So last week my internet connection went down. FAIL. Annoyed i called VirginMedia (our cable provider) and was played a message that there was a fault in our area. Fair enough, these things happen.

Over the next few days it went up and down, and the message was updated. Annoying, but at least they’re being honest about it. Eventually our connection dropped all together, nothing. absolutely zero bit’s of internet flowing through our tubes, so i called them again, no message related to our area.

Weird.

I stayed on the line and got through to an arrogant, annoying, condescending wanker. Being that you have to have an IQ lower than that of a half eaten banana to work as a “technical support” call center rep it was no wonder he told me i had no internets due the fact i’m using an apple router (WRONG).

So i was pissed. I did a twitter search for virginmedia (on my iPhone) to see if anyone had any tips. What did i find? @virginmedia I decided to ask the question re: my internets, and what pursued was a few tweets back and forth, an email or two, and in less than 24 hours our internet was back to normal.

I’m ecstatic.

I’m not sure if @virginmedia is a group of people and i got lucky, or if it is just one guy (a great guy called Alex Brown) but it’s turned me from an about-to-ditch-this-bitch hater to an oh.my.gods.i.love.you.thank.you.so.much lover.

If you have issues with your virginmedia stuffs, tweet @virginmedia and it’ll get sorted much, much faster.

Noise

The problem with getting an engaging, responsive audience when you’re blogging for fun is the shear volume of blogs and other user generated content fighting for attention online. If we look at Technorati’s data the are currently about 112.8 million blogs online, and over 250 million items of tagged media.

Dig a bit further into this data and it’s revealed that there are over 175,000 new blogs every day with over 1.6 million posts per day (over 18 posts every second).

There is a lot of noise out there. Chances are that there are a lot people out there saying similar things to you.

Signal

The fun part of blogging is when you get feedback, it makes you feel like the effort you have put into your post has bee recognized, and generally leaves you with a nice warm feeling. It’s also nice to know that something you have done may have helped someone in some way.

To increase the likelihood of generating feedback for you work, it is important to have something concrete to speak about. Without a clear and defined topic of conversation it’s more difficult to get a response from people, especially complete strangers you have never conversed with before.

It’s for this reason that I’m very aware of what I’m talking about, and how focused I am when I write a post. I generally try to pick a topic and stick with for however long it takes me to get my feeling or opinion across (which is why some of posts are so damn long!).

Propagation

The next important thing in trying to get a conversation going is propagation, the further you spread your message the better chances are it will be heard.

I import my blog posts into facebook for example, I also often digg my posts, I tweet about them, if I use flickr I post back to my blog (and vice versa). The golden rule I adhere to is “the more places, the better”. What I mean by this is the more visibility my blog / posts get, the happier I am.

A nice side affect of this is that I will generally be propagating my link to an audience of like-minded fellows who are more likely to engage with it.

Nonchalance

Although I try to get as much interaction out of my blog as possible, the thing keeps me from getting down when I get no comments (because lets face it, we all like to get comments, especially nice ones!) is one simple thing: i don’t care.

That’s right. I don’t care. If I get no reaction to my posts, so what? The bottom line is that this blog is for me first. If along the way I help someone out with some code or inspire someone to explore creative programming then I’m happy, but it’s not the reason I do it. I write this blog for me.

So to my fellow small time bloggers I say this: Have fun, Worry Not & Keep Blogging, Keep Linking.

What is “Personality in Creativity”???

When I talk about personality in creativity what I am talking about is the way in which individual human beings are capable of understanding, relating to and ultimately experiencing things in a completely different and abstract way from one another.

I think my understanding of this has become most prevalent in recent times, you see I bought my boyfriend a digital SLR camera for his birthday (a rather nice Canon EOS 400D) and I couldn’t help but notice that often I would find a shot or scene that I thought was worth capturing, the interesting part is that sometimes my boyfriend wouldn’t feel the same way (more often than not he would, or he was just humoring me, who knows!) It was through these continued and often random occurrences of indifference over what was considered aesthetically pleasing that I arrived at my ephinpy of revelation.

The Ephinpy of Revelation

My revelation was one of appreciation for the individual, in the same way that I would attack a pragmatic problem or a technologically challenging task from a certain perspective, my boyfriend, your girlfriend indeed your [whoever] or (especially) another person will see the same problem / aesthetic from another perspective.

It is indeed the way in which we as creative individuals are able to see, analyze, appreciate, and then (finally) form preferable, concise resolutions to aesthetically or mentally challenging problems.

I’m using the perspective of pragmatic and aesthetic creativity interchangeably, you see this is the way in which I (creatively) perceive a challenge, it is an aspect of my personality and something which is as unique in its execution to me as the very fabric of which I am formed.

