As the great saying goes: Necessity is the mother of invention.  Well, last night, my wife trimmed my hair for me and the left side was a bit shorter than the right side.  I got up this morning and decided that I'd tidy it up a bit.  Unfortunately, I realised too late that the head wasn't on the clippers so I cut a swathe through my hair that's left me looking like a spayed cat.

Enter Photoshop and the marvels of digital photography.

What was a disaster was saved by our talented graphics whiz, Claire, an iPhone and Photoshop.  Take a picture, flip it in Photoshop, print it, cut it out and stick it on with a trusty Pritstick. The pictures show a result that is probably more subtle than Joan Rivers' facelifts!

Before and After:

It's been a busy week this week.  We've had 2 e-commerce sites go live:

• www.nauteriors.co.uk
• www.pilot-europe.com

We've got a third site which is 90% complete and should go live on Monday with a bit of work over the weekend and a fair wind behind us.  We're also part way through building an e-commerce site for an equestrian centre who sell equestrian clothing online.  That's moving along nicely and should be finished and live before long as well.

Communication has been fun with my home broadband going down for 24 hours and the phones in the office going down for most of the day today.

And lastly, at 5.00pm this evening I received a call from a client saying that their secure certificate for their web site had expired and that they had an advert in a magazine tomorrow promoting their online music store. The datacentre we use hadn't invoiced us or sent anything out to let us know that the certificate was expiring.  This is something they always do so this was a glitch in the system.

Anyway, I spoke to Globalsign who issues the certificates and to Donhost support and got exellent service from both.  An hour or so later and the new secure certificate was installed and the site for the client is ready to take orders again.  If anyone wants any classic rock then have a look at www.destinyrocks.com and rest assured that your details will be taken securely!

There are other developments but more about that later!

Oooo!!! Very frustrated this evening.  I've really got out of the habit of coding over the last 3 or 4 years and now I'm working on a little personal project that means I have to get my hands dirty with some PHP again.

I hope this is as close as I'll get to feeling like someone who has had some sort of trauma and has to learn to read and write again. When we're small and we start reading we just accept that we start at the beginning and build on our knowledge. When you've had a skill and you lose it then it's extremely frustrating.

What I have to do is some fairly basic stuff but I almost have to go back to the 'cat', 'sat', 'mat' principle and work my up. 

Oooh!  The latest bit of fun from the offices of Insight.  This is how it works:

• A £2.39 iPhone Application called Phonecam which turns your iPhone into a wweb cam that will take photos every 'x' seconds and upload them to a server.
• Our website then uses Ajax to display the most recent image and refresh it every 5 seconds

It's absolutely as simple as that.  It's taken me about 10 minutes to get it all set up and it looks like it's working a treat.  So, it's 9.30 on a Friday night and I'm sat at home looking after the kids.  If you're looking now, then you might catch a glimpse of me making a cup of tea.  If you're reading this at any other time then you'll see whatever I'm pointing the camera at right now.

I can't think of any totally practical applications for this but if you have an iPhone and it's just sitting in a dock on your desk or something then why not do something creative with it!