“Saying goodbye to the football season is very much like giving birth to a ginger child: after nine months of optimism, hope and anguish, you’re left with a genuine feeling of disappointment.”

Fluid is an SSB (Site Specific Browser) application built by Todd Ditchendorf for OSX. Using the webkit rendering engine, the tool allows you to create dedicated applications for your most frequently used web apps. As the line between desktop and web based software continues to blur, fluid takes the web application a step closer to desktop harmony with it’s OS based cousins.

Fluid is rapidly developing, and is looking as if it will become a valuable and flexible tool for users and organisations. It comes with a handy plugin architecture, and support for adding dock notifications to applications through userscripts.

I’ve been using fluid since it first appeared for various applications. I’ve found that some apps work better in the browser, some better in isolation via fluid, but it’s such an easy process to create a Fluid SSB, that experimenting and seeing how you like it is no great pain. I’ve turned to fluid for my google applications, as well as the web apps you see in the image up top. They are Backpack, Facebook Chat, and muxtape, all of which are almost constantly running. for these small, simple applications, fluid is perfect. And in the case of facebook chat, it means I can keep in touch with my inconsistently available friends without spending hours on the facebook website itself. Muxtape as a fluid application is greatly enhanced by the thumbnail plugin, which changes it from a browser, to a song library, by providing you with individual lists of songs to flick through at your leisure. Lovely.

The simplicity and focus of Backpack from 37Signals is equally well complimented by a fluid SSB, which steps back and allows you to get on with using the application, without the distraction and visual clutter of a standard web browser.

You’ll want some pretty icons to go with your fluid applications. And there are lots - including the ones in this post - available in the fluid icons flickr group.

The Championship this season has been perhaps the worst spectacle of football seen since Germany and Austria played out a mutually beneficial 1-0 German victory in the 1982 Spain World Cup. There are piles of statistics I could present to illustrate just how bad it’s been, but you need only look at the league table to appreciate the complete lack of quality shown by all but one or two of the 24 competing teams.

Tomorrow 12 games will bring down the curtain on this torrid campaign, and I, like all fans of Leicester, Southampton, Sheffield Wednesday and Barnsley and Coventry will be hoping upon hope that a disastrous season doesn’t end in the unthinkable prospect of relegation to the third tier of English football. It’s remarkable to think that all ten years ago, in the 1997-8 Premier League campaign, all five of these teams were competing against the very best in English football. Ten years later, and with a common trend of financial meltdown, each of these former top flight teams are awaiting their fate and come 4pm tomorrow, one of them will be swapping trips to Molineux and the KC Stadium, with the unenviable prospect of playing their trade at places like Huish Park and and stadium:mk. A far cry from those heady days of lining up in the tunnels of old Trafford and St. James Park.

The gap between the two top leagues in English football has undoubtedly broadened, but perhaps the bigger concern for fans of clubs like ours is that a gap is also developing between those relegated fro the premier league, and the rest of us. Parachute payments are an enormous advantage to clubs who will have structured their finances based on the prospect of relegation. The likes of Coventry and Southampton, who found life in the old first division hard going for those first few years are now stuck with a premiership legacy, and the resulting apathy from a fan-base used to seeing Beckham and Bergkamp, who are now turning away rather than paying through the nose to watch players such as Lee Trundle and Dean Windass.

The demise of the five clubs battling to retain their championship status was far less sensational than that of perpetually-troubled Leeds United, and was down to mis-management rather than criminal negligence, but to every supporter who pulls on that shirt of a saturday afternoon, and trunters down to their - out of town - footballing mecca, tomorrow is massive. It not only defines the places they’ll be visiting next season, but potentially, will decide the very future of their beloved teams.

For what it’s worth, I expect Coventry City to be alright, we’ll pick up the point we need away at Charlton, and Liecester will be beaten by Stoke - hopefully signalling their exit into oblivion under Milan Mandaric and his managerial fancy of the month.

Here’s to another season of the Championship, which is (incredibly) the second best supported domestic league in all of Europe.

I have six weeks left in Fukuoka before I fly back to England. It’s hard to believe that I have been here since September of last year, the time has gone by so quickly, and has been full of so many awesome memories, that I feel I could stay here for another year, and it still wouldn’t be long enough. I have another year of my degree from JMU in Liverpool to complete, during which I have to write my dissertation, take a couple of business classes, sit my finals and give a presentation in Japanese about Gunkanjima (See previous post).

After that, after university, who knows where I’ll end up. I see two paths in-front of me, both somewhat idealised.

1. Back to Fukuoka

I’d love to come back here. The pace of life is slower than in England, and elsewhere in Japan, and it’s relatively cheap to live a comfortable lifestyle. The problem would be finding work. The most obvious choice would be to come and teach English, but I’m not qualified for that, and have precisely zero experience of teaching - let alone teaching in a foreign country. The JET programme might be an option, but I would want to specify Fukuoka as the location of my placement, and that doesn’t usually work out. I could try and find work as a web designer, or working in some other capacity within a business in Fukuoka - the language barrier, and the somewhat closed nature of traditional Japanese businesses won’t help, but I think my skillset and language ability make me a decent catch for a company here.

