December 06, 2007: Website design and web development

Brainfire is a freelance web design and web development company based in Berkhamsted, Herfordshire, near Hemel Hempstead. Run by Mat Harden, a passionate and experienced web designer, Brainfire specialise in standards compliant accessible websites. Services include web development, website help and updates, web standard and semantic coding of existing designs, HTML email marketing, bespoke website application development, PHP development, ASP development and web consultation.

For all enquiries, call Mat Harden on 07769 655 641 or email mat@brainfire.co.uk.

December 05, 2007: Garden glove specialists

My friends, the Garden Glove Specialists have recently added an on-line payment facility to their website to allow card payments for their Second Skin & Ultra gardening gloves.

They sell three types of gloves:

Ultra Glove - these latex rubber gardening gloves provide thorn resistance and are great for pruning roses and pulling brambles.

Second Skin - their most popular glove, nitrile rubber thorn resistant gardening gloves, which are flexible great for potting, tying up plants and any jobs where you want to feel what you're doing. And they're thorn resistant!

Easy Fit - the latest gardening gloves are very light weight and great for every day use. will be available to buy soon available to buy now!

Each gardening glove has a cotton back and elasticated cuff keep all dirt and bugs out! Everyone who uses them thinks they're fantastic!

May 31, 2007: I am not Brainfire Group

Occasionally I get requests from misguided companies (and lawyers) asking me to sell or hand-over domain names they believe have been registered by Brainfire. I'm am not a cyber-squatter. I do not register domain names in the hope that large corporations will pay huge sums to recover. Unfortunately for me a company called Brainfire Group does. Brainfire Limited and Brainfire Group are two entirely separate entities.

All I know about Brainfire Group is the following:

• They register domain names to the their address in Calgary, Canada
• They are involved in a number of domain name disputes with Nominet
• They have been involved in one of the few legal cases that have used Wikipedia as a court source

If you want to discover who has registered a domain name, use a WHOIS lookup such as the Geektools Whois tool.

March 20, 2007: If you can't beat 'em join 'em

I've finally snapped. After months of procrastinating I've decided to become a full Flickr member. As I already pay for hosting of a few domain names and the fact that I also have my own photo site - NotMyFace - I found it hard to go Pro. But Flickr is just too good. To mark the occasion, I've just uploaded the Best of Photo Booth and my Lomography collection.

March 08, 2007: Stuck on a train

Really chunked off! I've not got a good track record with late night trains, but this time it was not my fault. Went out for a drink with a mate last Thursday night in Soho. Left at a reasonable time to catch the 23:34 from Euston. This journey usually takes about 35 minutes, so I should be home just after 12 o'clock. No biggie. So the train gets to a couple of miles outside of Watford and stops. A minutes or two passes, I think nothing of it. I'm typing away on my laptop anyway. I'm using my time wisely. Then about five minutes pass. I'm thinking this trains taking it's sweet time. Then an announcement, "there's a broken down train at Watford, we can't move". Another couple of minutes, then "another train is on it's way to meet it, but there's signalling problems, so it will take a while… sorry". Another HOUR AND A HALF and we're still there. Fan-tas-tic!

So we're told that there's only one line in use at this time of night, so we just gotta wait. Then we hear that they've opened the other line, but we can't move onto it because of "severe signalling problems". Meanwhile, trains that have left Euston after us are now passing us on these other tracks. I'm on a course the next day in Brighton. I've got to be up at about 6am to catch a train. I'm not happy. We evetually get to Watford, wait there and then slowly progress, but stop at every signal. Whilst others caught some Z's, I forced myself to stay awake so I didn't end up in Milton Keynes again.

I got home at 02:15. I had about 3.5 hours sleep before the Ajax course I was so looking forward too. I couldn't believe it. A 35 minute journey took 5 times as long as it should. Chuffin marvellous!