That’s what I though a few months ago and I have.  I am now full blown freelancing and contracting and generally working 15 hours a day until I get settled into a regular schedule.  Today I Should Ltd should see me good for a while. Unless other things come along (not that a pretty damn good company/start up site has been in touch to see if I am interested, well, one has which boosted my ego quite a bit last night) I see this suiting me quite well once I get evenings back to myself.

So far its going very well, aside from working far too hard and not seeing enough of anyone that I should be spending time with – but its all going to work out in the long run!

Anyway – as soon as I get the branding and such started, I’ll get a web development blog started on todayishould.com where I can keep professional head on and open this blog up to blatant whinging and bitching!

However I was annoyed at the time and still stand by my opinions. I am referring to a twitter slanging match (there’s no other way to describe it) regarding, to put it bluntly, respect for the dead.

The offending opinion was: “There are fresh flowers outside Kensington Palace for Princess’s Di. WTF! She’s been dead for over a decade people! Time to move on!”

Wrong.

Now I must admit that I probably shouldn’t have used the “T” word in a reply, but I was angry. Why can’t people leave flowers at any location to remember someone. Especially someone that did change so many people’s lives be it from land mine charity work, AIDS and HIV awareness efforts or just being a public figure.

Fair enough, maybe there are better places for remembrance offerings, but is there any need to tell people to move on. When walking past flowers, my immediate response is a thought that it is good that people are being remembered, not that they were doing it wrong or should get over it.

In my opinion, that is just being a twat.

Following the introduction of a death by dangerous cycling bill, Julia Hartley-Brewer gave typically misinformed and biased bullshit on her sad excuse for a radio programme and now it seems everypone has to have a go at Cyclists.

Well done for jumping on the cyclist bashing bandwagon with your article “Cyclists have had an easy ride too long” Sebastian Shakespeare, however as commented on your article, here’s my response to your drivel:

You say that cyclists should have insurance (I do have third party insurance, FYI) but try having a look at the uninsured drivers stats first. When that problem is resolved try bringing in another rule for the contraptions that will do minimal damage (in most cases) to a person or other road user.

We haven’t had it easy, how you would call being hit (side swiped on a straight road) by a HGV and hospitalised easy (myself, July 2010) I don’t know.

A minority will flount the rules, and I try to tell the law breaking fellow cyclists of the reputation they give us. But you say we run red lights, in the eyes of the law I could give you hundreds of car (and motorcycle) registrations each week that are all positioned in the cyclists area at junctions, ignoring the ASL (Advanced Stop Line) making life much harder for cyclists to be safe.

How about the traffic wardens look at them too, or is that victimising the car drivers too much?

I could go on, and I’d like to have a conversation with Sebastian, but (as he pointed out in his article) he’d rather speak to someone who has poor English language skills than hear my northern twang. My money is actually on the fact that he has some form of regional accent. Or maybe he is too focused on writing shit that he never speaks.  Maybe I should give him a Glasgow kiss to justify his apparent lack of respect for anyone.

When they started by stating numerous times (the ill-informed Julia Hartley Brewer and callers alike) that car drivers pay to use the roads so should have exclusive use of them, I was hoping for ANYONE to point out that Vehicle Excise Duty (VED) does not pay for the roads, but roads are paid for by regular taxation, so I do pay for the roads, even if I don’t have a car or a bike. Check ipayroadtax.com for more details on that, but safe to say they are wrong. I did call in but unfortunately LBC didn’t call me back.

And MOTs, licenses and registration plates for cyclists is a useless suggestion, considering the police struggle and pretty much fight a losing battle against motorists who drive without insurance, how the hell do you expect this to be enforced. If anyone has any ideas I’d love to know.  Before anyone mentions insurance, I have third party insurance on my bike, although I would never expect to use it.

Next, callers were virtually threatening cyclists. I don’t remember his name but the driver that said of cyclists “I’ve hit one before and would do it again. If they’re in my way I’ll run them down.” WHAT THE FUCK. I guess it says something that the caller drives a BMW but I wish he had given his number plate so I can avoid him altogether. And report him to the police if he tries to use his car as a weapon.

Cyclists that “wear lycra and think they’re professional cyclists” should dismount and use a footbridge (as suggested by a caller) is bollocks. We have a right to use the road and when we are traveling at a fair speed, why should we sacrifice journey time by minutes when we would only hold up cars for a few seconds, most of the time.

To the cyclist who is the only one who doesn’t break the highway code and thinks other cyclists (and I think he included the LCC in the statement) are arrogant scum is living in his own little world, I see hundreds of cyclists every year that are fine cyclists and don’t jump lights and so on.