The Very Fabric of Which we are Formed

This is the point, as obvious at it seems, I’m trying to make, The way I will solve a problem, the way I will view an aesthetic, even the way in which I will appreciate sound, touch, taste… It’s all unique to me. As is the way you will react to these stimuli.

As obvious as it seems to say this out-loud, I sometimes think there are a great deal of people in the world that need reminding that you should view this “with your own eyes”, be that with your actual eyes, or a perceived sandbox of conformed rationality, it should be your spectrum of creativity (or rationale) that paints the answer, not an emulated or derived palate of someone else’s expression.

“A Derived Palate of Someone Else’s Expression”

When I talk about this I’m not saying that people shouldn’t learn, be inspired by and ultimately study others work to gain a better understanding of a particular field of creative expression (far from it, indeed I believe that it is often only possible to understand and therefore form a creative expression about a given problem / aesthetic, if you have first studied and understood how peers would approach the same problem)

What I am saying is that it’s important to move beyond this. Take what you have learnt, apply it and reiterate. Your creativity will then be peppered with the nuances of your personality, and ultimately you individuality.

This drunk rambling was bought to you buy 6 pints and 2 shots of tequila. Thank you.

I don’t know what I’m doing.

And why the future of business is to be where others fear to tread

As soon as you think you’ve got it sussed, it changes. This happens every week, no, make that every day, hour, minute and second. The old certainties are gone and in their place we have rolling never-ending disruption. Oh, what’s that you say? There’s a new format for this ad or that ad? Surprise me. Nothing stays the same. We live and work in a super fast, super fluid environment where there are no rules, really.

Now, depending on your bent, this is either a pain in the arse and an obstacle, or the best full throttle, jump out of bed, greet the day with a shout opportunity that you ever got. It’s like Christmas every day. We don’t create, we invent. And what’s better than that? Inventing doesn’t require rules – they’re for people who want to know what they’re doing, who like order and the fact that everything has its place.

Creative? That’s sooo, 20th Century. Where I spend my time we make stuff, we imagine, wonder, copy, borrow, steal and cobble together. We invent. ‘How do you do that?’ ‘I don’t know, but we’ll figure it out.’ Look at that, if you mix it with this and take some of that, it makes this! If where you work isn’t like this and you’ve got a bunch of people called creatives having ‘ideas’ then you work at an ad agency, a place with rules and people know what they’re doing because they’ve done it before.

As was, creativity is the preserve of the few, its top down and hierarchical, structured and rules based. Traditional. Its old and it doesn’t work anymore. Constant disruption requires people who embrace it and feel comfortable with it. Where we work, we don’t know what we’re doing because its never been done before and in order to remain fresh, smart and ahead of the pack, you have to be inventive. It’s the ability to invent that’s at a premium. Inventors have no fear of the unknown. They like change and a lack of boundaries, Its where they thrive.

And this is where we are; we’re all inventors, media planner, art director, Flash programmer, strategist, every last one. At the edge of knowledge, technology, understanding. Here I am. I don’t know what I’m doing, because if I did I would be yesterday.

© 2007 Rob Lawrence @ Avenue A | Razorfish UK

This place, the people that fill it, they “get it”.

Do i need much more reason to like coming to work on a monday morning?

New York

In the spring me and my partner went off to New York, this was the first time I had ever to the states, and I loved it. New York is an amazing place, and I really hope we get to go again soon. Whilst we were there we enjoyed lots of touristy sight-seeing trips and ate at lots of gorgeous eateries such as Gobo and Candle 79.

Whilst in NY we also took an internal flight up to the Niagara Falls (canadian side), which was amazing, the immediate difference between the USA + Canada was astonishing, and I really hope we get to explore Canada in a bit more depth in 2008.

RailsConf 2007

After New York I attended RailsConf in Portland OR, this was on the best experiences of my life. I was my first major conference and I met some brilliant people, it was really good to meet up with lots of like minded people, and a trip the I’ve not forgot throughout the year.

I’m hoping to go again in 2008 and have yet to speak to my work about it, I just hope they will see the value in sending me there, as I have given up a lot of Rails development since working at Avenue A | Razorfish to focus more on Flex / Actionscript development, which I’ve loved, but my heart is with Ruby / Rails.

Turning 21

The summer saw me turn 21, and my gorgeous boyfriend planned the most amazing surprise fancy dress birthday party for me. It was an amazingly good laugh and really fun to see my family and friends dress up in silly costumes for my benefit.

