Finally my books arrived from Amazon. They sent me an email estimating delivery on the 24th October. So when they hadn't turned up on Friday I started to get a bit concerned. I logged on to the website to check the status and on the website it estimated delivery between the 24th and the 30th. Anyway, they are here now.

The first is the "Oxford Begininer's Japanese Dictionary" to help with my Japanese Course. The second is a book called "Don't Make Me Think" by Steve Krug, the title being his 1st Law of Usability

With my recent thoughts of web-design and development I have become increasingly interested in usability and interface design. It is becoming such and important apsect of web design, i.e. unless a user has a vested interest in your site specifically, then they tend not to spend more than 7 seconds on the first page they come to before either commiting to look further or hitting the back button and trying somewhere else. Therefore, if you don't make things easy, people will lose interest quickly.

I'm looking forward to reading it!

I've also been spending a lot of time recently coding a framewok for web-development, specifically a CMS to use to as a base for any web design work I do. It's coming along pretty well now and I think I have built it extensibly enough to cover my needs.

And, in other news, everything's working out nicely for this coming weekend...

UPDATE: I just remembered how shocking the Usability of the picture gallery on this site is... bring on my new CMS and i'll port this site to it as one of my first ports of call!

So another month gone, and so much has happened!

Where do I start, well, let's track back and see what was going on. We left you after the Grizzly and no pictures made it up on here - my fault I know, but there are some on Rosie's FaceBook profile that makes them slightly more secure than this public site...
Anyway, we're still trying to sell our house. this month has seen much more interest but no offers, and the viewing have died off slightly this week. It's really gutting as we keep seeing nice places that end up being sold before we get to them, or we want to put in an offer but can't because we don't have a buyer. It's a nightmare.

And it's starting to drag on my (and Rosie's) patience. That and the lack of alternative job opportunities. My boss finally got fed up and handed in his resignation, so it on a 3 months notice period. I kind of made me re-evaluate my career as he's been kind of a mentor to me so far, and certainly not the only getting frustrated. With my accusations of Gross Misconduct (of which I was completely exhonerated - but they made think twice about the company I was working for...) and the valued colleagues leaving like rat's from a sinking ship, alternatives would be nice.

Even Rosie is looking around for a job that might actually reward her for the immense effort she puts in, or if not one that will pay her the same without have to give so much, or a different career path that she might enjoy more... anyway - there is nothing there unless we create it ourselves.

I feel a change on the wind...