This has lifted such a huge weight that has been on both of our shoulders for years. Family is very important to us both and I’ve never wanted to compromise my girlfriend’s relationship with her family so I cannot express enough how happy her father’s phone call has made us both.

On Friday night I went to my first Twenty 20 cricket match at the Oval cricket grounds after Sanj and John boxed me in on the train and refused to let me get off at my stop. I’m not the biggest fan of cricket but Twenty20 is certainly the most bearable form of the sport, lasting three hours rather than an entire day, or five days if we’re talking test cricket! And you can’t really fault the setting: a gorgeous British summer evening in central London with a few drinks and a pack of mates: Mark, Paul and Nathan joined us at the grounds. The rules are pretty easy to grasp and it’s just a wholly enjoyable sport to watch with a bunch of friends and casually chat as the game goes on in front of you.

I’ve been meeting up with David at Borough Market every Saturday we can arrange it lately, and each visit always starts with the best coffee in London (according to The Times) at Monmouth. Seriously, if you’ve not tried this coffee yet, you should. Flat Whites in Soho – another award-winning/highly acclaimed coffee shop – buy their beans from Monmouth coffee. Last weekend it was just him, his baby son Michalis and myself – a proper lads morning out. Rather than having our usual German sausage for breakfast we sought out the ostrich burger stall and I have to say it’s one of the tastiest burgers I’ve had in a long time. Just pure ostrich meat that is low fat and healthy, with wholemeal mustard, mayo and rocket in a bun. I always end up buying a ‘hangover cure’ from the juice stall as well: orange, lemon, kiwi, fennel and apple in a layered drink. If you’re using a straw and start from the bottom, you get a sharp hit of the lemon and apple at the bottom to wake you up and then as you reach the top you get the sweeter, softer orange and kiwi. It’s very nice!

I was out in with John today – he’s just finished working on Inception and watched the Cast & Crew screening on Thursday (and didn’t invite me this time, the b*****d). He says it’s the best film he’s seen/worked on in the last five years though so go see it!

I’m a dork

So we’re in a meeting with an incredible new client: five really great, intelligent, creative, funny, nice people and we’re really enjoying working with them. I get out my laptop and set it up on the table so that we can look through the designs, websites, etc, and one of them leans in to type in a URL on my laptop but then, I’m guessing out of politeness, pulls back and puts their hands in their lap. So I say “Please feel free to type in any websites you would like to check, it’s fine!” and gesture towards my Macbook.

As soon as the words come out of my mouth, I get a flash of every website I’ve ever visited and my heart sinks as I remember that I’ve not cleared my browser history. I mean anything could be in there… nerdy games I occasionally play, inappropriate jokes, or, you know… other stuff.

What do you do in that situation? Do you brush away their hands as they reach for your laptop? “Actually, don’t touch, I have cooties!!!” Or before anything can happen do you immediately say “Excuse me for one moment.” and very obviously clear the browser history, at which point, you might as well just announce to everyone in the room “I visit websites that I don’t want any of you to know about.” But I don’t say anything.

Instead, every single time one of them leans into my computer I freeze, sometimes mid-sentence, and stare intently at the suggestion URLs that come up as they start typing in each URL. I swear my heart stops beating and I hold my breath each time as Sanj stares at me with a noticeable frown on his face like “What is wrong with you and why do you go beetroot red every time they touch your laptop!? This is going well! Don’t mess this up for us or I swear I’ll kill you.”

As they tell me the name of the URLs right before they type them in I’m playing word games in my mind trying to assign hundreds of potentially inappropriate websites that start with the same letters. What if they accidentally click one of them? My real fear that fills me with the worst kind of dread is: what if they accidentally click to visit one of the disgusting websites that you guys send to me every day??? You know exactly what I’m talking about so don’t even pretend like you don’t. I’m talking about those sites that are so shocking that they screw up your entire day after you’ve even had a glimpse of them.