Quitting Impact

Probably the biggest thing to change in my life this year was finally leaving the shit-hole I used to work at, Impact IM Ltd. It was the best decision I made and am glad to finally be out of there, and I wasn’t the only one to think so, nearly everyone I worked with at that hell-hole have now left also.

Impact did nothing but set me back in 2007 and made my working life incredibly unfulfilling, hollow and ultimately depressing. Just read back though some of my posts.

Starting at Avenue A | Razorfish

One of the best things to happen this year was starting at Avenue A | Razorfish, I’ve already written about how amazing they are to work for so I’m not going to reiterate that here, but I have now finished my 3 month probation and am there for the long haul.

That’s all for now, I’m off to Dubai for Xmas in less than 24 hours, so i’ll leave you with our work’s christmas card to keep you entertained. Enjoy!

Rails 2.0 (i wonder how long until the trolls think Rails 2.0 is a Rails mash-up or something) brings with it lots of new features, polish, fixes and sexy, here are some of my favourites:

• Namespaces in ActionPack
• Seperation of view-type and renderer (ie. show.html.erb or show.html.haml)
• Automagic record routing: form_for(person)
• HTTP Authentication baked in!
• Request Profiler
• Sexy Migrations, say a big thanks to err.the blog for this one
• ActiveRecord XML deserialization and JSON serialization
• ActiveResource (like AR for REST api’s)

There are (obviously) tons more features to the release, i suggest you check out the official announcement as well as Ryan’s awesome post. Happy coding bitches!

The difference is amazing, coming from a small new media department to an international digital agency highlights many of the things that are wrong with your average small agency. The structure here is amazing, the work is spread so granularly, it really helps ensure that peoples talents are utilized to the full. The culture is brilliant, it’s a million miles from what I had before, and the caliber of work is stellar.

I’m going to touch on some of the larger more important differences in a bit more depth, but there are so many other smaller difference which I probably won’t be able to cover, like having dishwashers, team meetings in the pub and so on, but first a little history lesson.

History

The company I work for was originally called DNA, a very well respected and highly talented multi-discipline design/build agency. DNA were approached by many large companies looking to merge with them, but the board felt that these offers were always because of either their design strengths or their technical strengths, but never both.

About a year ago now, Avenue A | Razorfish (a merging of Avenue A, a massive design and marcoms player and Razorfish, a massive tech player) approached DNA to merge, the directors (Neil and Chris, who are great guys) felt that AA|RF cared about the same things they did, and let the merge happen.

So now DNA is a part of Avenue A | Razorfish, which is owned by aQuantive. aQuantive own two other companies; Atlas and Drive PM. Atlas is an advertising network, and Drive PM is a mechanism by which to target advertising to an amazingly specific level. So aQuantive is 2/3’s advertising driven.

A while ago the market was heating up with talk of online advertising, the big players were all trying to buy up companies that would let them flex this muscle, Microsoft approached the darling at the time (DoubleClick) but they said “no” and sold to Google (becoming Adsence) so Microsoft thought “fuck it” and decided to try and buy Atlas (the largest ad network). The result is they decided to buy the entire company, not just Atlas, for around $6billion. So Microsoft own aQuantive, but it really doesn’t filter down into everyday life at Avenue A | Razorfish.

Structure

The structure of a company is always going to be better / more defined when you have the number of employees we have. But the point is not how many people you have, rather do you have the right level of separation?

At my old place we had 4 members of staff sharing about 10 different jobs; We had department managers selling and not managing the department, project managers managing the department while the head was out selling, and then having to manage projects as well, designers doing IA, programmers doing design, flash designers doing interaction programming, everyone doing QA, the boss doing SEO and ad campaigns and the board chipping in on design direction.

The lack of separation caused a lot of confusion and misplaced resources.

At AA|RF we have a lot more people (about 160 and growing) so we can afford to spread the staff into very distinct teams such as: Creative, Design, Interface Architecture, Information Architecture, Flash Animation, Flash Interaction, Rich Internet Application, Java Developers, .NET Developers, Database Designers, Motion Graphics, SEO, QA, Search Research and probably a whole load more I have yet to meet.

Apart from the skill based teams we also have teams created to cater for specific clients, when a large job comes in PM’s, Producers, Account Managers and Resources will get together and allocate members of staff in certain ‘Skill Teams’ to join a Project team.

Overall the structure of both the ‘workers’ and the auxiliary is brilliant, the overall company structure is brilliant also, having a proper HR team is great!

Getting “it”

The thing that got me so excited about this job and working for AA|RF was the fact that after my interview with Paul and James I got a real sense that they “get it”. I expected that once I start it will be different, and there will be a lot of people that don’t get “it”, but man was I wrong!

