IMGP3270, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

A few months ago Clarkson and I made some cuddly beasts. Mine is the larger and more disturbing of the two, Clarkson’s is the smaller and more obviously happy looking. It was a very easy process to create them. In fact I can’t understand why more of these odd looking animals are not made since they are much better than the creatures commercially available and infinitely more unique. I even learnt how to do a spot of knitting to create a scarf to hide the unfortunate paunch that my beast seemed to take on after being stuffed.
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IMGP3270, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

I was lucky enough to work on website for a local school over the last few months with a group of people from work. It was a hugely rewarding experience and I went along to the school on thursday to launch it. The kind children and staff at Daubeney Primary School gave us each a card to show their appreciation for our work.

One of my ideas behind the development of the site, was to engage the children by getting them to design websites too. It was going to be a slightly simplified version of my craft afternoon pitch, but with 750 children at the school it would have been a little logistically difficult. Instead I produced a lesson plan about good and bad web design and the teachers delivered this to the children in the week leading up to the launch.
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Grade II listed 17th Century cottage, originally uploaded by Tim Tim Tim.

A superb and unique Grade II listed 17th Century cottage situated in this sought after village location with two double bedrooms, stunning re-fitted bathroom and kitchen with garden to the rear.

This house is for sale… Set up an appointment with Peter Lane and come and see it.

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I have been investigating and designing an MP3 download manager built using Flex and delivered as an Adobe AIR app. Its a really interesting area, since desktop application development and web development is finally becoming a relatively easy activity and OS compatibility issues are becoming a thing of the past. AIR apps can be built in a number of different ways and there are tons of tutorials and resources on the net to help you get started. I will share a few helpful articles and my experiences getting the grips with the platform as we go through.
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What a lovely textured spash screen. Those were the days.

I was working on creating an HTML email today and found that it was next to impossible to achieve compatibility between Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007. There didn’t seem to be much material to help me out except this interesting article, which explained the problem.

It turns out that in Outlook 2003, emails are written and displayed using MS Word, but when you view HTML it uses the IE rendering engine. Makes sense I guess. Outlook 2007 on the other hand uses MS Word 2007 rendering both both. This is good in terms of consistency, but dreadful in terms of flexibility. Not only will an HTML email written for outlook 2003 look awful in outlook 2007, but Outlook 2007 simply doesn’t support full HTML, meaning you have to resort to using tables to ensure compatibility.

• no support for background images (HTML or CSS)
• no support for forms
• no support for Flash, or other plugins
• no support for CSS floats
• no support for replacing bullets with images in unordered lists
• no support for CSS positioning
• no support for animated GIFs

But these are all the things that make it worthwhile doing an HTML email. Otherwise the whole internet would be basically a big web of Word documents linked together by a giant desktop full of broken shortcuts. In this world I do not think the WWW would have caught on….we would probably still live in a Nielsen world of 1 line CSS files and revolting 90’s design.

Microsoft helpfully gives us help with all of these problems. This is one of the least useful pages ever. It supposedly give you a link to an HTML/CSS validation tool, that not only requires Microsoft’s Visual Studio but also requires changes to registry settings and goodness knows what else. They should have just provided a tutorial on nested tables, colspan and cellpadding and we would be away.