20 x 200 - Affordable art prints. $20 for prints with a print run of 200 pieces. Interesting for the new house (if I ever get one).

Damn, the whole news years thing came and went by and I didn’t get a chance to finish off my end of 2010 review. Still got a couple more posts on this.

Reading

On account of the audiobooks the actual reading of books has somewhat been lackluster. The last book I think I actually read was Amin Maalouf’s Origins. Prior to that I finished of Malcom Gladwell’s ‘What the Dog Saw’. Interspersed I tried getting into ‘Black Swan’ and the Osamu Tezuka art and biography book with different levels of success. Finally I finished of Beatrice and Virgil, by Yann Martel - which I actually didn’t enjoy. As much as Life of Pi blew my mind, Beatrice and Virgil just left me cold. Pretty poor showing. It’s not that I don’t have a ton of books that I really want to read, it’s just that finding the descipline to actually do the reading is a bit difficult.

The countless articles I’ve read online and in the various magazines I’ve bought over the year don’t get counted. The tweets I’ve read and wasted more time on, don’t get counted. That said, I am a bit embarressed to confess that on more than one occasion I would by the Economist (which I honestly believe is one of the best magazines for getting information on what’s going on in the world) and not actually read much of it, past the cover story. I think what I’ll try and do is, once a month try and actually get through an issue of the economist. Every week is a tall order, but once a month should be ok.

I also bought a few issues of Wired. The typical price in Lebanon is 19,000LL, which is approximately $12.5, around 8.5 quid, which is nearly double the cover price. Which is probably why I’m going to try and limit myself to reading this magazine once every couple of months.

I didn’t get into any new magazines over this last year, which is strange. I keep wanting to buy a Computer Arts, or a Mac World or something like that, but always end up putting it back on the shelf, as it just feels like a lot more disposable than the price tag requires.  The one nice thing that gets imported however is ‘The Guardian’ weekly. This is a digest of all the top stories in the Guardian provided in this A4 stapled format, which is easy to digest on a Saturday morning. It’s definitely something I’m considering buying more often in the future.

I guess I’m not being controversial here when I say I’d like to read a few more books. How I go about this is going to be interesting. Maybe I need to train myself to read at least 10 pages before I go to bed, multiplied over 30 days gives me 300 pages, which is roughly the size of an average novel. Sure some books are larger, but we’re generalizing here. Obviously best laid plans and all of that, but it could become a way of life.

It’s an interesting experiment, and will guarantee at least one book a month minimum.

Today is a slow day. Three days off, I’ve decided I’m not going anywhere today, except maybe to the supermarket (and that I’ll do pretty early today). The rest of the day I’m going to spend reading, writing, drawing, coding, in different bursts.

One of the things that I’ve realised is that I can do certain things in bursts of up to an hour. I have to train myself to be able to actually accomplish something, anything in a hour, because honestly after that initial hour things get a bit stale. On the odd occasion that I’m actually engrossed in what I am doing and moving forward, then obviously I should continue (if of course I can do it), but after that first hour I should just move onto something else and maybe come back to it.

You know that time inbetween creating something and not finishing it, you reflect, ideas keep coming to you and you have this thirst to complete it, because your time is limited on it. You’re feeding the thirst and hopefully that will mean that you’re also more productive in the long run.

Shifting towards something a little more personal, the biggest part of 2010 and the most impactful.

Life

Even with all of the other things going on in my life, the biggest thing to happen to me in 2010 was that I rediscovered my life, and by that I mean I finally found the person I want to share my life with. It wasn’t easy getting here, I’ll tell you that much, and I honestly wasn’t even actively looking for it and it landed in my lap, with a little help from me. The funny thing is that for ages it’s always felt like this was all inevitable, and yet not a day goes by that I’m not thankful that I’ve finally found Yasmine. The even stranger thing about this is that I’ve also completely forgotten how it felt like to be single, where you didn’t have someone that genuinely deeply cared about you in that way (don’t get me wrong, the love from my family and friends in Greece and England is beyond words and questioning, but this is different).

In life you can never have everything, and when I moved over here, I knew that I was giving up a ton of stuff, but crucially I was also getting something that I can never get in England, and that’s family, mine and Yasmine’s. Once again this is a double edged sword but it’s one that I am extremely grateful for and really enjoying at the moment.

I love the fact that I don’t really have to cook, unless I really want to. I like the fact that I am generally taken care of in that department completely and totally. Be it my future mother in law, Yasmine, my aunts, whatever. I like the fact that I don’t have to iron, except on the rare occasions. I love the fact that the country is small and I can get around relatively easily.

