And so the family grows, look at the 4 of them, so content sitting side-by-side. What a proud father I am! Lets hope the whole family gets wet behind the lugholes next week when we take ‘em down to Lee Bay and let them cavort with the massive!

So it is official, I went to town on the Duke (MK II) yesterday arvo with a Black ‘n’ Decker and some rather toxic resin, in an attempt to fix the tail on my much-loved surfboard.

Pretty pleased with the results, I wouldn’t mind stepping into shaping one day, reckon it would be fun!

Sunshine, re-birth of the mitch mobile, lasagna, beers, opening of the new HB surfboard clinic, all in all, better weekend.

Well a year has passed, I am still stoked on surfing and it is now the official countdown to our annual summer surf trip to Lee Bay, North Devon. The summer flatness awaits, and last year’s crew are of course going to be in full attendence:

• BCE
• BJC
• Mr. L Reynolds

And this year we are joined by a surfer, who is simply known as The P Dog. The P enjoys nothing more than being cleaned up by a few rogue sets, that full-on, taking it on the head feeling, it is a dog’s world, and it wouldn’t surprise me if P dominates the line-up down at Croyde et al.

Me and BJC will be travelling down on Sunday 23rd, The Dog, with travel kennel and pedigree chum in tow, will be coming down on the train on the same day, and we’ll be joined by Lukey on Wednesday.

It should be a great trip, we have the tools: 8′2 (Mitch), 6′8 (General), 6′4 (Duke a.k.a Dominator), 4 Skims custom skimboard (Mini Mitch) and whatever bodyboards Luke decides to come with. We have swim fins, diving masks, snorkles, cricket bats, badminton stuff, it is all good.

We’ll keep you updated on the tour, may even shoot another video, just to keep the fans happy.

Peace from the east (of Anglia)

After looking pretty extensively for an open source content management system that will output clean, semantic html and css, in a neat little template-based system, I was left sorely disappointed. Look like I will be writing my own again! Whereas solutions such as Joomla and Mambo pack pretty harcore backend admin functionality, they fall down severely in the template front end category. A lot of the stuff I reviewed had nested-tables, that might have validated, but I ask you, what kinda freak uses a nested table hack to create a nav item, when a simple unordered list will do.

Also it was funny yesterday, I was at Liverpool Street station, waiting for my train and had a little delve into WH Smiths to check out some books etc. I picked up .net magazine (web design etc) and had a quick read, I was surprised they were still harking on about using tableless layouts and the benefit of CSS. God, this is what I have been doing for my clients for the past 5 years (minimum), but I guess on the other hand, it is good to see the web standards vibe gone fully mainstream now, but it does seem a long time coming!

Had a meeting at the Swiss Re Tower (Gherkin) building yesterday, pretty cool view form the 30th floor I can tell you.

Less than 2 weeks till Lee Bay and Devon. Less the 6 weeks till Elise comes over, rock and roll!

So on a lighter note, my amazing girlfriend (Ms. Elise Boyson) happened to have the privilage of going to see Matt Costa (and his band) the other night up in Portland (Maine). Here is a pic of the duo, my girlfriend being the one with the long blonde hair, pretty eyes and cute smile!

So I was testing a site for a client in IE on the PC this morning, and beside the fact that after being on Mac OS X for over a year now, going back to Windows XP, just to perform a simple site test was painful. Windows updates, popup messages, bubbles reminding me that I have unused icons etc. F*ck, talk about stress!

Whilst I was at it, I decided to try and download Internet Explorer 7 (Beta). F*ck, what a pain in the arse, I launch Firefox to download it, and I have to go through some browser verification, so I closed it down and went for (shiver…) IE 6. I then have to download some mini-app to test to see if my copy of Windows is the real deal (which it is) and then finally I get connected to some download window.

10 minutes later and I am still downloading (I have a 1mbps connection), and I am thinking, why do microsoft continue to be complete and utter arse*oles. The make the simplest task so convoluted. If you want to get firefox, all you do is go to the site, download it, and your done, damn! Anyway I have just noticed it is about to complete, and what do you know, I have to restart the PC, god, I am sooooooooooo glad I ditched this bunch of s*it a year ago. I only use a PC for testing in the various browsers, and I can safely say, I will NEVER go back!

So Sulli has added a little entry on his blog about our surf trip to Bali, sweet man, the pics look great, shame you got a few typos! Check it all out here! By the way mate, nicked a pic, just to big you up, this is where he got his ‘wave of his life’, sweet bro, keep it up!

I just have to say for the record that I think if I get another cold call from some company employing people who you can’t even fu*king understand, I think I will personally kick some ass! I used to take the call and in an attempt to be nice I would actually listen to them say their bit for a few minutes. I am over this now, so as soon as they introduce themselves I just hang up, gives me the rage! And I personally think Oftel should ban this kind of practice before I inflict some pain on someone!
Grrrrrr…….

So I was thinking back to when I was over in Fiji with the dominator crew this morning, so I gazed over to www.fijisurf.com to check out the photos Jason had taken from the boat in the channel and saw this one. It immediately threw me back to King Kong Left. This picture was taken by Jason on the first day I was at the resort, I remember having this look of dread on my face when I paddled out, thinking shit, this is mini Teahupoo, most of the other surfers agreed, the only difference between us is that these boys had 5 -10 years worth of surfing experience on top of my modest 3!

Anyway one day I hope to return, maybe to Nagigia, or maybe somewhere new, either way, I will never forget looking at those faces and thinking, shit, I am never gonna make one of them! But I did, maybe not as big as the one in the picture, but I got there!

Peace!

Picture taken by Jason