Adam Bird - My Personal Blog

I have known for some time that the people of Caring Hands in the Community provide a wonderful service for homeless people in Medway. I’m also aware that whilst their hard work hasn’t gone unrecognised, there has been a lack of information available online about the work that they do. This reason, out of many is why I asked my Uncle Matthew if I could be involved in re-purposing their web offering. On Monday evening, I witnessed for myself a small element of their work which reinforced my opinion and desire to succeed in the project we are working on. Caring Hands was initially started by my Uncle Matthew over ten years ago after a conversation he had with a man outside King’s Church where he worked whilst sweeping the drive. The man was homeless, and without wanting to go into specifics (see the website when it launches!) Matthew felt compelled to do something and shortly afterwards Caring Hands in the Community was born. In conversations over the years Matthew has always been ...

Being a Gillingham fan isn’t glamorous. We don’t play beautiful, flowing, intricate football. Nor do we play football in an arena fit for gladiators, surrounded by stands that rise up to the God’s in homage to the heroes what ply their trade on that stretch of finally manicured turf. Which is why, when the chance comes along to see a different side to the game, I try and take it when I can. On Monday, I paid my second visit to the Emirates Stadium, home of Arsenal as they met Newcastle United in the Premier League, live on Sky. Arsenal have been in great form of late, chasing down third place Tottenham Hotspur, their fierce local rivals in battle for the automatic entry into the prestigious Champions league. My friend Will is a season ticket holder at the Emirates and due to work commitments was unable to attend the game. My email response to his invite was “I’ll go, but if nobody more deserving wants to”. As it was, there were no other, so it was I who made a lonely pilgrimage t...

Towards the end of last year I entered a writing competition. The subject was 'life-writing' which for me is what this blog is all about, however uninteresting it appears to anyone from the outside looking in. Unfortunately, I didn't make the final long-list, but in celebrating my 200th post last week I thought that now would be as good a time to share it as any. The following "story" for me, encapsulates everything I've learned about myself in the previous two hundred posts. Premature Perfection Gravesend 1980. July the 26th if I am going to be exact. I don’t remember it. Of course I am not expected to, nobody does. It was the date of my birth. Nothing remarkable about that. People are born every minute, every hour of every day. It’s life. Like mine; nothing really remarkable about that either. I am married now, I have a child. Have another one due next month. Married for just over a year to the women I started dating thirteen years ago. I have a semi-su...

Having had the last week off work due to holiday accrued during 2011-2012, I sit asking just where the time as gone! I know exactly where, working hard on the rebuild of the King’s Church Website which has been the focus of my blogs over the past few weeks. I wanted to take a step away from the project for a while and have a look at some of the other things I’ve done whilst being away from the office. On Monday nights after school Oliver has a swimming lesson at Cascades, our local swimming pool and with me being home for the week it was a perfect opportunity for me to see how he was getting on. As a family, we are not well known for our sporting process. I hardly have any great anticipation that Oliver or Phoebe will grow up to to become sporting legends but both Stephanie and I understand the importance of being healthy and active even if we aren’t the worlds finest examples at putting our principles into practice. Even so, through our children we have a great chance to rever...

Towards the end of last month, I read a status update from my Uncle Matthew who is Pastor of King's Church in Medway. His status championed the launch of his church’s new website and encouraged his Facebook connections to visit. Except that when I did, I wasn’t enthused by what I saw. After I put across my point of view he agreed with my assessment and accepted my invitation to review the current site and work with him and his team to start again - pretty much from the ground up. Over the past few weeks, I’ve visited the church several times. On each occasion we’ve had a proactive discussion on what a potential new website should feature, how it should look and most importantly of all, how it should communicate - not just to visitors of the website, but to friends of people who belong to the church, or organisations that help on a daily basis to do good for the greater church community. We made a decision early on that we were actually dealing with multiple websites rather t...

For a long time I’ve had this belief that Sky are evil and as a corporation have done more harm than good for English football, that they’ve taken the working class soul out of the game and made it a rich persons plaything. The only problem is, last night - I became its latest victim. I sold out. Sacrificed my team for the comfort of my lounge and added my last few pennies into the bottomless Rupert Murdoch honeypot instead of being there for the team I love. Gillingham vs Southend on a Monday night. Nothing glamorous about that, but being a Gillingham supporter has never been about glamour. The closest I’ll ever get to see Gillingham in Europe was a friendly in Calais a couple of years ago and the Premier League seems just as far away. We were close once, not so long ago in fact, finishing 11th in what is now the Championship, but it is the ghost of those glory days that make the current level of mediocrity so difficult to bare. When it was announced that Gillingham vs Southend ...

A lot can happen in the short space of a week. Since I wrote last time and showcased some of the websites that I liked and others that I didn’t, I have met with King’s Church Medway on two separate occasions and formulated the beginnings of a working plan. A plan, that by the time it is complete should see them sitting pretty with not one new website but potentially four! Our first meeting last week was an introductory affair. I met my Uncle Matthew and Austin, a Deacon within the church who overseas the media department and built the current site. Alongside the two of them was a chap named Christian (ironically enough) who wants to help out and volunteered his services just as I had. We spoke about some of the points that I had raised in my original blog post about the current site, we talked about their current working processes and chatted freely about what the new site should do and more importantly some of the things that it needed to contain. Christian also led us through ...

Last week I took a look at a website ( www.kings-medway.co.uk ) which belongs to a church run by my Uncle Matthew and are doing some wonderful work for their local community. I pointed out that perhaps the website could function better and look more professional. More importantly, it should show off some of that great work that is happening on a daily basis and be more accessible for the local people of Medway and beyond. Whilst discussions are very much at preliminary stages as to the concept of the new website, I thought that now would be as good a time as any to look around at other church websites, get some inspiration and look at what people have done well, what type of content is being displayed and what pitfalls to avoid. As design is always so subjective, it should be stated that those that I’ve not particularly liked might well be by others. It should also be worth remembering that someone, or a group of people have put the time and effort to make these websites work, an...