I don’t like the banking sector in the country, nor do I like the stupid traffic in Beirut. I don’t like the insane drivers, nor how they force me to act while I drive on the road either. I do like the weather generally, although I do actually wish it would act like the seasons. We really honestly didn’t feel any autumn, nor are we honestly feeling the winter either. I guess this is all part of the global warming effect which I should discuss in more detail in the future.

Work

My moving over to Lebanon and taking a job at PDP from Arup was a major one. So far it’s given me exactly what I expected, although the size of the project and time frame that I was given to complete a project I have been working on, for 4 months of my time here, was certainly unexpected. It’s not been fun and it’s stressed me out in a way I didn’t expect. It wasn’t an issue of getting everything correct or forgetting something, it was an issue of maintaining a good level of work in a very tight timeframe, with junior engineers, while I tried to learn the way in which things were done in this office.

There are a ton of things that I want to institute in the office. Something will take a good long while to get them going, while others will be more immediate to implement. The best thing I learnt while working for any company is the following:

Don’t ask for permission…rather ask for forgiveness

Do it first and then claim ignorance later. It’s not like you’re trying to upset anyone, rather trying to push any company forward is a tough thing that takes persistence and time and effort to change something that many people don’t want to change.

Continuing with my year end review, I talked about blogging in general, now I get down to this site in particular and creativity and projects in general.

Website

Regarding this website, very little was done in 2010. I tweaked the design ever so slightly and updated the engine to the latest version of Habari, but apart from that I honestly haven’t done that much. That’s not true, I added some @media queries and did a bit of updating when it comes to trying to give the site some responsive design. Sadly it’s not really there yet, or at least it doesn’t render the way I imagine it to render on my iPhone, but that’s only because I’ve not done enough testing and reading around the subject.

I keep wanting to update with a lighter version, but I keep coming back to the darker colours and staying put. I know I will probably go for a slightly lighter motif pretty soon. Also I’d like to clean up the code finally as it’s a bit of a mess really. That’ll be the first thing I would like to do in January 2011. The design will pretty much remain the same, the underpinning will get lighter, the colours will change and I’ll probably add more doodles and images to places.

I guess I’m definitely of the mind to continue with the evolution of the site rather than a complete revolution. It works for me and it’s lasted the longest since I launched this site.

Creatively

Creatively this year has had some immense highs and some very long creative-less months. The main peak of creative activity as you can imagine all happened during my sabbatical months. Sadly that wasn’t meant to last as shortly within those months I had to start planning my change of life and country. Having said that I still managed to do a few things. First of which was this drawing for my cousin, using my lettering style which I developed a few months earlier for another little pet project.

Then there was this little drawing, which then got made into a glass painting which I get to look at every day.

I managed to make a few logos, some of which were actually used in the physical world, which again I thought was fantastic to see.

As if all of that wasn’t enough I got to complete my first draft and having been slowly hacking away at the second draft. It’s not as far along as I want it to be, but then again when was it ever going to be? Being this far along is reward enough. At least I’ve not given up on the dream. Given up on the dream, I’ve not worked this much on it ever. I’m waking up every morning and actually moving the process along.

Then finally, out of nowhere, I’ve even started off and created a little new robot character. I know I have a love for these things. It was completely by accident and it was inspired by me wanting to use my iPhone for something other than just consumption. I wanted to use it for creating. I am in the process of drawing a small backlog of pages so that I can start soliciting it on a weekly basis, which should be a nice distraction from all the other stuff that I’ve got going on at the moment.

When put like that, the output doesn’t seem too bad. There are a ton of projects I didn’t get to start, which I put the idea down on paper but never got around to. Ultimately however things actually were completed.

One of the things that I’m going to try and do next year is put rough deadlines. Even if I don’t meet these deadlines, at least I’ll push myself in the general direction of actually doing the work. Yes I might get a bit stressed while I do it, but that’s ok, it means I can look back on the year and be happy for what I completed. Actually completing projects is what keeps me happy. I’m also definitely going to buy this book.

This post is all about the numbers. It’s about being the 1600th post on Broken Kode, the 51st post for the month of December 2010 (which also equals the largest number of posts ever in a single month) and the start of the year of end review for 2010.

I originally wanted to have a single post with everything but honestly this post just got out of hand (clocking at over 2000 words), so I’ll be posting it in parts, with a specific focus in each post. I’ll then do a review post right at the end.

