If you haven’t heard guitar playing that made your insides go all gooey before, you’re about to. This performance by Mark Knopfler from Dire Straits is overflowing with emotion and brilliance. My title words “pure magic” just don’t do the music and the way it makes one feel anywhere near enough justice.

For those that use my Calendar for WordPress you may be interested to know about a modification by “Ben in Campus” that has been written for it that enables several calendars to be made visible and have events added to them but using only one install of my plugin on one install of WordPress. It’s an innovative idea and one that a couple of people who have e-mailed me in the past asking for such a feature will most certainly find useful.

The same database table is used as previously but a column has been added allowing the storage to denote which calendar a particular event has input. Ben has also fixed a couple of bugs which have been on my to-do list for a little while, so they will be incorporated along with a credit to Ben in the next release, which is actually coming really rather soon so keep an eye out here and on wordpress.org

I was listening to the radio today when Phil Collins’ song, Both Sides of the Story, was played. The words seemed to say a lot to me about the world today and how we frequently misunderstand things just because we don’t consider everything we have the ability to consider. For this reason I thought I’d share them here.

‘Though we might hate to admit it, there are always two sides to every story…’

Find yourself in the gutter in a lonely part of town
Where death waits in the darkness with a weapon to cut some stranger down
Sleeping with an empty bottle, he’s a sad and an empty hearted man
All he needs is a job, and a little respect, so he can get out while he can

We always need to hear both sides of the story

Both sides of the story

A neighbourhood peace is shattered it’s the middle of the night
Young faces hide in the shadows, while they watch their mother and father fight
He says she’s been unfaithful, she says her love for him has gone
And the brother shrugs to his sister and says “looks like it’s just us from now on”

We always need to hear both sides of the story

We need to hear both sides of the story

And the lights are all on, the world is watching now
People looking for truth, we must not fail them now
Be sure, before we close our eyes
Don’t walk away from here
’til you hear both sides
No no no nooooo

Here we are all gathered in what seems to be the centre of the storm
Neighbours once friendly now stand each side of the line that has been drawn
They’ve been fighting here for years, but now there’s killing on the streets
While small coffins are lined up sadly, now united in defeat

We always need to hear both sides of the story

And the lights are all on, the world is watching now
People looking for truth, we must not fail them now
Be sure, before we close our eyes
Don’t walk away from here
’til you see both sides
No no no no no no

White man turns the corner, finds himself within a different world
Ghetto kid grabs his shoulder, throws him up against the wall
He says “would you respect me if I didn’t have this gun
‘cos without it, I don’t get it, and that’s why I carry one”

We always need to hear both sides of the story

Well, this is a turn out for the books. I’m blogging again! I never thought I’d be away from the blog for this long since I first started it, but somehow I got side-tracked on so many other things that I just didn’t realise how long it was since I’d posted something, then when I did realise I wasn’t really in the blogging frame of mind. Still, I’m here now and I intend to get back to proper regular posting as that’s what goes down the best.

So what have I been doing to keep me from my blog? Quite a lot actually so I’ll give a quick run down.

• Large amounts of work at X-Lab

  My lack of blogging started with a lot of pressure at work to get the first version of the X-Lab lab to lab messaging system finished and presented to a group of people who could help us to take the project forward and get interfaces with existing lab systems written for it.

  To cut a long story short, 12 hour days, numerous late nights and a lot of coffee and pizza deliveries saw us through and we got the system completed on time and suitably impressed those at the demo to allow us to take the project forward and (hopefully) get it deployed in labs when we have finished version 2

  This, for me, feels like such a great achievement as I’ve never worked with Microsoft technologies quite so much as this before and to get a success like this felt really great. I hope that I will be able to see the project fully succeed in the future as its one of those things that has the potential to positively impact thousands of people.

  Watch this space!

• Holiday with Heather

  At the end of July I went on a long weekend break with Heather. We stayed in North Wales and did a little sight-seeing and plenty of relaxing on the beach in the surprisingly abundant sunshine which bathed the region. It was our first chance to have a holiday away together and we both really enjoyed it, not to mention the fact that it was some good quality “together time” before Heather headed off to Middlesborough to stay with her family for the rest of the university vacation. Feel free to check out some of our holiday photos in my gallery.

• Holiday in Jersey

  Last year I went to stay with Michelle in Jersey and this year I went back to stay with her again. Its a great place to go away on holiday and its always nice to go and stay with friends.

  I was fortunate enough to be able to get out on Michelle’s Dad’s boat and take some pictures from off the coast of Jersey and my trip also coincided with the annual battle of flowers parade which was as spectacular as it had been the year before and with a whole new set of wonderfully decorated floats to enjoy.

  One of the highlights of the trip was going to Jersey Zoo, founded by Gerard Durrell and having read Durrell’s books on animal collecting it was fascinating to see what his trips and writings from around the world had created.

  The weather throughout the week was excellent and when I wasn’t socialising or on sight-seeing excursions I spent most of my time walking along beaches or lying in the sun reading books. It was a well needed rest and lots of fun to boot. Michelle has some great friends and it was really nice to see them again. Thanks to Michelle for letting me stay!

• Catch up on work and student society planning

  Since return from my various holidays I have been playing catch-up trying to get a mountain of work done. There is not much to report here except that I hate paperwork and I never realised that agreeing to do so many student run websites was going to cause this much work to be thrust upon me in August. Ok, thats a bit of lie, I did know but took them on anyway as I know I can do a good job and it will be nice to have my name on a load more student sites and to see them used and enjoyed by new students and committee members alike. Getting these things done will also get more things on my portfolio which is always good for business.

  One of the really good things which has come out of this surge of work is the opportunity to work with Christina Fowler, a recent graduate and expect in graphic design, she is assisting me by completing the design work for the new Leeds RAG website. Its nice to be able to spread work in this way and also share ideas. If all goes well I look forward to working more with Christina in the future, her work is certainly very impressive.

• Socialising

  Seeing as its the summer holidays I have been taking every available opportunity to attend parties and go out for meals and drinks with friends. Drunken arrivals back home have been one of my main reasons for not keeping this site as up to date as it otherwise might be! There are some great pictures floating around facebook of some of these evenings and there are also some really good ones of Claire’s birthday Otley run in my gallery.

As you can see I’ve all round been pretty darn busy. Still I’m not going to avoid blogging for that length of time again, in fact I hope to go back to writing here on a regular basis along with other blogs and forums that I have been neglecting lately.

A handful of photos from a large piss-up in the form of an Otley run for Claire’s birthday

A collection of photos from my second stay with Michelle in Jersey