PaperVision is an open source project to make 3D in Flash much easier than it has been.

I've only had a very quick play, but I was able to create this lovely photo cube very quickly.

It's based on an example on The Flash Blog. I can see a lot of potential for including this in my future flash work. 3D can make things look more impressive, but a sense of space can also make things easier to use.

Some very nice people have called me brave for handing in my notice and deciding to become freelance. They're wrong though. I've just not let myself think about it too much. If I had, then I would have talked myself out of it. They also seem convinced that I will be really successful and have no problems. I'm hoping they're right about that, the confident part of me thinks they are.

I've worked in government communications for five years in the web team of The Department for Work and Pensions. I sort of got the job by accident, while I wasn't really looking for a job. After the software …

This is my favourite recent discovery. A fantastic site for the new Simpsons Movie. The site is so good that I may go and see the film again.

The site is full of brilliant ideas and lots of cool games to play.

The part that has captured my imagination most is the create your own Simpsons character bit. Once you've made one, there are lots of ways to share it with your friends. What a brilliant piece of personalised viral marketing.

Here is my attempt, although I couldn't quite get the hair right.

Yesterday I went to my second OpenCoffee event. I've not done a lot since the last one, but this is mainly because I've been away to the exceedingly hot Zakynthos.

This is the fourth OpenCoffee they've had. I'm wondering how long they'll be able to keep up with the {quattro} naming convention. I'd be lost by the time we get to double figures.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun and met a lot of interesting and great people. I met less people this time, but talked to them more. It was great to find people with similar interests and find out what they were up to.

I've started a little scrap book of …

I went to OpenCoffee Leeds {Tre} yesterday to sample the coffee, cake and geeky conversation. All were excellent, although I got there a bit late and missed the best cake.

I met a lot of interesting people and collected a lot of business cards. I’m not completely sure I’d be able to match faces to cards now. Hopefully I’ll see many of them again. I tried to talk to as many people as possible, but this meant that I only talked very briefly to some people.

I also tried out my new origami business cards, which seemed to go down well. A few people suggested the excellent idea of making them a bit …

When I went to the first GeekUp event in Leeds I became very jealous of everyone's lovely business cards. I decided it was time to sort that out and make my own. I wanted mine to be a little bit different and hopefully be something that people would remember.

I've loved origami since my trip to Japan in 2002 and thought this would be an excellent thing to use. I'd also tested the idea in a previous project and it had been very successful.

Now the design is done, they're quite easy to mass produce. The hardest part of the design was drawing the diagrams and making the instructions clear. It's …

Code Complete is a book that talks you through how to construct computer programs. It doesn't look at any specific language and the things covered apply equally to web applications and pacemaker software.

It talks about the process and really makes you think about the way you do things and the best way to do things. Every chapter has really made me think and hopefully I'll be a better programmer for it. It's the sort of stuff I wasn't taught at university, but think I should have been.

It's been like having a wise programmer share with me a wealth of experience and knowledge. It's made me …

Kirkstall Festival was fantastic this year, and we had good weather for possibly the first time this summer. I'd helped Pyramid of Arts' Youth Group make an armada of sea creatures for the parade. We joined various other groups and schools from Leeds marching through the streets of Kirkstall. Everyone’s work was fantastic, and we were particularly pleased to be given the best group prize for our underwater parade creatures.

I'd gladly volunteered to play a giant drum in the parade. I like making a lot of noise, but I didn't realise how much pain a drum can cause repeatedly hitting your legs. …

I've made a 3D model of Pyramid of Arts' sculpture at Thwaite Mill. Pyramid of Arts is an arts charity bringing together artists with and without learning disabilities to work on large scale arts projects.

I wanted to have an experiment with creating 3D models in Sketch-up and see if I could get it added to Google Earth. Google Earth is a program by Google that displays pictures of the whole world and 3D models of some of it.

Pyramid made this sculpture about 3 years ago and had just finished it when I joined. It's Pyramid's first permanent work, so it would be really nice if it could be …

The weather in Leeds lately has been very random. Sunny one minute, torrential rain and thunder the next.

To help others know what weather I'm experiencing, I've made a handy ASP.NET control that displays the weather in Leeds. It shows a picture of me experiencing that weather and can also tell you the weather in several other places I've been to.

It can also change how the whole site looks based on the weather, but it doesn't do this at the moment. You can see this control on the right hand side of my blog's homepage.