Come the 4th of January the site will have been online for 7 whole years! As 7 is also my lucky number (don’t actually know why I think it is, as I’m sure billions of other people feel the same way, but the number 7 makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside), hopefully it will be a banner year for me.

Having said that 2010 has been an exceptional year for me so far. So before 2010 leaves us forever I thought I’d drop a quick salute and reflect on the year that was before I jump into the year that will be (it’s also been a few years since I did one of these, because frankly this shit takes AGES to compile and is a proper time suck).

On Blogging

This is an interesting one. Blogging is dead as I know it. I’m not saying that blogging is dead, but the way that I liked to interact with people via their blogs and their long form words is completely gone. That’s really sad for me to see and actually feel, because I really enjoyed that aspect of things.

Twitter has come to replace that. Honestly my main issue with Twitter is that I’m not feeling much in the way of interaction, at least so far. Maybe I’m going about it the wrong way. I don’t reply and respond to every single tweek and when I do it generally goes unanswered (typically).

So what’s a guy to do? I like the fact that everyone and their dog is on twitter. I hate the fact that I can’t write the length that I want. I can tweet from work, but only via my iPhone (which isn’t a big deal). The thing is the form of communication doesn’t rightly appeal to me.

I guess that’s not completely true, it does on some level, but it’s not my preferred method of online communication. Maybe I just need to embrace things, or maybe I just need to keep building this site up, such that it also becomes a destination of sorts.

Maybe branch out into Twitter a bit more. I tried to do it these last few weeks. It was mildly successful, if you consider getting more people following you as being successful.

The ‘Kode doesn’t have a specific focus. People might come here to get a few interesting links, a few snarky comments, maybe look at some pretty pictures, and maybe download a bit of code or whatever.

For the past few years I’ve really been link blogging with some comments, as that was all that I could bring myself to do. In depth commentary takes time, time away from other things, things which I’m enjoying just as much.

So the task for the 7th year of Broken Kode is maybe to refine the commentary slightly - I still like the haphazard linking. The thing is, can I refine how I present things? What good will that achieve? I guess it ultimately depends on what I am trying to achieve with the blogging. It’s an outlet. By now it’s habit. Blogging is about presenting your ideas and I guess I’m trying not to loose site of that, since it honestly seems everyone else around me has.

There are those people that have not. People like Gruber, Swiss Miss, Kottke, Joen and a few others, but by and large the art of personal blogging isn’t as vibrant as it once was…or is there too much noise out there that I can’t really distinguish between the good, the bad and the ugly?

Personal blogs that are updated with any regularity are a rarity. Don’t worry about me I’ll keep the lights turned on.

For no other reason than for some good reading here’s some end of year posts and podcasts to look back at the year that was 2010:

1. The worst logos and identities…

2. …and the best logos and identities

3. Best Manga of 2010

4. Manga Out Loud podcast - first time I’ve listened to this podcast, enjoyed it a great deal.

5. iFanboy’s all media round up - love what the boys usually do. I pretty much agree with Josh for just about everything and ignore just about everything that Ron says, mainly because I know that our opinions just don’t meet,…well hardly ever. The whole X-men thing is just, really?

6. Guardians Books of 2010 review podcast

7. Wait, What? Podcast - Graeme and Jeff talking mainly about Marvel and DC’s changes over the year and where they go from now.

8. Follow James Allen’s excellent review of each Formula 1 team this year. So far he’s covered Force India, Mercedes and Red Bull

9. While we’re talking Formula 1, don’t forget to listen to the excellent Formula 1 advent calendar by Christine over at Sidepodcast

I’ll keep updating this post with more as I find them. Enjoy.

See now that it is weird. Over the years I’ve heard sooo much good stuff about the Comics Reporter. Unfortunately every time I put his RSS feed into Google Reader it just gobbled it up and ignored the formatting. Somehow, while I was exploring my feeds, I actually happened on the real feed, and damn it’s brilliant. He actually links pictures to the birthdays of people and the interviews are full format rather than gobbled garbage. Here’s the link if you guys are having the same problem: http://feeds.feedburner.com/CrBriefings

The Indie Mac Gift Pack - I know it feels like a bunch of adds on the site right now, but seriously I’m more interested in how amazing these websites look like. This one is completely different than the previous one, but better in a completely different way. Hover over the monsters…

So, the first part of this experiment is complete. I’ve basically spent the last 3 weeks blogging solidly on the ‘Kode. It’s been a mixture of links and opinion columns and random thoughts. in that time I’ve not tweeted at all, in fact it’s all been on here. So the next step is to see which of the two platforms garners more attention in general. Obviously on Twitter it’s just going to be that, a whole bunch of links with very little commentary, but lets see if that platform is any good at generating traffic towards this site.

