Dan Govan

...in no particular order...

• Cued up flights to Gibraltar but got distracted before I managed to press "buy".
• Wrote 680 words about an emo vampire.
• Brushed up on my CSS3 and went "oooh" at some JQuery nifty woo.
• Compiled my notes on the upcoming website overhaul in a Wave. Design next.
• Read about hundred pages of Priestess of the white, lent to me by Keith.
• Worked up a sweat jumping around my room like an idiot for all of 20 minutes. Weak.
• Watched 2 episodes of Star Trek: Voyager.
• Played some Mass Effect. Meant to roll a biotic this time but snipers are just too awesome.
• Pretended to be a megalomaniacal super being on Thingbox.
• Ate two bowls of cereal, one bowl of soup and a tuna sandwich.
• Downloaded 5 new films that I might never watch as they're probably all rubbish.

• Boned up on Shy Child in preparation for seeing them tonight.
• Read about Howard's weekend, told through the medium of dinosaurs.
• Asked around for some work to do. Failed.
• Signed a couple of anti-pope petitions.
• Looked for more nifty blog designs.
• Played with the "My Maps" bit of googlemaps. Ambivalent.
• Measured how much I've sworn on twitter.
• Walked 3 miles along the Thames (in the rain).
• Spent a coffee pontificating about shrinks, films and vampires with Mikey.
• Tried again with the work thing, succeeded. Woop(?)
• Undid some code that I misguidedly thought was really clever in 2006.
• Got terrified that they had put the deadline for paying for Glastonbury tickets back a month and not told me.
• Realised the difference between 2009 and 2010. Paid for ticket.

Stream of consciousness ahoy. It's 2010 and time to overhaul this half-finished website, so I'm trying to work out exactly what I want to do with it. I don't spend a lot of time blogging so much these days so I should tuck that in the back somewhere behind a splash page or some such, while I tweet a fair bit so that should be brought in front-and-centre. It needs a combined cv / portfolio area too, instead of having that separate.

Anyways that sort of stuff is relatively simple, what's trickier is what I want it to look like. A palette of red, white black and grey is a given, because, well, it's my site and I like those colours. But beyond that, it has to be SNAZZY! (But doable.) I've been looking through blogs and web pages that are ostensibly nifty looking for something along the right lines. Here's a few that I thought were Plus Nift. I was just bookmarking them til I thought it'd be useful to note down why

• denisechandler Love the header, the wacky bees and the menu reaching over to the side of the page. Simplt but really impactful. Is that a word? Oh sod it.
• sursly.com Ok, this looks like nothing, til you click a link and you're all like WOAH WHAT JUST HAPPENED. Hiding the scroll an putting a bunch of stark graphics between the "pages" is fully nift.
• mikeambs.com Very simple. I like minimalist stuff and this is that. Similarly blog.squarespace.com, I've seen the little marks on the edges like that in a few places now and it's a nice touch. I'm sure there's a better word for it but hey.
• jeffsarmiento.com Wee details are also good though, and this has loads of that. I particularly like how the secondary column feels undeniably secondary.
• colly.com Probably represents the my idea in webdesign. I'm not aiming anywhere near that high, to be honest, but it's good to keep a benchmark of awesome in the back of your mind.
• northtemple Love the NORTH widget thingy. Awesomesauce.
• urbanlandscapelab Minimal colours, nice use of negative space, love the header/footer and the bright green blip when you click a link. Nice.
• matthamm Textured background vs flat foreground + slight bevel = subtle text that pops sufficiently anyways.

With any luck I'll add some more sites/ideas/etc here. Woop!

So I've been playing WoW again, probably the most hardcore playing since the fabled pvp grind of 2005, but I've got much more out of it for the same effort this time around, the game is just so much better in so many ways. There's still a absolute ton of legacy content lying around though, after all the game just celebrated its 5th anniversary so the original content is looking pretty frayed around the edges. That's the reason I'm so looking forward to the next expansion, probably more than I have done for the other two: In "Cataclysm" it's resetting and redoing all embarrassingly old content, making the whole game shiny and new. If bliz can manage to renew properly, so that it doesn't just feel like a slapdash coat of paint on the same tired stuff, then it's difficult to think how any other MMO could ever take Warcraft's crown.

