Rick Hurst Web Developer in Bristol, UK

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Month: March 2009

Seven Things

While this blog is usually confined to techno-babble and “professional” stuff, it used to have a more personal tone. This post is all about me and is part of a meme called seven things, after Jon Tan deemed me interesting enough to join in!

1. Most of my teens and my early twenties I spent obsessing about being a rock star. I spent hours every day playing my bass guitar. I found it impossible to listen to music without dreaming up a scenario where I would end up in the band I was listening to – “no way – the Smiths are reforming, but Andy Rourke has lost an arm!! There’s only one option, and that is to ask Rick Hurst to join the band“. The peak of my music “career” was being dropped from a band on the advice of famous songwriter Guy Chambers. I’ve been to his house. He made me a cup of tea.

2. I only ended up with a career in web development by accident. I actually have a degree in environmental science, and tried for years to get a job in that field, but couldn’t get my foot in the door due to lack of experience. A friend suggested I put my cv on the “internet”, so I bought a dial-up modem and a copy of HTML for dummies, and six months later I was a professional web designer (it was the dot com boom – HTMLers were thin on the ground).

3. In 1997 I spent six months living in a van traveling around spain. I camped in the Andalucian mountains, in the woods and in urban streets, and lived like a king on about £15 a week. I supported myself by busking (mostly radiohead and oasis songs) to English tourists. With time on my hands I also wrote about fifty songs of my own, which later turned out to mostly the same, and a bit rubbish.

4. Most of my childhood I had a lazy eye and regularly used to have to wear an eye patch over the non-lazy one to encourage me to use the other one. I still find it difficult to look through both at once, but at least they now both point in the same direction. As a result i’m rubbish at ball sports, catching and 3D pictures/ films don’t work. Or those magic eye pictures.

5. I only met Jon Tangerine in bristol a couple of years ago, but our paths must have crossed on a regular basis in the early 90’s when he ran an acid jazz club night called “stump juice” at the connaught hotel in wolverhampton, where I was a student. I’ve never really been into clubbing, but that was a regular for me and my housemates, and considered a legendary night amongst wolverhamptonites with a vintage clothing habit.

6. I grew up in the East Anglian fens, and it nearly all ended there when I was 17. I was a passenger in a nasty car accident which resulted in myself and four other people crawling from the wreckage of a ford granada upside down in a ditch. Miraculously we all escaped with minor cuts and bruises. Although I’m a confident driver, I’m a really nervous passenger, and can’t stand being in a car with an erratic or risk-taking driver.

7. I got married in Las Vegas in 2001. The wedding cost 175 dollars, then we hired a convertible pontiac firebird and went on a road trip around nevada and california for our honeymoon, courtesy of egg. Hopefully we’ll go back one day and renew our vows, and take our son on a US road trip – maybe in a winnebago this time!

Ok, thats my ego indulged, so now according to the rules I have to “tag” seven people. For this to work, they need to be people who have a blog. While I know some interesting people who happily document their lives in the walled garden of facebook et al, they have decided that blogging isn’t for them, and hence rules them out in this occasion!

Keeping it in the family:

James Hurst – my cousin – talented web developer, musician, owner of River Rat Records and thoroughly nice bloke.

Some locals:

Iain Claridge – netsight/freelance designer and my barometer on what is cool and stylish

Tim Beadle – Accessibility pedan^^^^ enthusiast, underscore regular and pedaller of bicycles

Skateboarders

Whether you are interested in skateboarding or not, most of the skaters I know are creative in some way. There is a tendency for skateboarders to document themselves and their friends – photos, videos and blogs – skateboarders are all over it. I did actually intend to only tag skaters for this, but the people I had in mind have either let their blogs die or have already been tagged.

Mark Mapstone – I internet stalked Mark before I met him when I discovered he was a blogging skateboarder like myself. He can fly through the air like a bird on or off a skateboard and is a very entertaining writer.

Gavin Strange – aka jamfactory The most creatively prolific person i’ve met. He skates (occasionally!), designs boards, and takes photos and video of people riding them. and rides one of those bikes that don’t let you freewheel.

Bob Lands – Although the boblands site is no more, he’s gone all arty, bought an old camera from a charity shop and now blogs at surf or pie. He will be embarrassed by this, but it will get him back for encouraging random strangers to hug me in public (long story).

Whip – I’ve only met him a couple of times, but he’s got a cool popemobile van

For those i’ve tagged, and can’t resist the urge to ignore me:-

  1. Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
  2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird.
  3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
  4. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

archived comments

Thanks for the link dude!

This post is really interesting, its a great idea and i now know 7 new and very interesting things about you!

I think ill do the same on my blog, good idea old bean!

Gav 2009-03-11 23:47:05

cheers for the mention mista – I haven’t read this post yet, but I’m certain its full of the usual ‘hurst genius’. bloody hell, I know that Gav/Jam bloke too… small world hey?

Mark Mapstone 2009-03-12 15:57:25

Hi Rick,

Thanks for the tag 🙂 I guess that means I’d better write a blog post…

Cheers,

Tim

Tim Beadle 2009-03-13 09:35:52

Curse you Rick Hurst!

Does this mean I have to do this now? 😉

Bob 2009-09-14 13:28:08

Holistic Community website rebuild/ reskin



One of the projects I have worked on recently is the Holistic Community website – a directory site for Therapists, Training Courses and Treatment rooms. This was an interesting project, as I was originally approached to make a few amends, but the previous developer refused to hand over the php code running the site, therefore the only option was to rebuild it, based on the existing site and a database export. I have to confess that I went about this project the wrong way – the database structure was far from ideal, and also I subcontracted the initial build to an apprentice who was learning php, who then left halfway through the project! As a result I had to rewrite all of the code.

In retrospect this would have been an ideal project to build on a framework or CMS, but this would have been too steep a learning curve for the apprentice. By trying to initially replicate the old site (including numerous multi-page forms), and using the existing database structure (resulting in lots of convulted multiple table joins), and using a novice php developer, and taking it on at a time when I was too busy with other projects, the project dragged on a bit and I probably did more than double the amount of work that I needed to – not ideal on a fixed-price project! However, the bright side is that it is a nice example of a rebuild/ reskin, and I am full of ideas about how I could undertake similar projects in the future in a much more efficient way.

Bristol named as world innovation hot spring

bristol_hot_spring.png

Bristol appears on this innovation map complied by McKinsey and the World Economic Forum. This is fantastic recognition for Bristol. However, as Andy Parkhouse of Team Rubber points out, local government support is extremely patchy when it comes to the digital media industry that helped put us on the map. Bristol seems to be suceeding, despite the lack of funding, but there are numerous successful projects in the city, such as Bristol Media and BMEX, that are being virtually ignored when it comes to funding. As pointed out in one of the comments, it seems that as far as SWRDA are concerned, if it isn’t an old building, or doesn’t appear on TV, they just don’t understand it.

archived comments

As I said in my comment on the original McKinsey article, I believe that this chart seriously underestimates the amount of innovative work taking place in Bristol – and other European cities – because it is based solely on US patents. It is not possible to patent a large part of the digital media and creative work that takes place in this city, so however innovative it may be it will not register on this chart.
Personally, I agree that there should be more support from the government, in terms of either grants or tax breaks, for start up businesses and for research and development. I think SWRDA and similar organisations should take a more proactive role in promoting innovation and idea generation, maybe taking the mediasandbox program as a model?

Nigel Legg 2009-03-05 13:18:46