When indulging nostalgia for the old fashioned Christmas of velvet-clad children, candle-decked trees and sumptuous festive feasts, it is very easy from a 21st Century perspective to forget that all of this was produced without modern amenities like oh, say, running water. Spare a thought for the labours of scullery maids, cooks and mammies of old – and the snow-bound Ireland of today.

Here at home in 2010, we’re on Day 4 of pipes frozen solid and no running water. My husband equates these conditions to living in a Gulag, but I prefer to stand over the kitchen sink with a kettle and bucket and ponder the household efforts of my fore mothers. Obviously, households were managed with far fewer conveniences for hundreds of years, so it certainly is possible once you get a system going.

For two people, we go through about 15 litres of conservatively hoarded and recycled water a day, meaning a schedule that looks like this:

• Decant water into kettle, boil
• Stack dishes, pots, pans in washing-up bowl. (Note: If you do not actually own a washing-up bowl, you can substitute that very nice large salad bowl you received as a wedding gift.)
• Soak dishes in bowl of boiling water with small amount of dishwashing soap
• Scrub dishes in still-hot water and whine about boiling water being quite hot
• Remove sudsy dishes, decant salad bowl water into waiting bucket, and learn exactly why these pourings are called greywater
• Refill kettle, boil, cool
• Rinse dishes by holding them over bowl and pouring kettle water over each
• Decant collected water into bucket
• Use bucket of greywater to flush loo

This system (and this amount of water), while sufficient to wash dishes, flush toilets, cook dinner and generally keep us in tea and coffees, doesn’t take into account the fact that all of the water we use has to be carried in here from somewhere. Since all of our neighbours are also in the same boat, this is generally from the few local businesses that still have flowing pipes. It also doesn’t account for luxuries like laundry or, you know, bathing.

This year for Christmas my parents got us a room at the nearby Lancaster Lodge, where on Tuesday night we took the longest, hottest, most luxurious and expensive showers in the history of running water. Yesterday I worked out a deal with the local gym for a day-pass rate, which was great except for the fact they’re now closed until the 26th. Which is, as it happens, the very earliest we are expecting a thaw and maybe, maybe the return of running water.

Most problematic really is cooking and particularly baking. Traditionally we make our Christmas gifts, with homemade cookies, candies, and chocolate all swishily packaged up and delivered on Christmas Day. This year, I don’t have the water for filling double boilers, washing up food processors and mix masters, or melting off delicious chocolate, so Christmas presents are just going to have to wait for the occasion of New Year’s Day.

When I have eight people coming for dinner. And hopefully, a flushing toilet.

Dear Santa:

I have been a very good girl this year. Please cancel previous request for pony. All I want for Christmas this year is a thaw.

Love,
Sabrina

Generally, when people approach me to work with them, they come bearing a certain number of assumptions about web designers. While it’s nice that someone somewhere who has clearly never met me thinks I’m a latte-drinking, WACOM-owning, Mac-plugged hipster, the reality is that I sit here most days in my pyjamas, working away on an ageing Dell desktop and trying to figure out how to open those new-fangled .docx document types.

And while I do take my coffee very seriously, my credibility in this arena is greatly diminished by the fact that I do not know how to roast my own coffee beans. It’s very hard to hold my head up at conventions for swanky web designers, which explains why I don’t go to those. (That plus I don’t get invited.)

So here, for your Monday morning amusement, are the Top Ten Things You Never Want to Hear About Your Web Designer:

• I am completely self-taught. I have never taken a web design, coding or marketing class, and am thus entirely unqualified for pretty much any job you might want to hire me for. I’m pretty OK with that.
• I learned to code HTML creating free pages on GeoCities, because I wanted to edit the colours on the provided templates.
• I learned to build an SQL query in FrontPage. At the time, it was the only visual builder around and it opened up the world of databases to me. I will be forever grateful.
• On the very rare occasions when I actually need to create a table for, you know, tabular data, I still use FrontPage, mostly because it’s so rare I can’t really remember how to code tables any more.
• I learned basic CSS from a woman named Vee McLaughlin over many hours in an ICQ chat window. She was incredibly patient and to a huge extent, I owe her my entire career.
• I live in the Motherfucking Bank Guilt Spiral. It is impossible for me to blog if I owe any client work. I always owe at least one client work; therefore I almost never blog. Or do laundry. Or buy groceries. Or go to the bank.
• I do not use PhotoShop. I mean, I can, but 98% of the non-vector graphics I create are done in PaintShop Pro. The version I use was released in March of 2000. I will never upgrade it.
• I overwrote a client’s live site by accident in 2001. There was no backup. I still have nightmares about it and have never made that mistake again.
• I stuck the color #92BD5D in my palette back in the day when we used only web-safe colours, and waited more than 10 years for it to become trendy so I could use it pretty much constantly. When it becomes passée, I may never work again.
• I am overwhelmed by data and have not opened my RSS reader in a year. 99% of my reading list comes from Twitter. I do not subscribe to Smashing Magazine, Mashable or anything else I’m supposed to be reading, including your blog.