If there has been a common theme running so far through the early stages of this year, it has been work. Not the professional kind, which I’m still playing the waiting game on as to what my future holds exactly - but the stuff I do from home, the little something for a mate, or a friend of a friend. I’ve got a couple of little projects boiling away nicely, including my first Arabic language website which will prove to be an interesting technical challenge, a website for a local car accident repair centre as well as trying to keep up with the brilliant and inspiring courses from Code Academy . Today then, I’m going to attempt something wholly new to this blog and add to my increasingly crazy workload, by starting a series of blog posts looking at the life cycle of a web development project. Starting at the beginning, in looking at an existing website, where it falls short, what it does well, all the way through to research, design and eventual redevelopment and deployment of a new s...

Towards the end of last year, my father proposed a family challenge - to lose weight. The person who loses the most weight, by April 1st out of my parents, my sister and her husband, myself and Stephanie would be treated to a weekend away at my fathers expense. We all signed up, agreed and now it is game on! We could all be playing for a weekend in Allhallows, it doesn’t really matter, we all recognised that 2011 was a year of indulgence and our forever expanding waistlines needed to be sucked back in. Stephanie of course had the benefit of an excuse on her side, she was pregnant for most of the year and feeding for two - not that you would have known, she actually weighs much less now that she did before she fell pregnant so she must be doing something right. It’s been interesting so far to see how all six of us have tackled this particular challenge, whether it is signing up to a diet scheme like Weight Watchers, skipping meals or cutting out various items of high-fat food and...

Last year I decided to try and up the ante slightly, by posting a regular blog and writing at least once a week which I did, I even managed to complete the annual challenge successfully, which surpassed my own expectations. This year, we’ve only reached week two and I’m already struggling with finding something to write - the problem I have is, I can’t quite bring myself to break the habit just yet! January is generally a tough month, financially and for some, emotionally taxing. With the dawn of a new year comes a series of resolutions to make the forthcoming twelve months worth something, to do something new, to challenge oneself and to make a difference to their lives. Reading Facebook status’s over the new year gave an interesting insight into how people perceived how they were treated; “2012, better be better than last year”, or “Bye Bye 2011, what a year that was!” For Stephanie and I, 2011 couldn’t have treated us any better. I wrote at the beginning of last year that I wa...

Last weekend Stephanie and I saw in the new year surrounded by the love and comfort of my parents, my sister, her husband and clan of children along with Phoebe and Oliver of course - but either side of that was two quite different and unexpected experiences with hospitals, needles and two females I love dearly. Firstly, I was asked by my Grandmother if I could take her to the eye hospital on Friday, the day before New Years Eve, which was fine with me. A routine check-up she told me, no problem I thought. Except, my Nan is 92 years old bless her and from right out of the Devonian old school, loud with it too, which can be cause for moments of embarrassment from time to time. Like singing “hear comes the bride” in the middle a busy waiting room at one of the nurses as she walked by. The nurse took it in quite good fashion, apparently Nan has been doing it for the past eight months despite the nurse not getting married until September! Anyhow, what ended up being a routine check-u...

At the beginning of 2011, I accepted the WordPress challenge, to blog more, to post one unique blog post for each of the 52 weeks of the year. This is blog number fifty-two, where I look back at some of the highlights and thank, you - the people who read them and come back time and time again. I haven't got a favourite post, so I thought I'd have a look at the analytics and find out which was most popular with the people that read them, so here they are: 1) Regeneration, not a Grave End Gravesend is currently in the beginnings of a major transformation. Both the 'civic quarter' and 'transport quarter' are being redeveloped as part of a multi-million pound regeneration scheme, which will eventually see a new one-way traffic system, a new bus terminus, a vastly improved train station and much improved pedestrian areas and access routes. However, if Gravesham Council had their way, the redevelopment wouldn't stop there. 2) I've a Stalker in Jesus ...

Standing in the tunnel, looking out at the stadium. It’s packed, a pre-christmas ticket bonanza that has put an extra three thousand bums on seats. The smell of grass, of fried food and the intoxicatingly pleasant sharpness of deep-heat which tickles the nostrils as the ears cope with the roar of the crowd and the stomach deals with the nerves. You’re dressed in the blue of your team, standing there at not yet five years old holding the hand of a total stranger. A man who leads out ten others to do battle against the other group of men dressed in green and black standing side by side in the long, deep space where shouts of encouragement bounce around the walls. The referee signals that it is time and off you go, into the noise which has reached a crescendo, eight thousand people on their feet to welcome their heroes, you leading the way, across the pitch and lining up in front of the main stand, with your Daddy standing by watching, tears in his eyes, feelings of pride swelling up an...

Heading towards the end of the year, one cannot help but look back at the last twelve months and onwards to the dawn of the new year. Depending upon each and every one of us, we’ll all have different plans, different aspirations and feelings of excitement, apprehension or even damn right fear. For me, the beginning of 2012 is somewhat an unknown quantity, the start of a new journey for sure, but the question is - where will that journey take me? Life has a habit of throwing a curve-ball every once in a while. Work this year has been good, I’ve settled in nicely into an agency that contains many of the nicest people I’ve had the fortune to meet. But sadly, we received the news that our biggest client is taking their business elsewhere and what was looking forward to another successful year changed into something that is filled with, at least for now, uncertainty and lies very much in the realms of the unknown. Sometimes, things happen for the better, bad things happen, bu...