For the moment though, I've hit a gear wall. Until the next patch hits in a few weeks the only thing I can reasonably upgrade is my weapon, which Bliz seems to enjoy making as rare as rocking-horse shit. Apart from logging on every week for a Raid to try my chance with the drops, I've been playing Dragon Age: Origins instead, easily the best RPG since Neverwinter Nights 1, or Gothic 2, maybe even the best since Baldur's Gate 2 back in 2000! Good times. Some how I also need to find time to process the 300 pictures I took while out last weekend, plus the 200 from my holiday in Edinburgh a couple of weeks ago, plus read the latest Wheel of Time book, which by all accounts has not suffered at all from the death of its original author. Woop!

In other news, I'm now 28. Probably undeniably an adult. Woe.

Oh oh oh so I found the list of games I'd played over the past few 3 or 4 months! Kinda slowed down/stopped now though as am deeply entrenched in Steven Erikson's Mazalan epic, currently on book 2 of 10(?) each weighing in at seven to nine hundred pages. Yes. I like my epics to be epic. So far it's like Jordon meets RR Martin, very convoluted and it pulls no punches with the mountain of (refreshingly original) Lore, but unusual protagonists and decent characterisation so far. High magic high drama. I like. So yeah, no time for computer games really.

Summer in London has been kinda rubbish weather wise. Yes there's the heat and ok storms can be fun the first couple of times, but generally it's just hot and muggy, with occasionally breaks for cold-and-wet or hot-and-sunny, depending. For example Glastonbury was perfect (or so I hear, sadface) but Brighton Pride this Saturday was a complete washout. I'm a little sad we didn't persevere a little longer with it as by all accounts there was great fun to be had in spite of the weather, but we were late to the party, slightly hungover, completely sober and almost posse-less, so after getting soaked we went home, showered and cooked, like old people.

Was really nice to have Luke over for a long weekend too, good times, fun wanderings, much snuggles, though it's ridiculous how much we bicker, given my previous opinion on couples who do that.. I think after the deceptive calm of the relationship with Si I seem to have gone to the other extreme: interesting but tiring. Plus he ate all my food. Damn him. Oh! And someone submitted a picture I took on Saturday to Look At The Fucking Hipster starring my *cough* beautiful *cough* boyfriend. He seems to be taking his new-found fame well.

I finally registered and went to the doctors recently about my upper/mid back pains, which I used to attribute to my arthritis and just grin and bear but I'm no longer convinced; it seems more muscular. I'm hoping to get seen by a physiotherapist soon to see what, if anything, I can do about it. I really want to try and get in decent shape and I can't when flexing any part of my back gives instant cramp-like pains :-( The short term involves a crap-load of tests though. I've already had blood tests (many vials filled, erk) and a couple of x-rays taken, next I'm going to get some sort of endoscopy thing to find out how much nomming ibuprofen like it's candy over the years has screwed up my insides. Probably lots. SADFACE. I've been banned from taking my beloved ibuprofen tablets for now so I'm relying on deep heat and ibuprofen gel which is kinda awkward. Still though, it was nice to be able to walk in and out of hospital unaided.

Work is pretty good right now, the all-company meetings sound slightly corny and are easily dismissed but I really get a feeling of where we are and where we are going as a company, and it all sounds good, even if I do take it with a pinch of salt. There's clear evidence of progress, from the report on the company Vision and Values that I helped put together and present to the London office FINALLY having a web presence at www.mrmworldwide.co.uk. I did the markup and styles for that as well which is a nice touch. At the last all-company meeting I learned that one of the websites I've been working a lot on recently (on of those projects that just won't go away) is to be on store PCs on the shop floor of every PC world in the country. Which is nice. On the other hand it's odd to have so many new faces in the tech department, what with the redundancies and redundancy-fears earlier in the year, as well as a couple of people leaving, part of that is down to us going from a .net house to .net and Java. Interesting times. I still walk to work every day which is awesome. Hopefully we'll stay at this address for another year to keep that lovely perk.