2. Football, Soccer, football.

The other option, and the one which I think represents the best choice in terms of a career is to find work within a football club. I have some experience in working as part of a clubs media department, having completed a three month placement at a club last summer. I live for the beautiful game, and it is where my professional ambitions lie. I have been sending my details and resume to clubs in England and the USA, but until I’m a little closer to actually graduating, there isn’t a lot I can do in terms of applying for jobs. I want to find a role which allows me to continue working as a web designer, but which offers variety in terms of my responsibilities. I’d love to get involved with the media production side of things, having created podcasts and worked with print media in writing articles, a job combining all of these aspects would be perfect to me. Throw into the mix my Japanese ability, and again, I think I’d make a good acquisition for a progressive, globally-minded football club, I guess the challenge is convinced a club that that is the case. I’d love to think I could come and find a job working for a team in Japan, but the game here is still in it’s professional infancy, and the need for people with my skills aren’t yet at the level where I would be useful to a team. Perhaps with the exception of the biggest of clubs. Of course, there are countless different organisations involved in football which aren’t clubs, and I’d certainly welcome the opportunity to work for a publisher or media outlet in a similar capacity.

It’s going to come down to where the best chance of my being happy lies. I’d love to get on the career ladder as soon as possible, but there is an argument that if I come back to England after a few years in Japan, not only will I have improved my language skills greatly, but the football industry may have matured to the point where there is a greater need for people with web design skills, and new media credentials to join their staff. Having said that, if Manchester United call tomorrow offering me a job, I’ll have a very hard time turning them down.

It was a long time coming, but I finally managed to get my redesigned site up and running last night. The design you see is something I worked on before I came to Japan, but time conspired against me, meaning that I only managed to actually get it finished in the last few days. And if you’ve seen the business cards I’ve been handing out for the past year, the new design might look a little familiar.

The new site indicates a shift in emphasis from a simple weblog, with some additional content tacked on, to a fully fledged home for my things online. It now has a small selection of my web design work, a section for me to upload my music, and a weblog of course.

The colour scheme is an evolution of the long running green theme, which I’ve used for the last five or so years - the palette has become a little more subdued than previous versions, and has been added to with some splashes of orange and navy. Design-wise, I wanted it to feel solid, and mature. Where previous versions relied heavily on images and CSS tomfoolery, I wanted this version to seem a little more understated, which I hope will allow the content to take centre stage. Of course, I couldn’t help but fiddle endlessly with CSS stuff, and that means that for those of you using a recent webkit, or gecko based browser, you’ll see all sorts of nice flourishes which take away the sharp edges you’ll see in something like Internet Explorer. One day text-shadow and border-radius will be universally supported, and we’ll all be able to stop fannying around with images and hacks.

Also worth noting is that I’ve moved away from wordpress completely. I felt it was overkill for my simple needs, and a growing appreciation for tumblr has led me to use the micro-blogging service for this site too. Posts are embedded within the site. I still need to design the actual tumblr blog, but in truth it is acting as little more than a funnel for content appearing n the site itself. I’m not sure tumble was really meant for to be used this way, and it’s less than a perfect solution, but compared to the bloated, spam magnet, memory hogging wordpress, it’s a delight.

There are still things which need fixing - broken links, bad HTML and spelling mistakes no doubt - but in general I’m really quite happy with the way the new site looks. Give me a shout if you have any thoughts or suggestions.

It was six months ago, here at my desk in Fukuoka that I stumbled upon my first sighting of Gunkanjima. The island off the coast of neighbouring Nagasaki which has lay abandoned for thirty-four years. From that moment on, I was dying to see it with my own eyes, and this week, I finally managed to do so.

This small rocky mound, called ‘Battleship Island’ in Japanese, due to it’s eerily gunship-like silhouette, was a bustling micro-community, based around a coal-mine, owned by the Mitsubishi company in the last century. It was, at its peak, the worlds most populous place, when it was home to over 5,000 people. That was until the mine ran dry in 1974, and the company told it’s workers that they had two days to get to the Kyushu mainland if they wanted a job. Subsequently, the island was a ghost town within hours, and since then has been off-limits at the bequest of the Japanese government.

It was home to the worlds first concrete tenement buildings, and in many ways, was a healthy and vibrant community. Complete with a school, hospital, cinema and shrine. It’s dilapidated state masks a triumph in building living quarters in confined space. Accounts of people who lived on the island talk of a difficult, but enjoyable community with all of the trappings of a modern (by contemporary standards - and tenable lifestyle.

Having circled the Island on a boat from Nagasaki Bay, my interest hasn’t waned. The place really is stunning, beautiful and epic. Approaching it from the north gives the impression of a world war two killing machine peering out from neighbouring Tashima, and seeing it from it’s easterly side reveals apartment buildings with paper sliding doors intact, and mosses growing up the sides of what were once pivotal landmarks for this disparate community of coal-miners and their families, drafted from across Japan and continental asia to quell the fuel-thirst of a rapidly industrialising nation.

Gunkanjima offers a glimpse of that often-retold hollywood tale of earth after man. No human - bar a few researchers and naughty fisherman - have stepped foot on Gunkanjima for thirty-odd years, yet it’s imposing frame still tells a story of habitation which will linger for hundreds of years without human intervention, even in the most hostile of conditions in Japan’s typhoon belt.

The future of Gunkanjima seems uncertain. The Nagasaki government realises the draw of tourists and the film industry could be a substantial boon to it’s coffers, and plans are afoot to make the most of it’s commercial potential. Whether this means just making the island safe for visitors, or turning it into a wretched theme-park is yet to be seen. What is certain is that there are few places on earth which offer such a sight. Gunkanjima is an important landmark not only for Japan, but for humanity, in a time when we are more conscious than ever of our impact on the earth, here stands a 200 by 150 metre advertisement for responsible construction.

To see more photos of Gunkanjima, try my slideshow at flickr