Aidan Williams - High Acuity

Ever since I first met my girlfriend she has wanted a cat and last weekend I finally agreed. We both grew up in houses with cats and I think she’s really missed having one since we moved to London five years ago. We’re pretty settled in our new place so I figure now is a good time.

On Sunday we took a train out to Harlow, just outside of London to see family with a litter of kittens and instantly fell in love with a gorgeous grey (or ‘blue’ as they’re called) male kitten. The children told us not to take him because he was mean and wouldn’t play with them, but we couldn’t help it – he’d already stolen our hearts.

He clearly didn’t enjoy the ride back to our flat, but as soon as we let him out of the carrier, he had a blast exploring the flat and is becoming more and more affectionate (and mischievous) every day.

John’s comment on one of Archer’s pictures:

“I see Aidan insisted you got him in Chrome with the blue LED eyes. Much nicer than the inferior black or the white options. Did you max him out with all upgrades? I want an iCat too!”

It’s flattering when someone completely rips off your XHTML & CSS for a major international brand’s website. Then it’s saddening when you discover they’ve completely messed it up because they don’t understand the fundamentals. Then it’s funny when you discover that they delivered the website six months past the original deadline.

Virtually every agency we’ve worked with has ripped off my XHTML & CSS to use on other projects, because I’ve been unavailable. I’ve even started putting one element into my CSS which really obviously cancels itself out, just to see if they’d keep it in – and they do!! Haha. And a few have shamefully ripped off Sanj’s designs. Sometimes it’s the complete design, colour scheme and all, and sometimes it’s just elements like the nav, header, buttons, layout, etc.

But that’s fine. We’re happy and busy, so they can make money from us on projects they’re not paying us for. The only thing I do slightly object to is when front-end developers from those agencies come to me and ask me how to do a particular piece of work while keeping it cross-browser compatible, semantically correct, valid and accessible. Largely because if I try to teach them how it all works, they’re not interested and just want me to do it for them. I’m happy to help people I’ve worked with before in that way, like ex-colleagues, but for anyone ripping off my code in its entirety for one of your projects and not paying me anything for it, I might be less inclined to give you my time and help for free.  

And ultimately, if you place our work directly next to theirs, it’s glaringly clear to everyone how much better the website we’ve produced is to theirs.