Change

I'm in the mood for change lately. I suspect it has much to do with my new job; leaving Microsoft where, with retrospect, I think I generally felt like a square peg, starting afresh and enjoying myself. A lot.

Such that I'm planning to relegate the blog back a level and build a classic homepage under which it will continue to exist. This will allow me to more accurately position myself rather than simply being seen as the owner of a once popular but now effectively dormant blog. It'll also allow me the chance to reconnect with photography once more, something that suffered a similar interest trajectory to the blog in recent years.

When I set this blog up nine years ago, blogging was the catch-all bucket for more a more socially interactive and approachable evolution on personal homepages, providing a platform for news, communities and all. But blogging has long since matured and some of its original uses have become largely redundant with the advent of Twitter and Facebook et al, and therefore my blog only represents a part of my personal place and existence on the web whereas back in 2001-2002 it was all of it.

I fully intend to keep the blog and all the (remaining) 2,200 or so posts intact. While I don't read them at all often, the archives are something that I find quite amusing when I browse back through and read things I've written and have little or no recollection of doing so.

My early thirties self apparently had quite a different world view to my early forties self - and it's amazing (if a little embarrassing) how optimistic and full of wonder I was about the then emerging structures of the web back then.

So anyway, I signed up with Squarespace and will build something new soon.

Clean Underwear And Satellites

I suppose that most people will be familiar with the notion of being told by your mother to be sure that you put on clean underwear everyday when you were a kid in case something happened to you; like being knocked down by a car which might necessitate being hospitalised urgently and at which point your - hopefully pristine - underwear would be liable to be being indirectly inspected; a matter upon which the entire reputation of every good living family hinged.

And so, I caught myself thinking over the weekend while attempting to find a reputable landscape gardener to come along to quote for finishing off our garden, which has lain for two months in a rather dishevelled state after our builder did some re-modelling, that we’d better hurry up and get it finished and tarted up all nicely before a satellite flies overhead and takes another photograph for Google Earth.

And perish the thought that everytime someone visits our place on Google Earth for the next five years, they’ll see a muddy bomb-site of a bog instead of the finely pruned and cared for floral wonderland we obviously all enjoy.

Yet another facet of the postmodem age we couldn’t foresee ten years ago.

Back, Various

Broadband connection is back on -- obviously -- and not only is it back, but it's double the speed of the old place at a whopping 1 Mbps.

House move went more or less by the book. Lots of cuts and bruises from fixing, ripping, carrying etc. LOTS more space.

After much subliminal advertising and plugging by Adam Curry, I succumbed and bought a Philips Senseo coffee maker yesterday. Most excellent if a little 'wiredness' inducing through repeated use.

While I was away I noticed that we appear to have attained a new level of omni-media-utopia where you can watch your own airplane drama unfold live from your seat in said plane while it happens. The signficance of this should not be under-estimated or over-looked.

Insomnia led me to spend the early hours of last Sunday morning (not yesterday) unpacking what seemed like an endless supply of cardboard boxes containing many randomly packed kitchenware items. And I'd forgotten just how long it takes to unwrap a tightly-triple-wrapped wine glass : a mind-numbingly tedious thirty-four seconds from start to finish.

At the same time I also noted that unwrapping your belongings after a house move is like an insane Christmas Groundhog day combo when every mystery item you eagerly unwrap builds to a such climax of anticipation and wonder only to be instantly blasted away, over and over, when you realise that you already had such a gift. Times 300. At the end I felt equal yet conflicting measures of homely satisfaction and a strange sense of intense disappointment.

Picked up one of those cool Belkin Mac Mini hubs today at PC World.

Stuck a vintage rainbow Apple sticker - complete with "apple computer" underneath in that original fat font they used - onto the top of my Mac Mini. Thought long and hard about it because I didn't want to tarnish its cool, understated design, but in actual fact it makes it look even cooler.