Fadtastic has an 9 rules group interview which included me. The questions are all around web design and yet again Andrew did a good job in posing the questions to us answering people.

I had thought that with this round of submissions and acceptances into 9rules, history may not repeat itself with the poor 9rules not getting bashed over the head again…… Well, you know what thought did - in this case turn out to be wrong. Whilst it’s possibly not as big a stick being used to beat 9rules as the past has seen, there is still a fair bit of prodding. The one note that I have seen on 9rules notes sums up the various things I’ve seen regarding apparently the formula that is applied to any blog accepted into 9rules of: 9rules + blog acceptance = quality downgrade.

Some people seem to be under various misunderstandings regarding online business. A lot of these things have been said time and time again. Many of them are like bad pennies to anyone that works in the web industry - you get a huge here we go feeling every time one of these comes up. I would like to look at a few that recently again came up in my own experiences:

I am sitting in my office, it’s 1.30am just gone. I’ve been thinking about going to bed now for a few hours but got distracted by about everything. I now find myself thinking about it only to have a gathering of about 3 teenagers outside talking about nothing. It’s not like I live in a town or anything - where did they come from and whose kids are they? We’ve been getting a lot of trouble from kids lately which hardly sits with the ideal life our village likes to convey - I think they are being shipped in from somewhere or something these hoddie wannabes, could never be some local’s little darling now could then ;) Now, if they can only speak up a bit more I can hear the gossip rather than a pubescent low grumble that is droning on.

There are a few downsides to living in the countryside apart from not having any more than 1mb broadband. One of the biggest issues that comes with winter is power cuts. Couple this with net cuts which seem to increase in number during the colder months and you have one odd way to run a web business.

I’ve written before about the need to feed the designer in you. One way of feeding my inner designer is to set myself tasks. This year I want to rekindle my love of photography. A long time ago I started out studying photography and did it as one of my degrees. I loved it and it was such a part of my life. I also was insane about video, I even took a whole year of my life and recorded it. I was never seen without a camera of some form for many years.