As one particularly funny website pops into my head my eyes glaze over and two seconds later I realise my mouth has inadvertently morphed onto a big stupid grin that is not remotely appropriate for the atmosphere of the current discussion and I try to get a hold of myself. I pull it together and the meeting goes off without a hitch. I think I really like this client – they’re a lot of fun to work with.

So last year when I called my mum, she casually let me know that she had been invited to visit the queen for her services to Cruse (bereavement, relationship and child counselling) and Samaritans. My mother is sickeningly modest – virtually no one in the family knew about this and I really don’t understand why she didn’t tell anyone, but I’m very happy for her.

She reminded me of a few other family members who have met the queen. Such as my father who was presented to the queen in 1979 at Queen’s College Cambridge University for his contributions to the university and his college, generally being a good student, president of the debating society, etc. Or my grandfather who was awarded an OBE by the queen for his role at the Institute for Hospital Administrators in helping to start the NHS, as well as a St George’s Cross for his bravery in World War II. And my grandmother who was awarded an MBE for her work in travel for British subjects in the commonwealth… No, I don’t really understand what that means either.

So, since I will never have the opportunity to win any such awards, it’s nice to remember these things. I don’t think winning the award for most profitable person of the year at my last agency is quite on the same level. Close though! Close.

Wait what’s that? This blog is about me and not the ancient members of my family? Dude! I just slipped in an immodest mention that I won some sh*tty award a few years ago, what more do you want!?

Alright alright… The start of this year really sucked for me. At the end of what I’ve officially declared the worst week of my life thus far in which every day was twice as bad as each previous one, I was out with the guys and while they were very generously attempting to cheer me up, my bag was stolen… This was the real icing on the cake for that week. This included my new Macbook Pro, my white iPhone 3GS, my wallet, my umbrella, etc. The response from the police was wholly pathetic and I won’t get into the details of that, since I’ve heard from many friends that seems to be pretty much par for the course. But I will say that I’ve decided to run for prime minister and when I get into power, I will change the system so we only pay the police when they get results. Now THAT will save the taxpayers a lot of money. I hope the criminals who stole it at least got something good out of the deal, otherwise that’s just a huge waste.

I have since replaced the Macbook with a 17″ Macbook Pro with i7 processor. Sanj and I created an un-boxing video as an experiment to see how many hits it would get on Youtube. But it will most likely never see the light of day as it hilariously features Sanj shouting at me for five minutes as I do various things wrong… Sanj: “What are you doing!?!? Sniff the manual! They all do it! Sniff the f***ing manual!!! This is so wrong; I feel like a porn director.”

On the good side, my girlfriend has been incredible throughout this year, just as she has always been. I’m constantly amazed by everything she achieves, and that she still has energy to come home and look after me at the end of each day. Sanj would be annoyed that I mentioned him at all but he’s also been pretty incredible this year, as has Andy, and I want them both to know that I appreciate them both just a little bit more each day * little tear *. Hey it’s my first blog post in a year, I’m going to talk about this crap, okay!?

My brother also had a truly beautiful 1930s styled wedding weekend on Burgh Island (where Agatha Christy wrote her books). I could write a novel on what an incredible experience this was for everyone attending, but instead I would like to thank my brother for choosing such a wonderful venue. During the day you can walk across the beach to the mainland and then in the evening the tide comes in and you’re marooned on the island, inside this very beautiful art deco styled hotel. The highlight for me was the best men’s speeches, which reminded us all of what an amazing person my brother is. I really don’t think we give him enough credit for everything he has achieved in his life. If he sets a goal, then one way or another, he will achieve it. He’s also kind, generous, intelligent… Sorry, one second, a little vomit just came up into my mouth.

Wow this is getting sycophantic. Oh well, I might as well go all out, right!?

Well kids, I think it’s about time we put this post to bed, don’t you? But if there’s one thing I would like you to take away from this post, one life lesson that you take with you for the rest of your days, it’s that I WON AN AWARD FOR BEING THE MOST PROFITABLE PERSON OF THE YEAR B*****S!

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!”

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.