The final blow to my credibility:

I own no Apple products and there is no part of me that wants an iPhone.

Yesterday, while up to my eyeballs in CSS and transparent images, a surprising thought occurred to me for the first time:

Despite the fact that I’ve been pushing pixels out the door for paying customers for almost fifteen years, I have never had a website.

I have always been a blogger, and I have always used a blog to represent myself online, even when there were no blogs and I was writing in a hacked guestbook script. I’ve never had a website that, well, does what this one now does.

Some web designer.

Anyway, it was an interesting process, one which I have attempted and abandoned on two previous occasions. I think that what made the difference this time was the IWA Best Business Blog award at the end of March; blogging has been light not just because of the train thing, but because winning that award really stunned me.

I barely think of myself as a business; certainly not as a company or a service or – God forbid – a brand. And I certainly don’t think of myself as a business blogger, either; I mean, I blog about getting accidentally drunk and my dog, for pity’s sake.

But probably it was time to get a little more grown-up about this whole work thing, and that award was just the uncomfortable kick up the arse I needed. I’m grateful now in a way I wasn’t three months ago, and I feel a little better dressed for the occasion with the new design.

This redesign was a good exercise, though weeding out my portfolio was a bit of a shock – there were something like 35 sites in there, now trimmed down to a much more manageable 20. The hardest part was writing the About page, which was called “Services” for exactly ten seconds, all of which I spent wanting to kill myself. Now I just sound like the Internet’s Troy McClure instead.

No site is without its issues, so I would just like to go on record as telling any future clients, “Do as I say, not as I do.” No, you cannot have a 220k background image, for a start.

Some nice things:

• All old links still work, although you may want to re-point any links to SabrinaDent.com specifically to the blog.
• There is a colophon if you’re interested in the pieces that went into this.
• I now, apparently, have a newsletter. Trust me when I say: very infrequent.
• Social icons now behave like normal people’s social icons behave.
• And lo, there is a search box, like normal people have.

The search box makes me ridiculously happy.

PS: We lost some comments on the last entry when moving – so sorry.
PPS: My husband is a saint; I’ve put him through three days of hell.

Dear Internet:

I love the fact that you love this website. I love the fact that when people meet me, the first thing they say is “Oh, I love your website! It’s so beautiful!” It’s lovely to be known for a beautiful thing.

Unfortunately, I fucking hate it.

I cannot stand to look at it. I hate it so much, I cannot stand to blog on it, which more or less explains the extended radio silence. I’ve hated it since about ten minutes after I won the Most Beautiful Blog award in 2008. I’ve been meaning to change it ever since, but I’ve been rather busy making websites and falling off trains.

I’ve been waiting for a good time to sit down and issue forth a redesign, but lately I’ve realised that there is no good time – I’m always busy making websites and falling off trains. So that’s it – I’m committing to a new website design and I am not returning until I have one.

I have no idea if you’ll like it, or if I’ll like it for that matter. I have no idea what it will look like, but I do know this:

It will have social networking icons that actually function instead of just looking pretty. It will actually achieve the accessibility I keep banging on about. It will sensibly hold and present the content it needs to contain.

And by God, it will have a search box.

Love,
Sabrina

Last week, as previously mentioned, I made my way to Las Vegas for Mix10. I’d never been to Vegas before, and was very excited – though less keen on the Cork > Dublin > Gatwick > Vegas journey this trip entailed, what with that totalling 22 hours and all.