Every member of staff in this company gets “it”, they all understand the best way to run a Digital Agency and the benefits of doing this versus that, every member of staff, every PM, every Producer, Every Account Manager even the Directors (especially the Directors) get “it”.

It’s a part of the company interview system, people are judged against wether they get “it” or not.

It’s amazingly refreshing to finally be working for a company that truly understands the industry, best practices, emerging technology, client needs and staff needs.

AA|RF knows this industry so well, it reflects in everything they do, the way projects are approached, the way clients are handled and (more importantly) the way staff are treated (which is very well as it happens).

Culture

Culture is a difficult thing to get right in a workplace, and I know only of two places that are internationally regarded as having an amazing working culture, and they are pixar animation studios and google. Apart from being the “Search King” google is (especially in tech circles) known for being an amazing place to work.

After my experiences in average small companies I was definitely looking for a more google-esque working culture, but had resided myself to the fact that unless I get some sort of obscure degree, or could borrow arfon’s brain I would probably never get a look in google (which is a shame, they feed their staff free gourmet food)

Luckily for me AA|RF has an amazing working culture, I’m literally blown-away by it.

First there are the official ‘benefits’ such as flexi-time, health insurance, pension schemes, gym-membership and the opportunity to work abroad. All very lovely, and a million miles away from what a smaller company can offer, but pretty standard for most ‘proper’ agencies, especially in London.

But it’s the culture driven benefits which are amazing, take for instance the policy on overtime; in our industry you are never ever ever ever going to get paid full overtime, so don’t even ask. What AA|RF do is different, they realise that we all work our butts off to get stuff done, because we are all passionate about this industry, so we can claim overtime as LILO or Leave In Leu of Overtime. Another great culture driven aspect is the way meetings are handled, AA|RF know’s we hate meetings so any meetings involving ‘workers’ are kept brief, taken on the roof-garden and last no more than 15 minutes.

Another great thing is the company policy on things like stress and breaks, we are all encouraged to take frequent breaks, and chill out for a bit if we feel stressed. In previous jobs management have tried to ignore stress, but in this job people are taken over the road for a coffee or a smoothie if they are stressed, this company really cares about their staff.

Attire, there is barley a suit in sight, everyone from the workers to the MD’s dress how they feel, no matter what that is, people are more comfortable, there’s no authority issues and it’s just nicer.

And the parties! Oh my the Parties! There are two ‘big’ parties every year, the christmas party and the summer party, I unfortunately just missed the summer party but apparently london zoo was hired for the afternoon, then everyone went back to work to have a barbecue in the roof-garden, then AA|RF took everyone to a club they had hired.

But that’s not all, AA|RF like to party, so there is a party every month after the monthly company meeting, the way this works is every team takes it in turns to spend £500 on the months party, which is used to cover things such as games and prizes, the company foots the bill for food and (lots of) drink.

This month it’s HR’s turn and they are throwing a mad hatters tea party on the roof, we’ve all been given materials with which to make a mad hat, the winner recieves an iPod Touch, 5 2nd place winners get a new iPod Nano, and there are 20 3rd place prizes of a crate of beer or something.

The culture at AA|RF is amazing, and it works, the MD’s can see that we all work really hard, and have tried to create a fun, relaxed and positive working environment, and they instantly win people’s loyalty. You end up looking forward to going to work no matter what.

Working in “The Big Smoke”

Working in London is both brilliant and annoying, having a plethora of lunch options, entertainment, fashion, shopping and night-life on your very doorstep is wonderful. And trust me, you never get bored. Never. London is the heart of everything, it’s the center of the world.

The only annoying thing is working in London and living in Kent, it’s difficult but not too bad, you get used to it really quickly and you look forward to your 1.5hours of down time at the start/end of the day.

The benefits far out-weigh the drawbacks, and I can honestly say that now I’m here I wouldn’t change it for anything in the world. At my old place 4 out of 6 members of staff left to work in london, and all are very happy. As easy and comfortable as it may be to work in this industry from the comfort of Kent, only a few miles from home it doesn’t compare to being on the pulse, in the heart of it, where it happens.

The companies are better, the staff are treated better, the pay is better, the clients are (way) more interesting, the buzz is amazing, the people rock and you will likely find that your boss is just like you.

The grass truly is greener on the other side, take my word for it.

Last saturday me, my partner and a friend of ours were invited to participate in something which only a select few in the world were lucky enough to experience. We got to play on Sony’s next generation games console, the Playstation 3. What was even nicer was that this was not some sort of public or press event, oh no, we got the opportunity to play PS3 in the comfort of our good friends andy & debs front room. Fueled with pizza and larger we were set for a night weekend of awesome fun.

