It’s amazing how a week away from the computer can open you eyes and re-align your perspective. It really highlighted to me how alive I feel when I spend a lot of time outside doing physical exercise – especially adrenaline sports such as windsurfing and surfing – and how 14 hours a day in front of a screen just sucks the life out of me. I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels like this! With the day to day pressure of earning money and with the routine of ‘normal’ life it is just so easy to forget what is really important to you.

So whilst the break has done me a world of good, in a funny way it has also made me feel less satisfied with my life as it is at the moment. That’s not at all a bad thing: I really think it’s important to keep looking at where you are and what you are doing, and asking yourself if it is in keeping with your ideas and dreams. Don’t get me wrong – I love what I do, but given the choice I would much rather be spending more time outside and in the water that I get to at the moment.

I guess what I am saying is that if you have the opportunity, get away from the computer, go outside, get refreshed. It sounds obvious, but it is actually surprisingly hard to do sometimes when everything else seems so pressing. I know I’ll be trying to do it more.

Anyway, I’m back in the fold now, in front of the computer, so normal service on all fronts should be resumed soon.

When contacted by FranceInfo, an Orange representative reportedly confirmed that that the carrier has been deliberately limiting speeds for all 3G capable phones on its network to 384Kbps, saying the move was aimed at ‘preserving the stability of the network’.— AppleInsider

I think a lot of people are going to be very pissed off about this – including me if it turns out O2 are doing this sort of thing in the UK too. I appreciate that network stability needs to be considered, but they need to be upfront and honest about this sort of thing, rather than just letting Apple take all the flak for something that is not actually their problem.

It’s very beta at the moment, and is bound to have all sorts of issues, so please bear with me while I sort them out.

Oh, and it probably won’t work at all in IE6 for now (call that an educated guess). I’ll sort it out when I have some time.

So I’m going to be writing the odd post, maybe a review or two of a few things that I have been trying out, and hopefully I will be cross-posting a few articles that I have written recently on my employer’s blog. It’s going to be all pretty relaxed, and I’m not going to get worked up if I don’t find time to put anything up for a couple of weeks or so – basically I’m saying don’t expect anything too regular.

As you have probably noticed, it’s a plain-jane vanilla Wordpress install at the moment (using the Dropshadow theme from Brian Gardner), as I wanted to get it back up asap. The design is pretty much done however, and just needs me to find some time to html/css it up and to put together the custom bits and pieces that I want on here. Should be done before too long if I don’t decide that I want to throw it all away and start again.

I might eventually migrate over some of the content from the old blog – but to be honest I am not that bothered, the little that was there was all feeling pretty stale to me;. I kinda feel like starting afresh with a nice clean slate anyway. If you have come here looking for something in particular, let me know and I will drag it back out.

The main feed URLs has also changed, and I’m intending to put together a separate feed of ‘eleswhere’ links, collated either via my delicious.com account or possibly using NetNewsWire’s ‘clippings’ feature. I’m not sure yet, so I’ll post the relevant URL(s) in due course.