Paul Annett

One of the things which sticks in my mind about the first time I stayed at my then future-wife’s flat in Bristol is the pile of unsorted CDs and empty cases which were strewn haphazardly around her stereo. I couldn’t understand how anybody could take such little care - not just because of the damage they could suffer but also out of convenience.

I have hundreds of CD albums, and when Relly and I met they were all on my CD shelves, alphabetised by artist. She says I’m anal - life’s too short to arrange the CD collection like this, but I say life’s too short NOT to. I don’t want to spend hours searching for a particular CD.

Of course, now that all the music’s in iTunes and on the iPod there’s no argument. I’ve stopped fighting The Battle of the Alphabetised CD Collection.

These days all our CDs just take up space. Maybe they’d look nicer sorted by colour.

Almost all my free time at the moment is dedicated to preparing our house for baby’s arrival. Although we’re both really looking forward to it, the realisation of how much we have yet to do is quite worrying.

The only thing this weekend which justified a break from the chores was the return of the Cybermen on Doctor Who. If there was something not to be missed, I thought that would be it. Last year the Daleks made a triumphant return, last month saw K9’s reasonably welcome reappearance, but Saturday’s Rise of the Cybermen was a disappointment. Particularly so after last week’s episode (The Girl in the Fireplace) was the best yet. David Tennant makes a brilliantly comedic Doctor.

The Doctor: “It’s a temporal hyperlink!”
Mickey: “What’s one of them?”
The Doctor: “No idea. Just made it up. Didn’t want to say ‘magic door’.”

Our work-horse of a 2001-model digital camera now rarely switches to ‘record’ mode, so can’t be relied upon for Baby’s precious first moments. Unfortunately a replacement is not as high up the shopping list as other more vital baby-related purchases such as some flooring for the nursery, so I’m charging my DV camera as that also takes stills. The writing of the baby shopping list is “mummy’s” responsibility. It’s she who must remain stress-free during pregnancy so only she who knows what will help her achieve that (though another pair of Rocketdogs will likely raise my suspicions).

As this will be our first baby, it’s both exciting and scary at the same time. Each time we’re asked “how long until the baby” it seems to get rapidly shorter. This peaked when we no longer counted the time remaining in months, but started counting in weeks (two months became 8 weeks, then 7 etc.). Yesterday we switched from counting the weeks to counting the days.

My new desk space, Clearleft’s office

(apologies for the atrocious title on this entry)

Yesterday I started sharing office space with Clearleft, one of the web design agencies who I regularly freelance for.

Since leaving Harrods.com to be my own boss I’ve been working from my home office, apart from the short times I spent away consulting on web projects for BT and IBM. With a baby due any time I imagine that it would get increasingly difficult to concentrate on getting things done at home, so the move to an office is A Good Thing.

Obviously when the little one is born I’ll be taking a couple of weeks off from work to get to know him, as this is very important for the bonding process between baby and parents. But apart from that, I’m now full time in my central Brighton office, and it’s all very exciting.

I’m looking forward to my time here. It’ll be good for us all to have other web designers for company, as we’re all pretty used to working alone from our home offices. And what better company for me to have? Clearleft is run by three of the most respected Web Standards experts in the UK, Andy, Rich, and Jeremy. Also sharing the office is Pete, who works for Creative Commons. I definitely got the better end of the deal there, and am grateful for their invitation to office-share. I’m sure we’ll all find collaborating on projects much easier by being in the same place.

To celebrate the new office I invested in some new shoes. Not a natural way to celebrate (my wife would disagree), but I saw them and had to have them. Feet, meet Mr Happy.