Currently at home, using my Nokia E61 to post to my blog using the standard Blogware web interface, via my Dad's wifi. Nice!

After much consideration, discussion and changing of minds, this year Kev and I decided to try a Frank pumpkin. Frank, of course, being the big scary rabbit from Donnie Darko. Easier said than done because he doesn't exactly have a face that reduces easily to shades of light and dark. We also had problems with an overripe pumpkin which managed to be both squishier and thicker-walled than we would have liked. The carving was a wee bit rushed, and lack of good pumpkin carving tools does sort of limit one's finesse, but still… it's a jack o'lantern. We will have to refine this design for next year. And get some better cutting implements.

Frank, the Donnie Darko Jack O' Lantern

technorati tags:hallowe'en, frank, donnie darko, jack o lantern

So that's it. My fling with the Blackberry Pearl is over. It has been sent back to T-Mobile, from whence it came.

I tried to buy a Nokia E61 instead, on the same Web 'n Walk plan, but T-Mobile has taken against me quite severely, telling me first that “because of your credit status we are unable to offer you a pay monthly phone”, and then when I tried again, “We're sorry but we're currently unable to
place your order, as your credit status prevents us offering you an
additional line on your account.”

Bullshit. My credit rating hasn't taken a dive in the last week, and no, thank you very much, I don't want to buy a copy of my credit report directly from the credit reporting company. This is more about T-Mobile's stupid system wherein you can't keep an account but change the phone, you have to cancel the account and then buy a new one with a different phone.

This is the most appalling customer service. First, they missell me the phone, now they are refusing to sell me the phone I actually want.

I'm tempted to just stay with Orange, but to be honest, the T-Mobile plan is a lot cheaper than the Orange one, and Orange don't seem to have the same range of phones. Luckily, my Treo seems to have magically healed itself (for the most part), so I wonder if the wig-out was due to water in the works rather than anything intrinsically wrong with it. Although the slowly growing yellow wiggly squiggle on the screen remains so it is definitely still on its way out.

This will all get sorted out eventually, but only the little fishes know when. Meantime, use the old phone number if you're going to call me because the 'new' one no longer works.

technorati tags:t-mobile, phones, crappy customer service

You may have noticed a sudden slew of old posts being republished here, all of which have now been deleted. You may be wondering wtf that was all about.

It's ok. It was just Kevin playing with my Treo – he hit 'Sync All' in mo:Blog, thus causing it to republish a whole bunch of stuff I wrote last year.

Special apologies to William Meloney who left a very nice comment on the reposted version of this post, The Connected Life from May last year, which has sadly now been deleted. William, I can respost it to the old post if you like – I still have it on email. Just let me know.

As for Kevin, well, it's lovely to have a boyfriend who is both curious and technically inept. It provides me with hours and hours of fun. I'm just not going to mention either the Sony Minidisc or the iPod here. No sireee. Not once.

As if flying isn't enough of a hellish chore these days, with daft hand luggage restrictions, over-zealous security and long waits, the French have decided to go one better with their new MP2 terminal at Marseilles:

The city of Marseilles has seen the future – it has no carpets. A minimalist, no-frills air terminal, intended specifically for low-cost airlines, opened yesterday beside the city's existing airport.

Carpets are replaced by a painted concrete floor. There is no air conditioning. Passengers have to carry their own bags from check-in to security control. There are no luggage trolleys. There are no shuttle buses or swivelling gangways to reach the aircraft. Travellers walk across the tarmac to reach their planes.

Independent Online Edition > Europe

Wonderful. That's just want I wanted. A miserable flight that lands at a miserable airport. It sounds worse that Charles de Gaulle:

The MP2 terminal at Marignane, near Marseilles, looks remarkably like a
freight hangar. That is not surprising. Two years ago, it was a freight
hangar.

…

Passengers will be encouraged, and expected, to spend as little time in
the terminal as possible. There are only 30 seats in the whole building.

Bugger that for a game of soldiers.

technorati tags:flying, marseilles, airports

Stuck outside Holloway Road station waiting for it to be opened. It's shut (exit only) because there's a football match on at the Emirates Station and apparently there have been too many people using the station. They are also saying that it going to be shut every time there's a match on. Great.
I haven't minded the disruption caused by matches – the roads closing and the flood of supporters. But this is really annoying. Apparently “there was a sign up” but signs are easy to miss, and frankly that's not enough. At the very least LUL or, more appropriately, Arsenal should have given leaflets out, and ideally they should have leafleted every house and flat in the area. If I had known I could have walked to Caledonian Road which was unaffected.
Oh, and Kings Cross is shut, and the Victoria Line and Northern Line apparently suspended. Bloody useless. LUL are about as useful as a fart in a jacuzzi.

