The Hickensian

How often have you read a snide, bumptious or haughty comment where you feel the only reaction could be a raised handbag, accompanied by the high-pitched mocking call of “oooOOOooooh!”?

If you’re not familiar with the work of Vic and Bob, the chances are that it’s never. Well, hopefully that will soon change, as Hicksdesign has launched a site to fulfill that need you never knew you had to “oooOOooooh!”:

Now whenever you see such a comment, you point them in the right direction: oo00.eu (2 oh’s, 2 zeros and a european union). Obviously, feel free to use it on me if say some deserving! ;)

If you’re still confused, this video might help explain the origins of the raised handbag as a retort, (before going on to become a surreal contest):

Playing catch-up

This little side-project was the perfect opportunity to play with new CSS3 toys and HTML5 tags that I haven’t had time to experiment with yet:

CSS Animations: In any webkit browser (Safari, Omniweb, Chrome), the handbag will actually be raised, waved at you, and then lowered. There is a separate animation for the shadow underneath the bag. It’s a little clunky, but that suits the context.
CSS Media Queries: Just as this blog does, the layout changes when the viewport is reduced smaller than 700px. These style rules also govern layout on mobiles (only tested on iPhone so far though). Not currently supported in Camino or IE, but work in everything else.
HTML5 structural tags: Added footer, header and section, with simple javascript to allow their use in IE. Not forgetting to add display:block to each to compensate for lack of browser default styles.
HTML5 audio: In Opera 10.5 (Win), Chrome and Firefox, you should get the .ogg file, and in Safari, the mp3. It won’t be in time with the animation sadly, but I’m hoping that’s something that will be possible in the future. Thanks to the Webble Millers for providing their oooohs.
Web Fonts: Type goodness is supplied via Typekit, namely the gorgeous slab-serif Adelle. Currently a no-show in Opera, but hopefully once 10.5 final is out, Typekit will update their sniffing.

So depending on which browser you use, you’ll get a slightly different experience, but the same content.

Leigh picked up a little gem from an antiques and curios shop in Burford, titled “The Internet A to Z”. This little tome was published in the year of our Lord 2000 (so possibly written in 1999), and it was interesting to see what difference 10 years makes.

In particular, there were 2 very relevant entries:

Opera

…and then iCab…

…ouch!

“Someone asked me the other day what percentage of my day was spent doing what. Yesterday it was approximately one third general admin type stuff, one third client liaison type stuff and one third designing type stuff. If we ignore the fact that there isn’t really such a thing as a typical day – that is a pretty much a typical day.”

Ben Terrett (Interesting Mini CEO Half Thoughts)

When I started working freelance, I worked out my rates and estimated earnings based on a ‘typical’ eight hour day. What I didn’t really comprehend at the time was the fallacy of an eight hour day of solid work. There are so many factors that eat into that supposed ‘billable time’.

• Admin. The obvious one. I hire a bookkeeper and an accountant to look after this side, but you still need to do a certain amount of admin yourself. Becoming a Limited Company brought with it more forms than I could ever imagine.
• Illness. Your choice of lifestyle and diet can affect this, but even the fittest get the flu.
• Hardware/software failures. Kernel panics, hard drive failures, crashy software.
• Meetings. Not so much with clients (which are billable), but with accountants, bookkeepers, solicitors, financial advisors…
• Enquiries. This has been a big problem for me, as before I worked for Opera, the level of enquiries was such that I could spend half of most days simply replying to them.
• Phone calls. The ones unrelated to active projects. “I’ve lost my login details…” or “Can you just send me…”.
• Lack of motivation. It sounds lame, but you will get days where no matter how hard you try, you can’t produce anything. Usually a sign of needing a break.
• Power cuts, or lack of internets (something I see happen a lot with Twitter friends cut off by poor service from their ISP).
• Children!. We love them, but every working parent surely dreads the call from school or nursery, asking them to collect their poorly child.

No doubt there are many more.

The problem with setting such an unrealistic expectation is two-fold. The first is that you often feel like a failure for not achieving those core hours (sometimes you do far, far more of course, but that doesn’t always help the guilt!). Secondly, it leads to underestimating project times, where your belief of how much you can achieve is sadly mistaken.

There’s no easy way around this, it’s just one of the things I’ve got used to. Correction – still getting used to. I’m better than I was, but I still get this wrong.

There’s not a lot left of last night’s dream, but here’s what there is:

I was at a carvery, that looked like the kind of cafe you get inside a department store, but the layout was a little odd. After picking up a plate you then had to go around taking your vegetables off other people’s plates. Bizarrely, no one minded about this, but every table I went to I heard diners exclaim “Look at the hygiene! It’s so hygienic!”.

I finally saw what everyone was getting excited about. In order to get the meat, you had to queue up to go past an airport security style desk, where you were checked for condiments, through a shower (with your plate of veg) and then put on hospital scrubs before joining the final queue for the meat. After that you simply exited via a little white swinging gate, with a plate of roast beef and soggy but sterilised vegetables.