For the record, I love Las Vegas, and think we should all move there. It’s like Disney for grown-ups, and as long as you embrace the Matrix and its transparent artificiality, it’s sort of magical. I also really enjoyed MIX, and learned a lot; it was a great experience and I’m glad I went. Highlights for me:

• Getting to hang out all week with Martha Rotter and Claire Dillon from Microsoft Ireland, who looked after me in spectacular style and have my undying gratitude for making my trip possible;
• Getting to meet Joey deVilla, aka Accordion Guy. I’m ashamed to say I’d never heard of him and didn’t know Accordion Guy was famous, nor did I realise I had parked myself at the Cool Kids Table in the lounge, but he was just plain nice to me. He has a Vegas Travel Diary that perfectly encapsulates this trip, and a toilet that tweets.
• Standing within 6 feet of Douglas Crockford and Dr. Dr. Dr. Bill, who also answered a question for me in a session he ran as an open conversation with just one slide (it was a good slide, to be fair.)

Interestingly, when I went to Nishant Kothary’s excellent session on The Elephant in the Room, his last slide was about a conversation he’d had with Bill Buxton that was virtually identical to my last blog post. I was flabbergasted and delighted in a way that is probably only meaningful to me, but I consider it a highlight of my geek life to have my crankypants validated that way. In fact, it ranks right after getting an email from an old-guard hero of the internet saying he liked a design I did for a project he was involved in.

In Vegas, I stayed at the Luxor, which I am well aware is virtually always a mistake. However, if what you need is a room on the strip for $79 a night, it’s a pretty sweet deal. I actually liked #1091, my ground floor, casino-front room; sure, the rooms really need a refurb and I was sleeping 20 feet from a slot machine, but on the plus side, I was also 15 feet from Starbucks, and Starbucks buys you a lot of points in my world.

Less impressive: the Luxor provides wired ethernet internet access only and the hotel has no open WiFi. It has WiFi, mind you; I saw plenty of Luxor nodes, just none open for guests. This is very frustrating, and after getting no reply from “all access” @LuxorLV, I typed $sudo apt-get install firestarter into my Ubuntu-running eeePC and opened up a public access WiFi node.

This access point was called, obviously, TheLuxorSucks, and ran for four days. And that, kids, is why you do not place signs in your hotel inviting people to tweet you and then ignore the unhappy geeks.

Sadly, while I am typing this entry one-handed, it is not because my other hand is busy rolling dice on a Vegas craps table. After a rather epic return journey flying Vegas > Gatwick > Dublin and a three hour train journey from Dublin to Cork, I fell (literally) at the last hurdle before reaching home and slipped spectacularly on the wet platform at Cork station, dislocating my left shoulder. So instead of going to my badly-needed bed, I went via ambulance to A&E at Cork University Hospital, where I waited for 6 hours to be seen, x-rayed and discharged with a suitable sling and referrals to the fracture clinic and physiotherapy.

For the record, while I realise the health service is in a terrible state, I’ve no real complaints about that experience. While it was a long night, I consider 6 hours at an urban A&E with a paediatric unit to be an appropriate L4 triage wait time. Paediatric and life-threatening emergencies should always take precedence over stable patients with managed pain. (Infants are notoriously unreliable patients.) Similarly, a few years ago when I went into the Mercy as a L1 triage, I received excellent and immediate care that was entirely responsive and appropriate.

People die of heart attack, blood loss and infection; nobody dies of a dislocated shoulder.

Anyway, here I sit typing slowly with one hand. I can’t dress myself, cut my own food, or bend over to pet my dog, and I’m pretty sore. I’m also exhausted, although not too tired to put a personal injury law suit at the top of my To Do list today. There is something ironic about the fact that after doing that website last year, I found myself referring to it today, but also nice that I know what this long process will entail, and doubly nice my fabulous solicitor takes my call on a Saturday.

So there you have it: I love Vegas, MIX and Simon McGarr; not so much the Luxor and Irish Rail, who can kiss my crankypants arse.

I often joke that Twitter is my only source of news these days, but there is some news I’m simply unprepared to hear. I was absolutely horrified today to learn of the death of Debbie Metrustry, known up and down the Irish internet as @debbiemet.

