Amsterdam, from what I can remember

As I mentioned in my previous post a trip had been organised for Amsterdam over the summer; and Amsterdam I visited too. I was, for the second time in my life, sitting on a Ryanair flight at an ungodly time in the morning head-bound for Amsterdam airport, trying desperately not to drift off into a slumber.

The flights to Amsterdam from the UK are short - very short. The plane barely seems to level out throughout the entire journey; more accurately, it simply spends the first twenty-two and a half minutes of the journey taking off and the later twenty-two and a half minutes landing, much like God almighty just tossed the plane himself.

I almost forgot about this place!

Hello there fellow subscribers; correction, hello myself. I almost forgot about this place and it was starting to fall apart. Never fear, for now the web site has been renovated better than Michael Jackson's nose... wait a second. Umm... Let's move on. As you can probably see, there's now a brand new blog design to go with a brand new wave on enthusiasm towards my blogging.

But before I digress into an abstract account of nothing-much-at-all, I must concentrate on the subject at hand: travelling around Europe. So much has happened recently that I am not sure where to start - perhaps in Prague - the first destination of my fragmented journey.

It's been a while since my last entry...

It’s been a while since my last entry, not because I have been particularly busy or have had nothing to write about; rather, because I have simply not set aside any time to actually write. It seems that I have been sitting down with a subject in mind to write about and then becoming distracted and stopping.

During this time I have, however, decided to add a few more novels to my reading list - a very silly idea since I still have over a dozen left and only two months to read them! But the list serves well its purpose to act as a reminder of the books I still want to read. The first one, Slaughterhouse-5, I purchased a few days ago and I am to start after finishing my current book; then, there's a few books I am interested in reading after finding out about them on Wikipedia's article on books banned by the government, including this book, which looks quite interesting. Surprisingly, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm were on there - both books I have already read.

Learning jQuery - a JavaScript extension

For a while I've wanted to set up my own image gallery that pulled images off Flickr and displayed them externally without flash or any flickr logos littering the page. Initially, I set up a basic gallery using JavaScript and I have subsequently moved on to learn jQuery to add more functionality to my gallery, including transitions between images and animations when changing pages. My progress can be seen by clicking here.

I found a very helpful blog that teaches the basics using highly simplistic video tutorials for absolute beginners in the coding world, such as my self. Whilst I am confident to an extent with basic JavaScript, I am by no means an expert or competent computer scientist, so learning jQuery was a daunting prospect, though I had my friend Jack to help out.

An inspired spot of graphic designing

After trawling through a few old links and favourites on my computer from my younger days (and I do mean my younger days) I came across a web site that I used to love - and still do to an extent. The web site is 99seconds.com and it's a design portfolio from a Bristol based designer called Adi Gilbert. Inspired by his work, I tried out the 'sketchy' style of graphic design myself and came up with the skull image above.

Whilst trawling through the web site I also came across other little gems, including twoand8bmx.com, which itself was designed by 99seconds' Adi. I've always had a soft spot for the lithographic styled black and white images on their t-shirts and other clothing - a style that I will probably go on to try next.