Happy Hogmanay!

Here’s what awaits Princes Street revellers.

How To Be Mysterious

A controlled experiment in telling friends and family.

Recipe for Success

We had guests for dinner on Sunday night, for the first time in months, and even getting to that point took a fair bit of negotiation to find the one weekend when three work colleagues and partners could all come at once. The six-week delay between thought and deed cranked up the pressure, too, to pull off something special; yet by Saturday I still hadn’t figured out what I would cook. As official inviter, I was the one doing all the cooking, which is half the fun.

Swells

life
is a sea
of momentous
possibility
lifting us
in its
swells
and
dashing us
on its
reefs
where
clownfish nibble
at the coral of
our plans
and friendly anemones
tickle our
regrets

Jammin’

Blackberries

The Black Hole

This dearth of posting is deceptive, because elsewhere I’ve actually been blogging like it’s 1999. It’s all been for the course, though, and for a smaller (or at least more private) audience.

Lone and Level Sands

A couple of sites I’ve been working on since last July have finally gone live, although in both cases most of my work on them finished a while ago. (I should have noted this during yesterday’s Reboot, but that was only a coincidence; and besides, they don’t have any flash.)

Can You See the Real Me?

I don’t have too many graven images at this particular shrine to self, but this was too good to resist. We all meet doppelgangers from time to time, in popular culture if not in the flesh. For years I’ve known of two in particular, but recently encountered a third...

My New Filing Technique is Unstoppable

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been boring anyone within earshot about the latest Book That’s Changed My Life. It’s hardly a book for the ages—no Moby Dick or Middlemarch—but it’s exactly the one I needed to read: Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen.

Cultural Attaché

After averaging 26 months between visits to Australia since we left, I’m about to slash my average to 19. The photographic opportunities are just too good to ignore, especially when one of my friends is willing to dress up and dance around in front of the camera like a man possessed—possessed by the spirit of matrimony.

Of course, when you’re faced with shelling out for two international airfares it helps to have work pay for half of it. And it helps even more if it’s somebody else’s work. And it helps even more if you get to swan around Tokyo doing your best Scarlett Johansson impression while the work is being done by that somebody else. Which is exactly what I’ll be doing while Jane goes to a trade fair, when we stop over in Japan on our way back from Melbourne.

As We May Have Thunk

I was at a talk a while ago by Professor Wendy Hall, a computer scientist whose group’s pioneering hypermedia system Microcosm emerged just in time to be trumped by another called the World Wide Web. As part of her potted history of all things hypertextual and semantic webular, she asked how many in the audience had actually read Vannevar Bush’s landmark article As We May Think. I was one of the surprising number of people who weren’t among the surprisingly few who had. Three weeks later, I still haven’t, so this public confession is to remind me that I should.

Howdy Ho!

It snowed again here on Sunday morning, and all those photos from last week were nothing compared to what we spotted in Princes Street Gardens in the afternoon: the most beautiful snowman in the world.

Busting Balls

View from Appleton Tower, 3 March 2006

The above photo is Jane’s (all rights reserved by Jane, reproduced by kind permission of Jane). She works in the widely loathed Appleton Tower. Although it’s a monstrosity from the outside, overshadowing its charming Georgian surroundings with nine floors of Duplo-block ugliness, the tower is quite pleasant inside, and has some of the best panoramic views of the Old Town... because they’re the only ones without Appleton Tower in them.

Snow!

It’s blowing a blizzard out there;
It’s snowing and freezing the air.
The world’s turning white,
So it’s winter, all right.
Just a shame that I’m no polar bear.

As I write this, it really is snowing heavily outside—Edinburgh’s first of 2006. It started coming down while I was out in the street, and I just happened to have my camera with me, so some photos will be coming soon.

3 March 2006 ·

Inconsequential Property

Jane had a business event down south in January, and for a while I was thinking of catching a train down to meet up with her and see some friends. We decided against it (having been travelling so much recently), but unexpectedly I ended up down in London for a day after all.