In our first interactions, I didn’t know her last name was Metrustry and thus the source of her username. In my mental shorthand for people, she was Debbie Well Met, because absolutely everyone who had the pleasure of meeting her loved her. I’m not kidding about that. I know people say it all the time of those who have passed on, but in the snarky, gossipy, tight-knit world that is the Irish internet, I don’t know a single person who didn’t spontaneously smile and have a good word to offer whenever her name was mentioned.

Death is a cheater, but in her case seems particularly perverse. Debbie was young; sure, there was the occasional complaint about arthritic bones, but she was overflowing with enthusiasm and purpose. We all give lip service to the idea that “you only have one life” but Debbie had, in the last two years, really grabbed hold of that reality and made drastic changes to turn her life into what she wanted it to be. She was working through a career transition, was  newly dedicating herself to running, she had started a major move from Dublin, and she’d just bought land for her dream eco-house in Tipperary.

In many regards, she was just (re)starting her life; it seems cruel beyond belief that she will not live out the dreams she was building while the rest of us are left here, free to carry on in our own lives with efforts that seem so weak compared to her heroic mountain moving.

I was looking forward to seeing her again in three weeks, and at the moment I still cannot believe I will not.  I’m quite sure we’re scheduled for lunch in March and quite sure she’ll pop up in my Twitter DMs any moment now. Anything else is incomprehensible; when she’s not there, I know I will think of her as just away, dancing until dawn.

I have called the funeral home but there is still not a date, time, or specific information about services for her and details are below. Regardless of those arrangements, I’ve checked in with a few mutual friends and there will be a BTW (Blogger, Twitter, Whatever) meetup in her honour, most likely on the day of her services. I’ll post more information when it’s available but for the moment, like so many others, I simply cannot believe we’re making plans around the funeral of this woman.

Because really, she’s supposed to be here, dancing into her future.

Funeral Arrangements:
Viewings: Sunday and Monday until 8 PM
Kirwans, 21-23 Fairview Strand, Dublin 3 [map]
Service: Tuesday, 16 February, 2010 at 2 PM
Glasnevin Crematorium Chapel [map]
Burial immediately following

BTW Meetup:

Tuesday, 16 February 5 PM onwards
Le Cirk, 32 Dame Street [web]
Buses from Glasnevin: 140 [map]
Please RSVP at BTW [here] or add your name here.

When I mentioned a few weeks ago on Twitter that I was suddenly doing more voice over work than I ever expected for clients, this was really not what I had in mind.

Last week, a very hesitant but nice-sounding man rang and asked for me by name. It was pretty much the normal thing – he’d heard of me from a friend, I came highly recommended, was I available, etc. The conversation got muddled very quickly though, because as it turns out, he was very much not looking for a website.

I’m not sure if he was looking for in-call escort services, out-call escort services, or phone sex, but he was definitely seeking a service I am entirely unwilling to provide at my current hourly rate. Possibly he was looking for dominatrix services, because I got quite irritated trying to get him to say what he was actually after, and it didn’t seem to put him off one bit.

As pranks (or harassment) go, this all worked out quite well for me as I am not a huge fan of the telephone to start out with. The more it rings the less I like it. So as more and more calls started to come in, I happily turned off my mobile and switched off all the phones in the house. The one I couldn’t turn off is now in pieces on the kitchen counter. It’s been there for a week.

Our house phone mailbox is now full, and my mobile has a truly silly amount of voice mail.

Things I’ve Learned:

• People appear to have plenty of money to spend on entertainment, even in a recession;
• A surprising number of people do not withhold their numbers when phoning out for something decidedly more indulgent than a pizza;
• I really should convert my work phone to a premium rate service…

So, if you’ve been trying to reach me and have not been able to, your message is in quite a queue and it’s likely I won’t be retrieving it, so you may want to drop me an email or try again. Happy phoning!

Although I’ve been designing and developing websites since 1996, I’ve only been freelancing for the past two years. I thought most of the learning curve was going to be about taxes and time management, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Most of what I’ve learned is actually about my own professional strengths and limitations, in ways that didn’t become apparent until I struck out on my own.

Here are five things I’ve learned that I wish I’d know then:

1. Work Good Projects with Good People

This took me a long time to figure out, and along the way I seriously cocked this one up a few times. The biggest mistake I’ve made is working with people I really, really like on projects I liked a whole lot less. These projects tend to be the very last ones finished, and the people who really, really liked me to start out with probably like me considerably less at the end.