Oh yeah, here's the list of games.

• The Last Remnant Didn't grab me in the first hour. Fail.
• Demigod Good, but it's just DotA
• Fallout 3 Not that awesome really. In any sandbox game like this I always get sidetracked making my fortune. I never care enough about the main plot.
• City Life Delux Confusing.
• Crusader Kings Damn confusing. And old-looking.
• Europa Universalis 3 AWESOME. With the Magna Mundi mod this game keeps me coming back.
• Europa Universalis: Rome Didn't catch on.
• Command and Conquer Red Alert 3 Silly but fun.
• Overlord Silly fun. Frustrating sequentiality given the lack of a map.
• Empire: Total War Kinda easy when I first played it. Shelved it waiting for patches.
• LotR: Battle for Middle Earth 2 Decent.
• LotR: Conquest Shite.
• Universe at War Good. The differences between the races kept it fresh in spite of the old-school UI
• Warhammer Dawn of War 2 Good, but I didn't get the big deal behind the multi-player which is clearly its main strength. With only 1 race single player quickly became dull.
• Civilisation IV I have trouble remembering which civilisation is which. The same flaw I find with every one is that the AI produces hundreds of units and I don't, because shuffling around hundreds of units is DULL.
• Chris Sawyer's Locomotion LOL
• Elven Legacy I can see some people liking this but hex wargames are a little oldschool for me.
• Sim City 4 Classic. I think Cities XL might steal it's crown though, god knows Sim Cities Societies damn well isn't.
• The Sims 3 After Sims 2 with all the add-ons Sims 3 very feature-poor. I'll have another look in a few years when the money-grabbing bastards have pumped out the obvious expansion packs that they already did in 1 and 2.
• Prototype AWESOME. Smashy smashy game with a decent plot. Didn't like the protagonist at all but I'm sure empathy would get in the way of all the smashy.
• Far Cry 2 Promising start, though my computer might die.
• CoD 4: Modern Warfare Really really good for the handful of hours it took.
• Overlord 2 Much better than Overlord. Made me realise I love having a palace/castle/den to upgrade and have ever since Civ 2 and BG 2
• Stronghold Legends Baffling.
• Sacred 2 - Fallen Angel Awful. Diablo and Dungeon Siege have a shit child.
• Plants Vs Zombies Good arcadey fun. Desktop flash game basically.
• The Witcher - Enhanced Difficult to get into it a second time, I wish there was a way to skip the tutorial bit. Yes my attention span is that small.
• Left for Dead Shot some zombies. No big whup. I assume you have to play it online to care.

Well I’ve played Prototype all the way through and had a brief, slightly disappointing dalliance with The Sims 3, so now I’m more or less waiting again, as far as games go. I can’t remember the long list of games I was going to post last time, but I think it included Spore, Fallout:3 and Empire:Total War, all of which were a bit meh. Call of Duty 4 was short but Sweet.  I keep coming back to Europa Universalis 3 with the Magna Mundi mod, it’s extraordinarily deep and I get massive geek thrills from uniting Italy 300 years early.

In other news, I’ve been taking a royal fuckton of photos of gays and their drunken antics, such that I’ve damned myself to dozens of hours mucking around on photoshop and wrestling with the evil that is Facebook Uploader, and my friends refer to me as their paparazzi, and then complain when they find out who sweaty they get after dancing three hours straight in a basement that’s never heard of aircon. Part of me wants to take a break from that, another wants to shell out for a DSLR and do it properly.

I’ve been failing badly when it comes to live music this year, I think the only stuff I’ve seen has been accidental, and looking through people’s Glastonbury photos I’m quite jeluz. I hope working Bestival works out but having not heard anything about it for months I’m not at all hopeful. I was going to try and go to Field Day, but it clashes with Brighton Pride. And Lovebox clashes with something else. Sigh.

Started using twitter properly now. A little while back I finally knew enough people that are on it *and* (shock) USE IT to make it not a waste of time. Slightly mourning the death of flickr to facebook and the death of last.fm to spotify. Oh well. Keep on movin’.