The start of a company year

The company project starts in ernest today! I've been working on the software now since August, and it's starting to take shape. From today, I'm working on it full time which should help me to work much faster in putting the finishing touches to the software.

We're hoping to launch by March/April, so there's a tight project plan in process at the moment! Exciting stuff...

Counterslip website goes live

The new Counterslip website (http://www.counterslip.co.uk/) has gone live! There's been a great team of people helping to get it up and running, but it's taken us a while to get a first version ready. I think we initially aimed a bit too high with our grand designs for all singing and dancing site, but we've had to cut down the plans a bit in order to get a first version live.

It might not look much at the moment, but we've got basic news and events functionality built in, and a whole lot of ideas half ready to put live soon. Any comments greatly appreciated!

Out the door and turn left

My mate Steve has just started a second epic journey which he is chronicling at http://www.overlandtales.com/. It's a great read (as was his first round-the-world trip) and full respect to him for the journey - that's certainly dedication to Hobo principles! If you get a chance, check out his diary - he's got a fantastic way with words.

xaml context menu not showing

Context menus in xaml are great, because it's to easy to customise their look and feel, however I've just spent a couple of hours trying to debug a silly problem.

I'd set up a Canvas holder with some nested Canvas items, and I was trying to add context menus to each of the nested Canvas items. The menu appeared for the holder but not for the nested items, and so I assumed there was a problem with the ordering of the controls - perhaps somehow the z-order of the holder was higher than it's nested items?

After a lot of googling and frustration I found, by chance, that a control needs to have a Background Brush set before the context menu will show for the item... so you can have a correctly setup context menu wired up, but if the control doesn't have a brush, it ain't gonna show.

I'm not sure why this is - I'm sure there must be a logical design reason for it (perhaps someone thought people would need to see the control to click on it) but I found it a bit limiting!

I hope that saves someone, somewhere and hour or two.

One ring to rule them all...

...only joking. I'm now an engaged man! It all happened a couple of weeks ago, but things have been so busy recently that I've only just got around to putting it up here.

True to romantic form, I wrote a song to sing to Laura and talked some friends into forming a small band for the occasion. Anyone who's heard me sing will tell you that I need a very good band behind me to make me sound good, so much cudos to them. She said yes, which was fantastic - and then we spent the rest of the weekend rushing around and telling everyone the good news.

I promise to post an update on business soon!

Shop till you drop

I'm not really a shopping man, and the thought of spending more than a few minutes trawling the shops gives me a cold sweat. Laura, who knows me a little too well it seems, discovered a shoal of vouchers in my room recently and has been looking for a cunning way to overcome my spendaphobia.

We'd arranged to meet up with some friends for coffee this morning, after which time Laura was off to Cardiff and I was intending to come home and work. She casually mentioned that she'd had some shoes put aside for me in a shop which I could buy with my vouchers if I wanted. Sounded good... I looked up after coffee to find that the gate to the shopping cage was firmly closed and that the chain was around my neck. "Cornered", I thought, "and in such a simple way!"

It was actually (I quietly admit) a fantastic shopping trip which didn't last anywhere near as long as I had feared. We hardly spent any money because of all the vouchers and there was no procrastinating over colours in the women's underwear section. I'm now safely back at home with a new pair of shoes and a warm glow from getting something for nothing.

Gentlemen, there is life after shopping.

The first day

Today's my first day off from work to develop my software idea. The great thing about this first day at work is that I don't have to spend the morning meeting loads of new people (who's names I'd immediately forget), and I don't feel like I have to impress anyone!

I think that the toughest thing today will be knowing where to start - there are so many things to do, and the temptation will be to run around frantically trying to do bits of everything and not getting anything done.

The only way is up

I've finally taken the plunge. After almost a year of research, advice seeking and general thinking I've given my notice at work to drop to a 3 day week. My company have been fantastic and they've allowed me to reduce my hours so that I work 3 days for them and then 3 days for myself each week. This means that from the beginning of August I'm going to be at WPC from Mon-Weds and then slogging it out at home Thu-Sat.

The general response I've been getting back from the songwriting idea has been really positive and I reached the point where I realised that I had to make a decision. I'm looking forward to the challenge, but I am a little nervous. The biggest challenge might be getting out of bed on a Thursday morning, but I'm sure I can work around that. Perhaps I just won't go to bed on Wednesday evening?!

No domes but one big arch

Laura and I spent the weekend in London culminating in a trip to the new Wembley to see Muse. I may be biased, but Muse surely must be one of the best live bands ever. Perhaps for crowd pleasing stadium anthems, Queen might win the crown, but for sheer musical awesomeness and the ability to sound forever tight and CD-like, Muse win hands down. I've heard that Matt Bellamy is supposed to be a bit arrogant, but maybe he's just heard himself play a few times.

Wembley was everything that it's cracked up to be - very big, difficult to get lost in, and full of people serving everything you could ever need for a Muse gig. Laura and I went to get some food to discover that the burger, chips and drink combo was £7:50 each. The surprise at the price was eclipsed, though, by the quality of the food. It was a gourmet burger! I didn't have to queue at all - not for the food, the bar or even the loo! After having seen Wembley I've got high hopes for Liverpool's new Stanley Park Stadium - don't let me down guys...

It all could have got nasty at the end as most of the 90,000 odd fans all tried to catch the same tube, but the police were great, letting the crowd through gradually to keep us safe. Unfortunately, though, it still took us 2 hours to get from the stadium to Dan's car which was parked 5 stops along the tube, and there was a lot of love on the tube with everyone pressed against windows and doors. When the doors opened, people kind of popped out onto the platform!