Lesson: Love both the people and the project.

2. Agencies Suck

The money is often tempting, but these projects almost always go to shit. The agency sits between you and the client, and any client large enough to employ a PR or advertising agency is probably less of a client and more of a committee anyway.  Not a single agency project from the past two years appears in my portfolio. And not a single one ever will, because I am never taking another agency job ever again.

Lesson: Do not return agency phone calls.

3. Clingy Clients Cost Money

This one was hard to learn, because I get a lot of calls from people who are being screwed over, have serious site problems, or are completely clueless. And I really, truly want to help these people but I have learned to be a little more streetwise about why they are facing the problems they are facing. There are clients out there who will very sweetly suck all your time, energy and patience and while they may be nice people, they are not good clients.

Lesson: You can’t help everyone.

4. I’m Not an Ass (Wo)man

Probably the most important thing I’ve learned in the last two years is that back end design is not a good long-term project for me. I have always previously done this work leading teams, and now I know why. I can certainly look at your back end, spot the problems, and help you reorganise it to be much better, but if I have to design and code every screen, I’m going to die of boredom and you are going to die waiting.

Lesson: Learn your professional limitations.

5. You Can’t Work All the Time

I’ve tried. My jaunt to Florence in December was my first vacation since my honeymoon five years ago. But I’m 37, and it’s become obvious I cannot maintain the same pace I could at 27. I have been seriously ill three times in the last two years, which is something of a record even for me, and I’m pretty sure it’s my body’s retribution for relentless 18-hour days. Scheduling time away from work is very hard, but it also recharges my creativity and focus.

Lesson: If you don’t make time for down time, you’re going down anyway.

A quick one on the domestic front:

Darragh Doyle is doing a sponsored skydive to raise money for elder-care charity CARE local. This sounds like great craic and Darragh is, as always, up for anything whacky. I was also impressed by the €800 raised in donations until I realised the jump is this Friday and Darragh has €2,200 more to raise.

Charities are not only hardest hit in a recession, they’re also first hit in a recession. Donors give less money to fewer causes, and programmes and support shrink exactly when most charities’ clients need them most. Unfortunately, it’s the local, work-a-day charities with low profile and small donor bases – like this one – who often have the roughest time of it.

Honestly, it’s not every day a guy offers to jump out of a plane. If you can, it would be nice to throw a donation at Darragh to support his rather heroic (and hilarious) efforts here.

Also, if I’m reading this right, if we raise enough money, Darragh will stop telling really, seriously, painfully bad jokes on Twitter. That alone is worth twenty quid.

Update: He jumped and raised €2,139! Great video here.

I came back from FOWD London feeling, shall we say, less than fabulous. It took a good 48 hours for me to realise that the slightly sick feeling parked in my abdomen was probably not just post-presentation nerves – though to be fair the hacking, aching and fever were also big tip-offs.

Having just returned from the international travel capital of Europe courtesy of a viral petri dish recirculating air at 30,000 feet, there was comedy aplenty in our house about H1N1 Influenza. In fact, early that week I had a coughing fit at the corner shop and joked to my husband that there was no more deserving recipient of my viral load than the complete and utter cow who runs our local store.

Buying from this shop is not like retail as most humans understand it. Every item purchased is treated like you are personally pulling food directly from the mouths of Ethiopian children, cash be dammed. Packets of tea, milk and bread are snatched from your hand and only given back grudgingly. Every biscuit I leave with is a moral victory.

Anyway, this all became much less amusing when it started to look like I really might have the charmingly named Swine Flu. The were so many creased brows and concerned tuts that I began to wonder if London had been relocated to a suburb of Mexico City and I had merely missed the good weather. In my more fervish moments, I dreamed it had, and apparently began telling people about elborate plans to open a summer resort in Islington.

It’s now almost two weeks later, though, and my career as a weapon of mass bio-terrorism appears to be drawing to a close.  I am much better, and have a new found appreciation for the ability to breathe and the wonders of being able stand up for a whole 10 minutes. I can also stay awake for an entire three hours at a stretch. And to top it all off,  I officially do not have swine flu.

The bad news is, neither does the woman from the corner shop.