Although I’ve been talking about it for aaaages, today I made the jump to a vegetarian diet. I’ve decided to start in the deep end, excluding all red-meat, fish and chicken etc. from my meals for at least the next week.

Wait.. but you’re the guy that ate nothing but sirloin steak for an entire week!

The main reason for this is to find a sort of balance with my diet. I know it seems a little extreme and that by excluding a food group I’ll have to make a lot of substitutions, but it’s more for digestion than nutritional value.

The medication I’m taking currently (and probably for the rest of my life), is to help my digestion. I have a.. thing that kinda complicates the whole process, a hereditary illness passed on from my mum (thanks for that!). Thankfully, it’s nothing too serious, as she reassures me she has been without medication for it her entire life; she’s healthy and in her 60′s. It’s also non-catching so don’t freak out and avoid me! It would seem that I’m the only one of her 3 children to inherit the problem.

I might go back to eating chicken and fish at some point but not red meat – As I mentioned, this is a purely health related decision, not ethical.

Thanks to all those who have shown their support – and thanks for the links @Shikaboom and @MattKamen. I look forward to adding new ways of cooking to my repertoire and I’ll post up pics/recipes for the ones that work out!

Last week I lost my corporate position as a junior web/graphic designer. It was through no fault of my own – the company was making changes and I choose to leave, rather than going back to my original position as a telephone based customer service assistant.. in Fife.

I’m grateful for the experience and really enjoyed working within the marketing team for the 10 months I was with the company.

Onwards to bigger things.

Freelance has been keeping me occupied and work seems to be steady for now. I’ve been working with Andrew Partridge on the Scotland Loves Animation brand identity, print graphics and website. This work has developed from a favour for a friend into a full client project, so I’ll be working hard to produce a lot of high quality material for the charity.

In the past couple of months, I’ve also had quite a few adverts published in SFX magazine – mostly for Beez Entertainment, but recently for SLA also. Keep an eye out for the latest special edition, with an Anime theme.

My main project, Ozarin has been developing well. Since starting in May, we now have 5 regular contributors (including myself) and more than 60 articles. I’ll be looking to develop the site even more this year, with the introduction of new mascot artwork from NANOjam and JC of the Red Flame, podcasts, ‘blurbs’ (short articles) and a new website to manage the new features. I’m also working on something a little bit special – more news on that as it comes to light.

If you’re heading to Amecon, check out our convention book advert!

Auchinawa steadily draws near. Stephen (chairman) and myself are working on a press release, confirming guests and other things. This can be expected over the next week or so. We will also be opening our convention book submissions, so time to get creative! We’re looking for articles, artwork and adverts. If you have something you think should be published, then get working on it!

Until my next time, you can follow me on twitter (@bryoz) for blurb-esque insights and musings.

Web standards have a habit of changing.

If you take a look at websites from 8 years ago, you’ll notice that things have changed a lot. We’ve gone from tables to divs, we’ve added CSS style sheets and now we’re starting to rely on flash much less in web design. Things are looking rosey.

The fact that I started making amateur websites back in the days of D-HTML and the dawn of geocities makes me feel really old for starters, but I concede; things are changing for the better.

Having only recently adopted coding for the web in a serious capacity, through my work and through necessity, I consider myself lucky to be learning as this gradual change takes place.

So what will change?

As far as consumers and casual web browsers are concerned, very little. You may notice increased functionality on your mobile devices due to CSS3 and jQuery now taking on many of the basic animation tasks in which Flash was originally integrated.

Whilst this may or may not have been a forced move after Apple refused to support flash via their infinitely popular iPhone and their new iPad is irrelevant. The fact that we now have simple code to perform what previously required a specialist software (and knowledge of that software) is a step in the right direction. There is no doubt that this will benefit casual web users along with mobile web users.

Although CCS level 3 has not yet been recommended by WC3 yet, we can still use some of the features available including animation functions and generated rounded edges, which most new browsers already support. Opacity is also supported, using RGBa (where a = alpha). A useful alternative to using .png images for partial transparency?

And what about HTML 5.0?

Well, I’m still looking in to that. From what I can see though, most of the new tags seem to be declarative. Such as ‘Footer’ or ‘Header’ are used to declare sections of a website, presumably to address key content and improve Search Engine Optimization.

I’m fairly certain that the new standards will gradually become slightly more obvious as browser compatibility rises with new updates. I think for most people however, the changes will be subtle.

I’m looking forward to stepping up my game over the coming year.

Related resources..

• Smashing Magazine – Coding An HTML 5 Layout From Scratch
• Smashing Magazine – HTML 5.0 Cheat Sheet

Things are still fairly routine. I travel back to Fife weekly for my web design job. I’m headed there now on the train. I’ve successfully had my hours reduced at the coffee shop, which gives me a little more free time.

I’m now a published graphic designer, with adverts for Beez Ent in SFX magazine and shortly Neo magazine. I don’t think this has sunk in yet, but I’m very grateful for the opportunity. It feels like a good start for a career in design.

