There are people who can fall asleep once their chosen bedtime occurs (they can also programmatically wake at a chosen hour also). I am not one of those people. The minute my head hits the pillow, my mind races, thinking about what has happened and what will happen. For as long as I was able to read, books have been my means of falling asleep. Nothing else works- tiredness, TV, copious quantities of alcohol- if I don't read, I don't sleep.

Apart from the technical books I read for work (read them when you go to bed, they'll definitely put you to sleep, but then you have to read them again to comprehend them) I tend to favour detective/thriller/action novels and I go through a lot of them. I had to start getting books from the library as my bookshelves were overflowing.

It has been only in recent years did I realise my healthy appetite for paperback novels comes from my uncle Joe, (who is in fact my great-uncle Joe, as in my father's uncle). I've seen his house, it's chock full of books- books to the ceiling. He is quite partial to books in the vein of the Bourne Identity (although he didn't like the sequels, or Matt Damon's movies). Joe gives me piles of books and I quite enjoy the Ludlum thrillers like the Janson Directive and similar spy/military novels. 

I have found though, that because I was reading so many books, I had to create a separate blog to keep track of what I've read.  When I get time, I write up reviews, so I can go back through them afterwards, if I want to be reminded of the book or if someone asks for a recommendation (they're really bad reviews, I make no apologies, they're really only for my benefit). I can usually remember if it was a good book or how the story develops, but my stumbling block is always with book titles and author names. Technology, as always, to the rescue.

I've never sown a thing in my life, but recently after cleaning up my garden, I decided that I would plant some vegetables, specifically some onions and scallions (I don't really have space for any larger vegetables).
Unfortunately I decided to do this in May, so when I went looking for onion and scallion seeds, it was too late in the year to plant the more robust varieties, so I settled on some Italian Barletta Onions and some Spring Onions (Scallions). I planted a large quantity but only four actually developed and today I picked them all.

I was actually quite disheartened with the crop- I thought I would get many more. I think I used too much peat moss and possibly didn't water them enough to encourage more germination. Regardless, I was going to enjoy my crop and decided to eat them the best way- raw, on crackers with an (un)healthy amount of cheddar on top.

The beauty of scallions is you can eat them raw without poisoning yourself, which happens with onions. If I was disheartened before, the taste has definitely encouraged me to try it again next year, earlier this time, and have a right harvest, all through the summer. Growing stuff is great.

Welcome to the second version of this blog. I launched the first version at some point in September 2009 and had been updating it sporadically since then. This new site will hopefully be the push to start updating more regularly.

I had hoped to keep updated, not just with content, but also a unique style for each blog post (like Jason Santa Maria's blog or Greg Wood's blog or Dustin Curtis' blog). In theory this was a great idea, but for me, in practice it posed a huge barrier to posting new content. What would happen is that I'd have an idea, then it'd be put on the back-burner until I had time to style it up. It would take me ages to write the piece then I'd start styling it and even going through different iterations was too time consuming.

So I finally decided to create a single design/template system. I had been using Wordpress since the beginning, and although I liked a lot of aspects of Wordpress, the templating system just didn't agree with me- I am well versed in PHP, to the point that I preferred working with my own naming conventions and PHP conventions, so I used my own hand-made CMS, which I use for commercial work over at Pixelcode. This gave me a huge amount of freedom to experiment with different ideas, most of which haven't made their way into the site yet, but are on my list of work to do.

One idea that made it through, which I have been trying to do for years (literally years) is a stylesheet switcher. You'll see above the main page-title, 'Dark Woods Edition' and 'Sunny Days Edition' links, which switch the styles from the default 'Dark Woods' to the 'Sunny Days' stylesheet- which has a higher contrast. It's my own Jakob Nielsen corner.

I authored the HTML in XHTML Strict, more for convenience than anything else. I've started calling div classes after HTML5 tags, and I hope to switch the entire site over to HTML5 soon. I've used a liberal amount of CSS3 throughout the site for transparent effects- I will have to create IE stylesheets too, for my IE visitors.

I haven't enabled comments, as I found they were a bit of a nuisance in Wordpress. I'm in two minds whether or not to implement comments at all. If I did, it'd probably be comments via Facebook or Twitter.
For previous articles, please visit v1.johnrainsford.com. Hopefully links to previous articles should redirect automatically. If there is anything missing or chucking out 404s, please let me know.