All in all, it was fantastic. Laura got the tickets back in December for my Christmas present - I love her more every day. (Particularly the days when she's brandishing tickets...)

What's that coming over the hill? Is it a concept?

So here's the concept. Ever tried writing a song? It can be quite a painful experience. You're walking down the street humming when suddenly an idea drops into your head. You rush home, grab your guitar, strum some rough chords and write down a couple of lines. You can kinda hear what it should sound like, but you can't think of a good rhyme for life (wife, knife, strife...) and as the song slowly progresses, you forget the rhythm for the first bit. Soon the best bit of the song (your original idea) is forgotten amidst a see of scribbles and all you can think of is the annoying bit that you don't like.

The concept is a piece of software to ease the pain of writing songs. It'll allow you to stick down chords and words really easily as they come to you and play the whole thing back. I'm hoping to put a rhyming dictionary in for those difficult lines, and you'll be able to generate some great sounding accompaniments. In the space of half an hour, you'll have a completed song that you can print out (in lots of different forms (music score, guitar tab, just words etc...,) and burn to CD. That means that when you turn up at the band rehearsal, you won't spend an hour trying to explain how you imagined it would sound - you can show them. You could even email them an mp3 of the music before the rehearsal!

It all sounds great in theory but there are a few products on the market which do similar things. Market research here I come!

Songbird

After a lot of thinking and research I've come up with a brand new software concept that I like even more than my previous idea! After thinking through the legal implications of the other product, I decided to go back to the drawing board and see if I could come up with anything better, and I started thinking about Songwriting Software. I've done a quick bit of research into the market and it all looks positive so far...

I'm going to run the idea past a few songwriters that I know in the next few weeks (if you're one of them and you're reading this then watch out!) and then I guess I'll have to make a final decision.

I finally feel like I'm getting somewhere with this which is very exciting. Any thoughts and comments are very appreciated. More tomorrow...

Read me my rights

I've spent the weekend mulling over a document which the nice people at http://www.own-it.org/ have sent me. They kindly had a look through my software concept and have set down their thoughts on the Intelectual Property (IP) implications of the idea.

Their basic summary is that they think my users could use my software to breech copyright, and that there's a possibility that I (as the software creator) could be held liable for "Secondary Infringement" as a result. They've noted that this kind of case hasn't been tried in a UK court since tape-to-tape copying machines back in the 1980's, but with Napster and Kazaa being found guilty in similar situations (within other duristictions), they think it possible that the court may decide differently this time.

Part of the issue hinges around reproducing music which is under copyright. Copyright expires 70 years after a composer's death and so most music used for learning a solo instrument are free from copyright because of their age.

My idea is much smaller than Kazaa and Napster and, having read the Own It document, I feel certain that the majority of my users will use the software legally. I guess that this could still potentially leave me open to lawsuits, but my hunch (without getting accredited personal IP advice) is that this is unlikely. For me, the big issue is whether I want to persue a piece of software that could be seen as "unjust". The IP laws are there for a reason (to protect the IP of creative people) and trying to get away with as much as I can just for my own ends doesn't seem right.

Dilemas all round! I'm having a think to see if I can come up with any other potential ideas. Anyone out there with a burning desire for some music software?!

"Lawyers have been known to wrest from reluctant juries triumphant verdicts of acquittal for their clients, even when those clients, as often happens, were clearly and unmistakably innocent." Oscar Wilde

Too busy to be lonely

Have you ever stopped being busy for a moment, and found things not as you left them? I sometimes realise how lonely and insecure I am, and how much my priorities have changed.

I suddenly realise how much my friends mean to me, and how careless I've been with our relationships. Then I realise what a great honour it is to have the friends that I have, and how grateful I am for their wisdom, humour and grace.

"When Christ said: "I was hungry and you fed me," he didn't mean only the hunger for bread and for food; he also meant the hunger to be loved. Jesus himself experienced this loneliness. He came amongst his own and his own received him not, and it hurt him then and it has kept on hurting him. The same hunger, the same loneliness, the same having no one to be accepted by and to be loved and wanted by. Every human being in that case resembles Christ in his loneliness; and that is the hardest part, that's real hunger." Mother Teresa

You'll never walk alone...

I'm still in the denial stage of grieving following our (Liverpool's) failed attempt to win back the Champions League tonight.

"Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I don't like that attitude. I can assure them it is much more serious than that." Bill Shankly, In Sunday Times (UK) Oct. 4 1981

Never the same

The sunsets recently have been awesome! Apologies for the blobs on the shot - it's just dirt on my bedroom window.

How to take over the world

Conventional wisdom dictates that success comes to those who wait (along with ketchup). Never being one for convention, I've spent the last few months doggedly pursuing one of my childhood dreams of running my own business. Some people have suggested to me that it might be more prudent to build up experience before I launch into this adventure, but whilst I value their advice, I like to do things the hard way!

I'm a musician and a software engineer, and after a lot of research into other software markets, I started wondering about combining the two together. I've now built up an idea for a product that I hope will be successful, and I'm going through the process of checking it out before I launch into writing it. I'm hoping to document the journey here, as it happens, so feel free to join the ride! Failure is a possibility, but that makes the adventure even more fun!

Your thoughts, advice, support and encouragement will be very much appreciated along the way.