I’m just curious how powerful twitter is and if it has effectively killed blogging as I know it (I believe it has, but I’d like to make sure). So it might be a little quiet over here. If you are looking for the same type of content, then I’d suggest you head on over to @khaledaboualfa for a little bit of the same, although I’m sure I’ll post things on here as well (just no where as near the level of the past 3 weeks).

If you’ve not been to the Google Chrome Webstore, go have a wonder around there and come back. Interesting no? It’s basically a big place to find interesting things on the web that let you do stuff. Some stuff is optimised for the Google Chrome browser, others not so much.

One of the things I’ve found is that whenever you go to a new service there does seem to be the choice of signing in using your google account, which is INCREDIBLY useful and generally a major hurdle already passed to get to use something.

The first thing I’ve installed is the Graphic.ly application. What can I say, I’m a comic geek, so this seemed like the natural thing to do. I still don’t like reading comics on my computer (I’ve ever really done that for one thing, and that’s because it stopped being published in English, and so I was forced to find another method to finish off the story). The interesting thing here isn’t Graphic.ly itself, it’s the fact that I’m trying it in the first place.

The service has been online for like a year or something and this is the first time I’m actually using it. Why? Because it’s there and it was easy. In fact I’m already reading a comic with art by the great Rick Mays, whom I’ve not read anything of any substance since Kabuki Scarab (one of the best mini series you’ve probably never read).

It just kind of proves a point of what the store is meant to be about, slowly but surely letting you discover stuff that was already there, now it’s just a hell of a lot easier to access.

Just been listening to the Sidebar nation, and they have this fasinating interview with El Coro, about the graphic novel he’s created in his spare time, it’s called ‘The Transient Man’ and it’s seriously interesting, seeing as you can read 120 pages of the book online.

I’ve been drawing a panel a day of my new comic. It’s going to be an online comic that comes out daily. Currently I’m trying to sort out a backlog so that if I can’t do a panel on a day it’s not the end of the world. This has been incredibly fun to do, as I’m seeing this world being built before my very eyes, in an incredible fast way. Is it as complex as my graphic novel? Of course not, it was never going to be that. This is a fun comic to read in the RSS reader on your way to work.

The special thing about it I guess is that it’s in full colour (or at least the limited pallete I’ve chosen) and was created on the iPhone. The reason I guess I’m doing it on the iPhone is part convenience and part novelty. The convenience is the fact that I can open my phone at any point and just doodle some more on a panel and then get back to whatever I was doing. The reason why this works rather than my using a Wacom pen, is the fact that the artwork is being created right underneath my ‘pen’ rather than infront on a screen. Closest to a digital sketchbook I’ve got, so I’m intrigued to see what opportunities an iPad will provide.

The creative process has been interesting, in so much as I’ve basically not written a script. The script get’s written as I draw. It gets updated and an idea will take another form, and I’ll end up drawing like 5 new panels or something taking the story in a completely different and interesting fun direction.

The thing about it all is that the world and the characters are becoming real very quickly. As with anything the more you do it the better you get at it, and it’s also interesting seeing how the look of the characters is evolving as I get more proficient at drawing them, with my current tools. There is a slow but constant evolution to the characters, which I’ve found to be very rewarding.

2 weeks ago I didn’t have anything, now I am looking at about two week’s worth of comics and several sketches and images of the various characters. The thing about this endevour is that once I hit play, I need to make sure that I create this thing in a timely fashion. I hit my daily deadline and if I don’t I have to make it up over the weekend. That gives me a two day buffer. I don’t want to share anything at the moment, but once I’ve got a month’s worth of stuff, I’ll be sure to start sharing and hoping you’ll share the love by telling others around you.

Feeling drained after that long trip to Syria yesterday (and back). It’s the first week where I don’t have a deadline at the end of Friday. I have to issue something minor, but by and large it’s not that tough a week. Thank fuck. It’s been pretty damn intense these last few weeks/months, but we’ve come through, and people are relatively happy with what we did.

There are elements that we could do further, edit, change etc, but ultimately we’ve done a pretty solid job for the 3 months work we’ve completed. Now I’ve got to haul my ass out of bed and take a shower and get outta here. Can I be bothered? Can I fuck.