Thursday, February 27, 2003

What ever happened to Wilf Lunn? ...is a question I ask myself now and again. A true inspiration as a child. So, I was very pleased to find out he's still alive, well, online and mad as ever at wilflunn.com. Ace. The crazy inventions he used to create amazed me when I was young. The way one thing would trigger another thing and so and on and so on, like the old game Mouse Trap. It was like oject-oriented inventing. When I develop Flash MX and PHP based applications which contain all sorts of things, listening to eachother and doing different things, I cant help casting my mind back to Wilf's madcap inventions.

Sunday, February 23, 2003

I never kept a diary, but I hope to keep this blog kind of up to date with the things I find and do online. We'll see! It's weird but good to be using something like blogger.com to do this, when I've spent the past 8 years or so developing websites, cd-roms, visual presentations and all sorts of Perl and PHP-based, data-driven shenanigans.
Well, looks like I've finally got round to getting a blog up and running. I'd been thinking for a while about writing my own scripts to do it (in PHP or Perl) but I havent had the time. I've been too busy creating the system responsible for this for BBC News. Working for 'Auntie' is great. After a long haul, trying to start a business in writing software (Smibase - Synchronised Multimedia publishing system : database/PHP driven SMIL : it works too!) and riding a financial rollercoaster, I decided to jump ship (a week before it sank!). So, now I do what I do best for the people I've always wanted to work for! And I love it. Still renting a converted saloon bar in Islington with my lovely girlfriend Jo, a fake cat and a robot dog.

BBC News Maiden at Victoria: What you see here is coming direct (and LIVE) from a camera in Victoria Station. I did the BBC News 24 content and underlying Shockwave, XML, PHP, MySql and flash backend for journalists to generate content for this.