In a word the Playstation 3 is phenomenal. It’s physical appearance is very smart, although the biggest of the 3 main next-gen consoles it is (in my opinion) by far the most aesthetically pleasing (with the Wii coming in a very close second) It’s top is curved and flows down to the front panel which is sparse and minimal with only a cut-out for the optical slot loading drive and two discrete touch sensitive buttons; power & eject. It’s majestically wrapped in a shell of super-polished black plastic (ala iPod) flanked with a burst of sun-bright chrome.

The machine is also exceptionally quiet when operating, you would find it difficult to detect the change in ambient noise between off and on, which is a hell of a lot more than can be said for the XBox series. This is even more amazing when you consider that the Playstation 3’s cell processor contains 9 active processing cores.

The SIXAXIS controller as well, is very very light, it hasn’t changed much in the looks department, there’s now a PS Playstation button in the middle. Turning the console on from the controller is a very cool feature though. The GUI is Sony’s XMB or cross media bar, familiar to anyone with a PSP, and it works very well in a larger format. The GUI is fluid and responsive and looks simply amazing in 1080p HD over HDMI.

Onto the games; available to play on this pre-release console were some unfinished games complete with their bugs and hiccups, but I’m not going to dwell on that because we were playing a pre-release console after all. The games we enjoyed were as follows:

• Resistance: Fall of Man
• Motorstorm
• Ridge Racer 7

Resistance: Fall of Man
This game is truly amazing, the graphics are simply breathtaking, every thing on the screen is so realistic looking, every surface and object is fully textured with stunning high resolution detail. The graphics this game pumped out move expectations of gaming more into the realm of full CGI film. They simply have to be seen to be believed, at times in this game it’s easy to mistake what your eyes are showing you for real life.

The game-play! Oh my the game-play! Nearly everything you see is reactive, in most shooter games it’s easy to distinguish between foreground playable objects and background drops which offer minimal or no level of interaction at all, in Resistance everything reacts, shoot a window and it’ll smash into a million pieces, quite normal, but shoot it from further away and you’ll fracture and splinter the pane of glass into shards, but every shot is different, not two fractures are the same.

Signs hanging overhead swing if you shoot them, fall off if you shoot them in the right place (try the hinges) discarded vending machine which serve no purpose other than to make the environment subversive are fully reactive, shoot it on the side at just the right angle and you can force the door to swing open, there are a million other examples of this level of interaction, simply put it’s amazing. Monsters never disappear, if something dies in an area it will still be there next time you go back.

The story-line as well is very compelling, more and more games are being crafted to such high standards of story-telling, it’s no wonder the film industry is looking to games for inspiration!

Motorstorm
The most fun ever. This game is the type of game that is perfect if you’ve got a few people over, it’s just so much fun. The premise is a motocross style race at mental speeds across a fictitious canyon landscape (it might not be fictitious but that’s not important) Again the graphics this game pumps out are truly stunning, mud and dust files everywhere, other vehicles react realistically if you bash into them, it’s high-speed madness!

This was the only game we played which took advantage of the new SIXAXIS controller’s tilt-control functionality, and although this was fun and a bit of a novelty, in this game particularly I feel that tactile feedback by way of rumble would have been a lot more fun.

One of the most fun things to do in this game is crash, when (not if) you crash everything slows down, your vehicle spins out of control and the camera goes into matrix style bullet-time, if you’re unfortunate enough to become departed from your vehicle then your character will bump around with amazing rag-doll physics.

The game is like watching a skating DVD; it’s great to watch people doing it right, but it’s so much more fun to see them fail!

Ridge Racer 7
We didn’t really play this one all that much, it did look a lot nicer than previous versions of Ridge Racer (I’m really into Ridge Racer for PSP at the moment) but it didn’t really wow anyone, it just felt like ridge racer. There were some nice motion blur effects on tail lights and what have you and the backdrops were of much higher quality than I ever remember, but I was put off by the voice over, she was an annoying whore.

Basically sony was right when they said that next-generation gaming doesn’t start until they say so, they’ve got an amazing piece of hardware, and if the first batch of games are any indication they’ve got some standard setting games also. Sony have gotten a lot of bad press for the PS3, but when you play it you can see that it’s worth the wait, worth the bad press. With no question of doubt or hesitation I’m getting one as soon as they hit our shores in March 2007. You’d be a fool not to.

It really struck are chord with me, I recommend anyone who writes code to read it then have a think about where you work, could you do better? I think I probably could.

Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money