The Rawkes Mission Statement

Welcome to Rawkes mission control here at our new base in Bournemouth, proudly situated on the South coast of England. Moving from the old location in Surrey is only one of many new and exciting changes that have happened around here. I'm Rob Hawkes, captain of the base, pilot of the Rawkes spacecraft, and your guide on this trip. Please join me as we tour the base and uncover exactly what has changed.

Shifting focus

One of the major changes in Rawkes is the decision to cease its role as a hub for my freelance services. Instead, it has shifted focus to accommodate my needs and desires for the coming years; namely blogging and experimentation.

Through the Captain's Log I am now able to explore further into topics such as web development, technology, and media. It also provides the home for much deeper research and discussion into the theory of those areas, motivated by challenging the currently accepted views. If you couple this with the Laboratory, an area where I'll be experimenting and documenting projects I'm working on, Rawkes is quite clearly a much more personal and valuable area of cyberspace.

Boldly exploring new frontiers

Now is the time for innovation and exploration, a time to shake off the shackles of older technologies and step, unhindered, into a new era on the web. Armed with this purpose in mind, and less than 2% of visitors using IE 6, it wasn't exactly rocket science to stop supporting legacy browsers and embrace the cutting-edge instead.

This new found freedom allows Rawkes to enjoy the benefits of long overdue technologies like HTML 5 and CSS 3. The website has been built exclusively using these new standards in web design, bringing a whole host of features that would never normally see the light of day.

Rob Hawkes: All-round geek

My life revolves around technology and the web, it's a simple and sobering realisation that I've managed, somehow, to grow accustomed to. Halt me anywhere on my travels and you'll find an iPhone or some other connection to the interwebs not far behind. I'm a geek.

Along with the standard HTML and CSS skills I also bring to the table a bunch of design theory, a passion for solving problems through programming, and a basic need to uncover exactly how things work — even if they don't make much sense to me. You'll often find me asking "How?" when presented with something new.

Rob Hawkes: Constantly learning

The desire to know how and why things work has led me, with much resistance, back to education. If you want to be technical I'm studying for a Bachelor of Arts in Interactive Media Production, if you want to keep things simple then I'm an IMP.

Coming back to university is a great experience and has allowed me to fulfil my want to push further and deeper into the web and the technology that surrounds it. Not only am I learning new skills, I'm also becoming wiser as I discover more and more theory that I can in turn implement in my practical studies.

There will never be a time when I feel there is nothing left to learn. This is one of the driving factors behind my desire to keep learning and experimenting. The changing universe around us is my motivation to pilot Rawkes and continue exploring the frontiers.