So here’s the customary end-of-year blog post. I’ve titled it looking forward because I want to forget 2008. No need to go into details about my current job, especially now our managers have the appalling results of the employee survey in their hands.

Despite it all though I have been able to mostly keep their hands off and produce some decent work. I’m currently working on two very large projects—one at the requirements stage and another at the system integration stage and I have another two that are close to release. Just before Christmas I released my redesign for the Museum of East Anglian Life website using WordPress with Google Maps, Facebook, Flickr and Upcoming integration. A lot of work and as ever with me, lessons learned. I’m always looking to improve.

My delicious bookmarks are now bursting with over 1200 links now and at some point early last year I started to categorise them according to design principle for example interface-design, navigation-design and interaction-design. I suspect that a lot of people keep tabs on my bookmarks so I hope they continue to be of interest to everyone.

So. Next year. Well, I will finish a redesign and realign of this website. As you may know I want to emigrate to Vancouver but I need a job first so I will be making a concerted effort to demonstrate my knowledge, experience, attention to detail and the unquenching thirst for more. My current employer may not give a damn, but I hope to leave visitors with no doubt that I know my core skills inside out and am worth employing from half a world away.

Another New Year’s resolution—skilling up on the stuff I don’t do, namely Apache, MySQL, PHP and Ruby on Rails. Programming. Yikes!

Oh, almost forgot. I get married in February and will honeymoon in Vancouver. Surely something to look forward too, yes?

All the very best to you and yours for 2009.

Well after 10 years of being engaged to Jane, it’s about time we got around to marriage! The big day is 28 February 2009 and will take place at Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich with immediate family in attendance. There will be a bit of a gap until the honeymoon but we’ll be off to Vancouver, Canada for 12 days staying at the Fairmont Waterfront. Well, if it’s good enough for Her Britannic Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II then it’s good enough for us lol.

The lad is coming too as we’re hoping to emigrate to Vancouver as soon as we can and we’d all like to see the place first (he’ll perhaps spend a gap year with us - we’re not pressurising him). It would be great to line up a few interviews in advance as getting jobs is key to making the move initially. I’m hoping that a city of that size will have better opportunities for both of us than Ipswich. I’ve tried hard in London but the salary to support commuting is beyond what employers will pay for me - and we couldn’t afford to live there. Jane is an analytical chemist (as opposed to a pharmacy chemist that most people think of first) so with luck perhaps she can score a chemicals / pharmaceutical industry job. Will I continue working with the web? Currently my passion is being killed off as I work in isolation from skilled, dedicated designers and developers so I will keep an eye out on lab work too (as a technician) or apply to the local police department if that’s practical. I’m keeping a very open mind on what sort of work I can do. Working in a team environment where you feed off each other’s passion, skills and ideas is important to me, that’s why the current job grates so much.

We’re going for what I call a “lifestyle reset”. Downsize the home so we can live outside more - as a keen (12 years +) snowboarder and mountain biker the mountains and forests surrounding Vancouver are the clinchers for us over other Canadian cities. We’ll see. Now I’m older I’ll probably hurt myself quicker lol (I can count 17 concussions in the first 30 years of my life).

So, if you’re reading this from Vancouver and you think you might be able to help then please drop me a line I can be an older intern, no problem.