Hey dad, I know how to work the internet.

Yesterday I spent all morning trying to upload a CSV (Comma Separated Value) file into a table in one of our client’s databases. Yes I know some of you hardcore techies are now sniggering away behind your Skylander collections, and I guess you are right it should have taken me the time to write this sentence to complete, but it wasn’t happening fast and everything I tried threw an error.

Needless to say, this frustrated behaviour continued for a good 2 hours-until a moment of magic happened.

Ray a designer who sits alongside me and was probably fed up with me swearing at my desktop, quietly suggested that I talk him through what I was doing, as a way of working out where the problem was.

Ray said nothing as I calmly talked through the problem stage by stage. By stage 2 in the process it quickly dawned on me exactly why the file had not uploaded correctly and within 30 seconds the data from the CSV file was loaded in to the database.

By simply calming me down and focusing my attention into describing the process in layman’s terms, the problem was quickly solved. Genius!

So why did I not spot this simple error earlier on in the day? Quite simply it was arrogance, driven by the belief that I and only I could solve the problem.

By bottling stuff up and believing you are the only one who can solve the problem can have you stuck fast in a frustration loop.

Frustration loops exist in various guises in many of our clients businesses and we find they are solved much quicker and with less effort when the challenges are shared amongst us.

Being able to share a clients challenges with them, however trivial can lead to new business opportunities and faster more effective results.

The key as Ray demonstrated to me is to say nothing and listen to everything even if you are no expert.

Last weekend I was sorting through some old family photo albums in the loft. Some of the photos date back to 1922 and contain the usual sepia toned family photos of past Aspden generations you would expect.

I love everything about these photo albums, mainly the fact they are tangible and were lovingly assembled by my ancestors.

After I had finished in the loft and precariously navigated the loft ladders, something chilled me to core. It was the stark realisation that when I go, there will be nothing tangible left for my child to physically flick through.

Every photo I have from 1996 onwards is stored in a digital format. I have floppy disks, random hard drives, memory cards, phones and Facebook stuffed with memories, none of which exist in a tangible sense. And although I have this digital catalogue of family photos for future generations to browse through and laugh at, it has occurred to me that there is something physical and very emotive missing in the experience of browsing these photos on screen.

I have realised that the thing I treasure the most about my old family photo albums is knowing that my mum, dad, grandma or granddad, sadly many of whom are no longer here, actually placed that photo and lovingly wrote an entry on the back. Knowing this gives me a real warmth that I think will sadly not be there for my child once I have been tipped off the boat.

Connected white goods have been talked about for years and finally it has become reality. Samsung’s new RF4289 fridge on demo at CES 2012 really moves things along. The thing is, with us all wandering around glued to our mobile devices, is this all a bit to much?

I’m not sure it is. You see the fridge in our house is the central magnetic repository for everything important in our life, from the family calendar to the latest artistic creation from my 3 year old. So could Samsung be leading the start of something that becomes thing to have?

Over Christmas i was asked by a friend how do you embed the video player from Youtube using the iframe method without it sitting on the top of everything in the page and covering up important things like menus.

Now i have never been asked this question before and to be honest i always thought the answer was common knowledge and therefore the reason I had never been asked it. But the person who asked me this question is someone with serious programming pedigree and it made me think, does everyone know you can pass parameters such as ‘wmode’ to YouTube in the iframe URL?

Here is how to do it:

A standard block of code produced by clicking YouTubes embed button will look like this:
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/AwJxQcf426U" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

If you want to tell YouTube to display the video player with wmode=transparent your code should look like this:
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/AwJxQcf426U?wmode=transparent" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

If you want to tell YouTube to display the video player with wmode=transparent and to autoplay your code should look like this:
<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/AwJxQcf426U?wmode=transparent&autoplay=1" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

A full list of other parameters can be found here

This morning John one of our designers pointed out that when he tried to call the office by using the telephone number posted on our web page the call immediately failed. It turns out that if we had formatted the phone number as +44 1706 822 888 it would work but we wanted to have it visually formatted as +44 (0) 1706 822 888 which is not recognised by the likes of iPhone or other smart phones.

After some research and fiddling it turns out that the solutions to this problem is quite simple. By using the ‘a’ tag you can add a phone number to your website, keep the format and still make it accessible to smart phones.

Instead of just placing the number on the page you should use the ‘a’ tag and format it like this.
<a href="tel:+44 1706 822888">+44 (0) 1706 822 888</a>
This way the smart phone uses the value of +44 1706 822 888 to make the call whilst still displaying the number on screen in the format of +44 (0) 1706 822 888.