Busy, busy week this last week. Insanely busy, especially as my company’s year end is coming up December 31st, and I want to close my 2006 books and file my accounts very early in 2007.

Thankfully, things are on track for me to be able to pretty much shut down from the 17th December through to the 15th January, during which time I won’t be dealing with client work but will instead be retiring to my laboratory and tinkering on the mad, wonderful new inventions I have planned for release in 2007. If I get my planning right, by the end of 2007 I should be able to drop my client work entirely and move over to supporting my own products, which is where I wanted to be this time last year.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy client work, it’s just not what the company is about - I have absolutely no desire to work as a freelancer for the next 40 years, and I enjoy owning my own projects to take where I want. Client work doesn’t give me the freedom, challenge or the level of profitability that my own projects hopefully will.

Anyway, until I have some products to talk about here, it’s business as usual. Here’s some Sunday afternoon/Monday morning links:

I’ll find the time to post a full review next week, but I got an early copy of Designing the Obvious a few weeks back, and am very impressed with it. For somebody like me who needs to work at understanding design from a usability perspective it was a welcome dose, just in time for some major projects in the New Year. Like I say, next week there will be a full review with a run-down of what it covers but in essence, it’s all about making sure that we remember the humans who will be using the applications we make, and building interfaces around them.

For those of you unlucky enough to be working with Windows machines, you may want to know that Vista won’t be too bad once you get rid of all the cruft Microsoft was too busy ignoring to remove for you.

Whilst they only seem to be shipping the Nokia N73 right now, Three have announced x-series pricing which is very, very reasonable. I shall be grabbing one of these before Christmas, just as soon as a Sony Ericsson phone becomes available on those tarrifs. The only downside is that although they describe it as ‘unlimited internet usage’ what they mean by that is 1Gb/month data transfer, 10,000 MSN messages a month, 80 hours/month of Slingbox/Orb and 5,000 Skype minutes/month. Even so, that’s still a lot better than existing tariffs and when O2 and Vodafone step in with better offers, the deals will get better.

I owe Andy at Liquid Bronze a thank you for the heads up on this, but it would seem that if you know where to look and you’re in the market for an Apple this Christmas but want to spread the payments out, you can get 0% APR over 6-months on Apple hardware between £500 and £10,000. Unfortunately it’s individual customers only, and I need to splurge my money through the business so I’ll be taking a hit in January on my new hardware, but I noticed that their refurb products list has some pretty good deals going - slightly out-of-date Macbook Pros at 40% off, for starters.

When I get a few spare hours of free time in the coming weeks, I intend to spend a lot more time playing online chess. For those new, the comments section to this post on Feld Thoughts offers some good options. Feld himself settled on a site called Red Hot Pawn the name of which indicates just how young and cheeky the chess crowd is getting these days.

More ‘normal’ articles due up next week, until then comrades…