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Now I have to say that Mondays are usually pretty good for me. I've had a bit of a break over the weekend and I'm usually keen to get right back into action first thing Monday morning ... but not today.

I got up feeling really eager to get on with work and then it all seemed to go downhill from there. Right now it's just after midday and I've usually got this column and a whole bunch of other stuff out of the way by now but the morning went all pear-shaped without any input from me and now all I want to do is go upstairs and have a snooze on the couch in the office that Steve uses when he's here at our downtown office.

I know he's got no appointments here and that couch is really tempting but I've got a lot of work I want to get done today and it won't get done if I give in to that temptation to have a nap.

So how are you feeling today ... are you facing a Monday that's shaping up to be just as bad as mine? I'm a firm believer in looking back to see if I can identify what happened to ruin my day so that I don't make the same mistake again; do you do the same?

And now to make it worse I just remembered something that I have to do today that I'd forgotten all about. Aaargghhh!

Enjoying a little freedom
One project that we did spend some time working on was something that will be built on a HTML framework but will never be seen on the Web. It will be distributed on a DVD and even though it will fire up a browser when it's loaded in the DVD drive but all the information will be on the disk and nothing will need to be downloaded.

Think about those requirements for a few moments and you'll begin to see that most of the constraints that govern us now ... things like download times, file sizes etc. almost disappear when what you're building won't need to be downloaded.

Of course we're going to set it for a minimum screen resolution and there will be internal navigation links as well as links off the disk to advertisers' websites but we can include Javascript and Ajax and all sorts of interesting things without worrying about what link list or TGP owners are going to say.

We can do fancy things with navigation and have movies playing and all sorts of interesting things that we can't really do on the Web just yet. If we were ever getting a little weary of doing the same old thing for a variety of clients then this job has certainly blown the cobwebs away.

In fact it's so interesting for us that I would recommend you try something similar. Here in adult we are forever building sites that aren't very fancy, have nothing in the way of jazzy navigation and really just lack pizzazz so why not kick over the traces for a few hours and build a site that has all those fancy things in it that you've always wanted to put into a site but were prevented from doing so.

It will give you a chance to learn about Ajax and other things that really have no place in the sites we normally build and you can have a lot of fun doing it. Instead of conforming to the rules of link list and TGP owners you can really let your hair down and do some crazy things.

Now you might think that's a rather dumb suggestion because it's going to take up valuable time ... time that can be better spent building more galleries ... and in some ways you're right. So think of it as your 20 per cent time ... you haven't heard about 2- per cent time?

Google is the company that's famous for 20 per cent time ... it's the time that Google allows its engineers to work on their own projects rather than on the work that Google wants them to do. Reputedly some of Google's most innovative things have come out of that 20 per cent time ... and there's been quite a few disasters too ... but sometimes you have to wear the disasters just to keep up the interest level in the basic things people have to do.

So give yourself some 20 per cent time and see what you can come up with. You just never know what you can do and you won't know until you try. We've already discovered some interesting things with our little project ... nothing that will make us a heap of money ... but things that will help us work a little smarter in the future.

And now I've got to get back to work and try and stay motivated and focused till it's time to go home. Thank goodness Steve is cooking dinner tonight because we just might go hungry if it was left up to me today.