First thing I notice when I turn on my computer properly for the first time in a week: kitschbitch has produced her best design to date. Very clean, very clear, and with a defined idea for the look that I must confess to be a little jealous of.
Thank fucking Christ. I am back in London with four or five days of complete nothing that needs to be done, with full access to a computer and total and absolute independence once more. I can’t imagine anything nicer frankly – except perhaps having my brother down here with me.
For those who have expressed an interest, I’d just like to reassure you that I will indeed be scanning the picture of my bearded father for popular consumption as soon as I am back in London.
So what will this Christmas be remembered for in my mind? It won’t be the contribution towards the DVD player from my family, it won’t be all my stepfather’s family coming around for Christmas lunch. It will be remembered by me for my mother finding the first photograph of my father that I have ever seen. This is the first time I’ve seen what he looks like since I was about four. And truly he was a beardy-weirdy bloke if ever I saw one. I think I was expecting something slightly … different..
I can’t stop myself. Three times. I’ve seen it three times. This time with my brother who (I think) loved it. Whenever will I get tired of the trash injection that is Charlie’s Angels?
Meg is having trouble getting up the energy to post to her site during the Christmas break. I know how she feels. The only difference between our feelings on the issue is that much of my inability to post is directly related to having to wrestle with my brother’s PC rather than my own gorgeous Mac, plus the whole “dial-up keeps dropping” catastrophe.
Found via the Underground: Band w/trem release an MP3 called Barbelith.
So I’m currently excited about two bits of press I’ve done recently – one for The Big Issue and one for The Bookseller. The former was orchestrated by a friend of mine, who basically wrote a kind of basic primer for weblogs and decided to cite me quite heavily, despite my extensive attempts to actually provide him with some actual stories. The latter is a much more serious work related piece on how print publishing companies can repurpose content for the web. Again, I must confess, it was partially orchestrated by a friend of mine. Neither of them are out yet, but I’m both excited and slightly disturbed by the prospect of their arrival. I think I’m still trying to work out my relationship to the press. When Derek gets mentioned in Wired I get these little pangs like I’m under-achieving on the web. But being trained as a journalist I know how easy it is to misconstrue, misinterpret or misquote. Anxiety strikes.
Seti@home reaches the next stage of the search for extra-terrestrial life.
So I’m back in Norfolk finally. Yesterday was bloody exhausting. We went for our work Christmas lunch around one, spent £40 each at Belgo Centraal which I now owe my boss (didn’t have any money as such). Then there was the obligatory drink at Bradley’s Spanish Bar, followed by about an hour of mooching, half an hour of tube travel, forty-five minutes of mooching, a two and a half hour train journey, to be picked up at the station by my mother and brother, before another half-hour drive home. And when I got here, I couldn’t sleep. It was too damn quiet.