It's been so long since I posted something 'meaningful' that I think I've run out of things to say about music. So, first post of 2008 will be about work.

Since leaving full-time in 2000, after a series of ever-amusing redunancies in the dot com industry ( 4 companies in 3 years). It was decided that I'd leave the idea of getting a regular income well alone. Much to the annoyance of my other half who was deep into her studies at the time.

Nevertheless, a life of self-employed riley managed to see us through for 7 years. Those who do work for themselves will know the benefits of this lifestyle. A breakdown of the week system as weekends become ever more meaningless. A lack of 'routine' (can be viewed as a negative too) as well less of a reliance on an ever frustrating transport system during peak times. Of course, there are downsides: the lack of timed regular salary input, the endless paperwork to appease the tax gods. Conclusion: good outweigh the bad.

But all that changed again during the tail end of 2007. One person who I'd been working with on several projects in the past was Vijay (his blog is here). The amount of parallels that we have between us is in our personal lives is staggering and possibly worthy of analysis in its own right. So it was only a matter of time before we'd take this synergy into the arena of work. Until someone comes up with something better, Fail will be the collective name we will work under. Amuses most people from the world of officialdom when they hear it and gained some giggles as we introduced ourselves at a recent web conference in London.

So the amongst several other projects in the past which have long since between taken over by tasteless web wannabe's, the one we're launching our new established partnership together with is Warpmart. Two years in design and six months of development has resulted in what we think is a pretty tight e-commerce website.

Rattling on about technologies is boring for the most part, so I'll not go there. But for the moment, we have built something that we're pretty proud of. It has its fans and it's haters but on an e-commerce level it seems to be doing well. This is all foundational and we're hoping to engage Warp in a pro-active process of refinement and improvement without diluting the original ideal. Working with Vijay was invigorating, productive and just simply the way I'd imagined a creative partnership to work.

I don't think I'll get a chance to say it anywhere else so I'd like to thank the following people with regards to the Warpmart project: Marcus Scott, Tom Hopkins, Tom Panton, Jonathan Burnip, Greg Eden, Steven Hill, Ged Day, Kev Fleming, Anil Bawa-Cavia, Demian Turner, Manuel Sepulveda, Ayla Sancaktaroglu and of course Vijay. If there's anyone I've missed, it's 'cos my search function in Mail failed to throw your name up.