Kashif: “Hi guys. Just to let you know, we’re having a camera crew come round the offices to take video and pictures for a TV and print campaign we’re getting done, so no funny business okay?”
Me: “Wait, why did you look at me when you said that?”
Kashif: * starts laughing and then looks at Sanj * “Come on, man, keep the ethnic minority under control alright?”
Sanj: * crying with laughter * “I will do, don’t worry!”

WTF is this!?!?!? It’s usually me making these jokes towards others, not the other way around!

Quite frankly the whole thing is disgusting. I’ll sue!

Yes, that’s what I’ll do… I’ll sue the law firm…

Angus: “Hi bro, the new iPhone is out.”
Me: ”Really? Great! I’ll check the site.”
Angus: “… Oh and they updated the Macbook Pros.”
Me: “What!? Nooooo!”
Angus: * starts crying with laughter *

So two weeks after we bought our new 17” Macbook Pros, Apple update them. Hahaha!

Luckily the updates were just a 0.1GHz increase in processor speed, but we decided to get in touch with Apple anyway. We were within the time period where we could return them and get them replaced with latest ones, but we decided we were too busy with work to accommodate the disruption.

Instead we asked if there was anything else they could do and they refunded us both £100! Not bad at all, Apple. Thank you very much!

On Friday, I upgraded from my first generation iPhone 2G to an iPhone 3G S. I know I could have upgraded to the 3G for free last year, but I didn’t feel the need to do so and the 2G has served me well. In fact I wasn’t even sure I really needed to upgrade to the 3G S (sorry Apple). What are we really getting here? Faster processor, slightly improved camera, video recording, a voice-recording app, voice control, compass functionality, spotlight. And most of these will be free when anyone upgrades to the 3.0 update on the older generation iPhones, so that really just leaves just a few reasons to upgrade.

These are all things we may want but certainly not things we need. This isn’t a dig at Apple though, it’s really a testament to just how well the first iPhone was built.

I decided to buy the 16GB White version, purely to have something different to all my friends. Why not 32GB? Virtually everyone in the store was buying the 32GB version and on every tariff available from O2, the 32GB version cost one hundred pounds more than the 16GB model. £100 for an extra 16GB of memory? You can find countless 32GB USB flash drives on the net for around £35, and 16GB USB flash drives for £20. So I thought Apple’s price hike was a little steep and was their way of saying to customers “If you want the best, you’ll pay a premium!”.

Well, I really don’t need the extra 16GB. I saved £100 and I have an identical iPhone to the 32GB owners with more than enough space to accommodate my iTunes library.

Having used the new iPhone 3G S over the weekend, I have to admit I was surprised with how much faster both the 3G connection is than the 2G model, and the general speed of applications. The performance of games has especially improved on the 3G S, some of which chugged on the iPhone 2G model. The camera also seems a lot higher quality, producing sharper photos with better colour depth and the video is also surprisingly sharp too.

My favourite improvement is the compass functionality though. I’ve used Google maps on the iPhone to get to meetings a lot in the past, and generally find directions to places to visit all around London. I’m shocked my iPhone-owning friends don’t use this more just to open, type ‘bar’, ‘restaurant’, ‘café’ and find a place close to their current location. Now that Google Maps has had the compass functionality integrated, I don’t have to look at the street names so find out which direction I’m facing relative to the map, I just click the compass icon and the map will turn to face the direction I’m walking. Simply point and walk – perfect!

None of the improvements to the iPhone 3G S are life-changing when compared to previous generations, and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend people upgrade to it especially if you have the 3G version. Unless the iPhone is the only camera you use and you really crave the improvements and video options. And in reality all these changes really mean is that I’ll be able to find places with a little less fuss in Google maps, apps will run smoother, and maybe I’ll be posting more pictures taken with my iPhone.

Don’t get me wrong, I am very happy with my purchase though…. Apple has made some very nice improvements to an already brilliant product. Just don’t buy a white iPhone – it looks nice at first, but it gets dusty very quickly. I think Apple will probably do something quite special with the next iteration, like a complete overhaul of the design, greatly improved camera with a flash, much higher storage capacity as flash drives become more common and cheaper, etc.