And as for the presenter I don’t remember the complete build up, but saying that if you kill a cyclist you should be the one people feel for is pathetic, you come across as a selfish cow. You have no more right to use the road than a cyclist, and while I can’t remember the incident as you described it, I do remember thinking you did not have right of way, so it would have been your fault. Maybe you can email me at matt@mattbee.co.uk to explain it again, because I now simply believe you to be a danger to myself and other cyclists for not even knowing the highway code.

I am very sorry that LBC couldn’t call me back so that I could defend cyclists and point out their errors, ask why they think the aggressive behaviour of some motorists is acceptable and why a 4 year old case has brought the fact that a cyclist could kill a pedestrian into the media spotlight when hundreds (or thousands) of cyclists AND pedestrians are seriously injured by motor vehicles all the time (no pedestrian deaths in the last 4 years involving a cyclist hitting a pedestrian, there have been 3 people killed by cars or lorries in the past 2 weeks!).

And don’t get me started on Advanced Stop Lines (ASLs)… when will drivers/motorcyclists get punished for entering those I wonder.

Dear MFC Official Direct

When seeing an advert for the 30% off sale and Boro replica kits for only £15 I was very happy and ran straight over to the store to get myself a replica home kit.

However the experience I had left me shocked, disappointed and embarrassed. Now let me say that I am a Boro fan and a front end developer (so I can understand when things aren’t perfect), but still feel the need to expose the pitfalls of this site in public.

My first issue was when I tried to update my delivery address, having moved jobs and so I couldn’t have the parcel delivered to my old place of work. However it appears I am not allowed to move companies, the company name could not be edited. ANYWHERE. Not on that form, not on my account page, not on mange addresses through my account page, nowhere. The company isn’t even called Gyro International anymore!

Following that annoyance, I thought “Fine, I’ll just add a new address. But then I couldn’t add a company name to go with that, and being in a shared building with many other companies and nowhere to add a company name and few form fields for address I thought I would have it delivered home.

I thought that would be fine, but alas no. Following selection of delivery type in step 2 I was thrown to the confirm order page. Step 4. Hold on. That’s missed step 3, and I haven’t entered my payment details yet? But I’m on the last step? Oh well. I guess this really is a good shop! That was confirmed by a nice page telling my my order has been successfully placed! Excellent, I don’t have to pay it seems. Maybe now Mido is back he is funding a shirt giveaway to try and make someone love him!

Alas no, after a second or two I was delivered and Sage Pay (formerly Protx) payment page. Now this possibly isn’t MFC Official Direct’s fault, however it is still part of a flawed process. And anyone that spends £12.7m on Alfonso Alves must have some cash somewhere to invest in a seamless checkout process. Or at least one that allows the checkout page to be on brand, not hideous and at least not be included as step 5 of 4.

So after all that and finally getting my payment details in, I notice that Sage Pay have thankfully printed my delivery address so I know its right:

Flat E
London
(They printed my postcode too, but that’s private!)

Now I know the postcode will probably mean that as a delivery address might just make it, and maybe the full address has been stored, but why print only part of the address. Thinking about it, there are quite a few flats in my area so Flat E, Putney might not make it. My address is a required 2 lines before the town and postcode so why not just show me the details so I don’t think you’ve lost half my address along the way. Same goes for invoice address. Just show it all or people (including myself) might not be confident you have managed to pass the correct delivery information and that we may never see our goods, many of which are quite expensive on the MFC Official Direct store.

Anyway, after this traumatic experience it’ll be a while before I use the MFC Official Direct store again, however I also have some gripes with the Middlesbrough Football Club website itself, so this probably isn’t the last you’ll hear from me. Thankfully however, at least the agency that built the site are linked to in the footer, so it can act as a reminder to never, ever recommend Black Magic Digital of Glasgow as a digital agency. They apparently missed out on the user experience chapter of every book they ever picked up.

Yours,

Matt Bee

Boro Fan and Front End Developer

Having been paid $70,000 to carry out the transport the owner and captain apparently then held out for more. With no more funds being given over and the initial funds recovered, the hostage situation came about. Leaving the harbour by force and half closing the drive on ramp with a vehicle still on it I’m sure there might be more to the story than anyone but those aboard know about.

Bit worrying for Kieran, but I know he is well versed in the politics of wherever he goes and has 12 years experience in the aid convoy business, so hoping that everything works out.

Following quite a bit of pressure through social networks from Kieran’s friends on twitter and facebook, it seems we’ve got some action by the press and government agents with the BBC hopefully picking up the story (thank you @KirbyVictoria), earlier featured on CNN. I’ll await news from the media all evening and I expect for a short while yet.

Where’s Jack Bauer when you need him. Or the Expendables, remembering the first scene from that film.

More links on the story:

BBC News

The Independant
Waltham Forest Guardian
Salem News

Basically, in IE8 and IE8 only, I was getting a helpful error message that said: line 1421 in jquery.js: Failed. Line 1421 was because I had uncompressed jQuery to try and find the problem.

