that uses the Twitter API It’s possible that I might put this together with the file transfer interface, but it’s uncertain right now.
5. StillLive.NET rebrand A major rebrand and site-wide redesign is on the way…

How about everyone else? Any resolutions for the coming year?

I have to admit, this site at the moment appears to be a just-another-blog. Well, perhaps I should call it a “development blog” for now. There’s much more work to be done about this space, and with the blog being the only content / feature, I hope at least people will like the photos that are attached. They are all, somehow, kind of dark. That would reflect my recent routines of sleeping in day time and working at night.

So, more awaits, and please, be patient =)

Spent most of the day listening to Latino jazz and reading. Had quite a couple cups of tea, and managed to send my holiday greetings to the majority of my dearest friends.

Dinner time. Good that I had a little stock of food in the fridge. Made myself a nice gourmet dinner with an icy glass of fruit juice. That came along with a Christmas movie on TV – BJ’s Diary 2 – one that I managed to miss when it first came out.

And now, after another round of mail checking and cup of Earl Grey, I’m summing up my 2007 Christmas, and about to get myself ready for bed.

All of the above, of course, would’ve been my 2007 Christmas if I hadn’t been sleeping constantly at noon and getting up at 7PM for the past week or so. Unfortunately, due to a couple of deadlines coming up, I have. So, here’s my true account of the 2007 Christmas:

After getting home at 3AM, I’ve managed ot sleep for 17 hours, and got up at 8:30PM. With no real food in my fridge except a carton of expired milk, my dinner consisted of a plain tortelloni dinner plus a cup of Earl Grey – and God knows when I’d be able to sleep tonight.

Merry X’mas to all!!