My laptop committed seppuku last week. The screen has come loose from the body, hanging now only by the connecting wires. I’m a little upset by it, but had planned on replacing it soon anyway. With money being tight, I can’t imagine it being any time soon though. Particularly as my heart is set on a new 15″ MacBook Pro.

Sometimes the travelling gets to me. It’s like I’m being torn between a place I want to be and a place from my past, which due to unavoidable circumstances, I need to be. As much as I love my web design job, I consider it the only reason for my frequent return to the east coast.

The following was posted on Edgar Wright’s personal blog. It has all the links and I felt a bit lazy..

You can stream it now over at http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/universal/scottpilgrimvstheworld/

Download

480p (20 MB) HD

720p (63 MB) HD

1080p (97 MB) HD

iPod/iPhone (8 MB)

I really can’t wait for Volume 6, the conclusion in the series. Having only picked the comics up from old flatmate Simon a few months ago, I burned through the first 5 fairly quickly. O’Malley’s disproportioned style reminds me a little of Eichiro Oda’s (One Piece).

Check this series out! It’s not to be missed.

I started the ‘#oneaday’ trend thinking that it would allow me to practice writing, letting me develop my skills and experiment with structure, vocabulary etc. and to an extent, it has.

The second goal was to create an interesting blog where people could visit/subscribe to articles or blurbs that interested them. It would be based on my own interests, such as design, animation, gaming and would occasionally see me posting original content,  such as my own design work or articles in response to certain subjects. I feel like I’ve failed to achieve this goal.

More often than not, I find myself rushing to post for midnight, with a brief and unimportant run down of what I did that day (without photos, no less!). The worst part to all this is, I’m not even using it as a ‘personal‘ blog, because I genuinely feel unable to write about my personal grievances in the public domain. It’s unprofessional at the very least.

I had intended to simply use this blog as a space to communicate until my portfolio goes online (hopefully around June this year), which will contain an integrated development blog. Whilst it wont be updated daily, it will be updated regularly with content relevant to my design studies and development work and tied seamlessly to a blog page on my portfolio.

So at the end of next week, I’ll be pruning this blog. I’ll be taking out anything I wouldn’t want to keep in the long run.

I’ve also just decided to prune all posts from ozarin.co.uk. Whilst development is going ok, I’d hate to bring in traffic to a website full of old articles. I’ll be repopulating the site with new articles this week. Development seems to be going ok, but will be stepping up my game in April.

OSSU!

I managed to walk all the way from the flat, into the centre of town, then to Cowcaddens (China Town), St George’s Cross (Where I used to live as a student), Byers Road (aka. Bryoz road) and down to Partick.

Grabbed a few groceries and headed home. I thought that after a couple of years, the west end would have changed dramatically, but it seemed to have just been a little run down, with a few of my local shops having closed. No doubt another area affected by the economic crisis.

So I made a mah-see-voh dinner for Sian, Gayle and Tina. Was fairly impressed as I managed to prepare everything together quite nicely, without burning anything. Although I was only really preparing the main course, the girls brought side dishes and desert.

It was a really pleasant evening, which was rounded off with some weird youtube videos, such as the one below.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnQq8HGzQaM]

One of the biggest things I miss about being in Japan, is turning on your TV at 3am to random things like this.

Whilst I really enjoy working there, I’ve just had a lot of extra freelance work coming in recently. As such, I wanted to cut back my hours in order to  better accommodate it. I plan on putting a lot of my freelance towards equipment and savings, so that I can become even better at what I do.

Recently, I’ve been trying to spread myself evenly between my own work (ozarin, bryoz, note town and nolife), client work (websites, graphics; things which pay) and charity projects (Auchinawa, Scotland Loves Animation; non-profit). I find however, that I’m spreading myself too thinly, meaning I make little progress on anything. It also gives me very little time to relax. I really enjoy playing video games but recently I can’t justify taking much time to play them. I also really miss practising my piano and guitar. Still, with a reduction in shifts I should be able to fit everything in quite comfortably.

There was an Auchinawa committee meeting this evening, it went very well. That is all :)

Today, work trundled along as I coughed the lining of my throat throughout the day. Not even tea could help me. I’m guessing it’s just something I have to live with until it passes. Trying to sleep whilst half choking is gonna provide a giggle.

So I found out about some of the new features of WordPress ver. 3.0 today. Exciting stuff! You can check out an article on the key features over at Net Tuts. One of the coolest things I found was that you could create custom post templates. If this is what I think it is, it would be really useful for separating posts in a different way from categories. For example, I could create a ‘one a day’ template and have avoid showing it quite easily in the main feed, choosing to link directly to archived ‘one a day’ posts instead. Hopefully it means I wont have to enter custom fields repeatedly when posting.

Really looking forward to the weekend. I’ve got a lot of work to get through, but that extra day off from the coffee shop makes it a whole lot more bearable.

For now however, I’m half falling asleep in my chair. G’night!

PS: Feeling much better (physically), than I was yesterday. Cup of tea, fixes everything.