The only other example of this error I could find (also found by Kenneth) was this instance: When jQuery returns “failed” in IE – and how it’s probably resolved which while it helped a bit, we weren’t using any live events.

So to the issue, after much troubleshooting and major investigation work, we resolved that in the (not sure if these are core within Drupal) Drupal installation, jQuery 1.2.6 was used with an old version of jquery.forms.js. We found that some of the forms plugin called methods that only came into jQuery in 1.3 (namely closest() ). Calling these non-existant methods caused the javascript error “Failed”.

The absurdly easy solution following hours of troubleshooting, was upgrade both jquery.js and jquery.forms.js to the latest versions. Bosh. Have that IE8.

So the moral of this story is ALWAYS KEEP YOUR LIBRARIES AND PLUGINS UP TO DATE!! And if you get the IE8 “Failed” javascript error, make sure you are calling methods that exist.

My review which I recorded in January made it onto the podcast number 198, and as it was the author presenting the review, it became a lot funnier than I had ever planned!

The Pyrenees are beautiful and while we knew we were in for a tough time with a few big hills, no one really expected to be staying at the bottom of a hors catégorie climb in Col du Tourmalet. Round the corner was the Col d’Aspin too which has featuredin Le Tour de France 66 times. So the climbing was awesome, tough, beautiful, painful, challenging, sweaty and required a lot of determination.

Climbing the Col du Tourmalet as soon as we got there on Saturday morning was difficult enough. Of course the next day, the riding an undulating 70km (via Lourdes and Bagneres de Bigorre) and climb the other side from the West to on Sunday was unbelievably tough.

On Monday we managed to fit 2 Cols into out ride, by riding a nice small road Col near Heches, then up the Col d’Aspin from the East. It was in between these two Cols that we discovered Richard G didn’t actually have the compact chainset that he asked for on his Specalized Roubaix S-Works. Which provided amusement, expect for the fact it just showed his strength while he beat me up most hills, or mountains!!

Tuesday was the last day so it was a straight sprint up Col d’Aspin from the West and back down again to pack up and head home.

What a fantastic few days it was and I absolutely want to do this again, only next time I want to take those hills by the scuff of the neck and keep up with the rest of the boys, if not bethe first up! Although as I was riding with 2 Ironmen, this might be more difficult  than it seems.

We went initially on Monday evening for a free introductory session where we learned basic blocks, punches and kicks in a private session with an instructor, who like me was slim and tall but I wouldn’t consider crossing him, knowing what he must know.

Claire really seemed to enjoy it and really got a kick (excuse the pun) from unleashing onto a pad held by the instructor, as did I, even if I was a little self concious I looked like an idiot. Mind you, looking like an idiot was nothing compared to sounding like an idiot, shouting a Kihap. Will have to work on shouting loudly every time I punch or kick, and decide on what I want to shout. I don’t think they allow you to swear, making it all the more difficult.

What I hope to come away with is more confidence and not feel intimidated by anyone, plus much improved core strength and flexibility. Of course as a bonus I should also have a bloody hard punch and good kicking techniques.

Choi Kwang Do also appealed to me due to its emphasis on physiology and anatomy rather than mystical energy centres of the body, which I’m not exactly sure about. The official Choi Kwang Do web site says “Choi Kwang Do is a unique martial art based on scientific principles and developed to promote optimum health, fitness and self-defense, not winners in sports competitions.” Its quite lucky there is such a great facility at the Cassar Academy in Morden (even if their web site could do with some of my skills).

The Cassar Academy in Morden.

For joining on the night we got our Do Bok (uniform) free, so we tried them on as soon as we got in and they are great! I mean, look how scary I already look.

Me in my New Do Bok.

Now we need to concentrate and actually apply ourselves to this, its going to be tough – but first things first, we need to learn the Choi Kwang Do adult pledge, that we recite before every class, and the principles of Choi Kwang Do:

Adult Pledge

• To set positive goals and strive to achieve them.
• To apply self discipline to further my personal development.
• To stand for justice and honour my word.
• To promote friendly relationships among all people.
• To use what I learn in class in a constructive manner.

Principles of Choi Kwang Do

• Humility
• Honesty
• Gentleness
• Perseverance
• Self control
• Unbreakable spirit

Add to all this a bow before entering the school floor, the school motto “Pil Sung” and a whole host of Korean commands we must know for class, there is an awful lot to learn before we really get into the nitty gritty of Choi Kwang Do, something I’m really looking forward to!

Chris Crudelli's BBC TV series.

We’ve also got a Chris Crudelli workshop coming up, where we might learn some more cool stuff, I like Chris Crudelli from what I’ve seem of Mind, Body and Kick Ass moves on the BBC DVD we’ve been watching. Not quite sure what Jiu Fa Men is but I’m sure it’ll all be explained on the day! More on Chris can be found on twitter.com/kickassmover or his web site, crudelli.com