Sitting at Heathrow, minding my own beeswax when I get a text from T'Other. The new MacBook is out. A replacement for the iBook, it goes five times faster, has at last audio in/out, a built in iSight camera and a whole bunch of other cool stuff. And at a snip of a price.
I just burnt through a chunk of my monthly data allowance on my Treo looking at the mobile browser unfriendly Apple site, and drooling. I really want one. I abuse my iBook so badly – multiple apps with multiple documents open and multiple tabs in FireFox and Camino. I could really do with a CPU that can deal with such behaviour, because there's no way I'm gonna change.
Can't wait to get to online so I can compare with the MacBook Pro.

So T'Other and I are off to Warsaw today for the EBU Radio News conference. I'm very excited because I've never been to Poland before. However, this trip is not without its ironies. I've let my Polish learning go, so am entirely linguistically challenged and my phrase book is still in Dorset so I am going to have to buy a new one. Still, we have a little time outside of the conference to explore the city, so will make the most of it.
Meantime, access to the internet will be patchy, and will to find access even patchier still. See you… later.

So T`Other`s brother (ooh! that rhymes!) has this really great PDA/phone called a QTEK 9100 or an XDA mini S depending on who`s selling it to you. I've been thinking of getting one of these for a while and now I'm getting to play with one and I have to say that so far I really like it. This blog post is being written using IE and the old fashioned admin pages, and it's working just fine over our wifi network. Nice! I might just have to go get myself one of these.

Walking towards Bank station just now, my train of thought was somewhat derailed by two fire engines hurtling round the corner. Then an ambulance. A HEMS car (Tom can explain what that is.) Then the police, in cars and on bikes. More sirens.
By this time I'm at Bank and the entrance is closed. More police. More ambulances. Wouldn't be surprised to hear a chopper in a second. No one has a clue what's going on, though. Clearly the station is closed – the cluster of emergency services vehicles and personnel attest to that.
I start walking to the nearest bus stop.
What you have to realise about Bank is that is has about 9 different entrances, and links underground to Monument station. Obviously all entrances are shut. But each one seems to have a fixed sign on it that says 'When this entrance is shut, use X other entrance'. As most of the entrances are out of sight of each other, there's no knowing that there's no point walking to another because it too will be shut, no way of knowing that the emergency services are on site unless you walked past them. I see people going from entrance to entrance, trying to figure out what's going on.
No gate has a temporary sign saying 'Station closed'. There are no LUL personnel around to tell you.
How hard would it be to actually put up a sign on the gates when the station is shut? A little information goes a long way and it'd save us punters from a lot of confused milling about.

Still insanely busy, as you may have surmised. Keep hoping it will calm down, but every quiet day is ruined by a crisis. I have so much unread and pending email I don't know where to start. Paris was fun, but not relaxing (more on Paris if I ever get the chance to sit and write anything).
I need time off, because I'm so tired that I'm ineffective. I need to kick back and do some serious meditation. I need to do the sorting that evens things out, to quote whichever of the Daoist masters said that.
I always joke that I'm a crap Daoist, but that that's ok because Daoism allows you to be crap. But when I start to feel swamped like this, Daoism saves my bacon because it's now, when I most need to, that I can fall back on the main principles of Daoism and save my brain from frying. Instead of getting all wound up, it's time to just get into the flow of it and allow myself to be swept along. At a time when everything is equally urgent, do the things you can do. You can't do the things you can't do. It's plain and simple really.
Also, sleep helps.

A pattern appears to be emerging. I look at my diary on a Monday and notice that it looks comfortably empty. About thirty seconds later I get a slew of emails and suddenly my week looks like the revenge of the iCal Gnomes. I get up, deal with urgent ORG stuff, go in to see my client, go over to my other office at lunch time, pick up on ORG and stay there way too late. (Although my workload is a walk in the park compared to Cory's and Paula's, really.)
I love what I'm doing, so I'm not complaining, but it is exhausting. My only consolation at the moment is that t'other's workload is just as mad, so when I get tired on the weekend the pair of us curl up and fall asleep, with Miss Ella the cat curled up atop us both.
Mind you, I do owe an awful lot of people emails. Erk. The trouble with that is that I'm turning into one of those people who gets more email that they can possibly cope with, and whom other people then accuse of deserting them because they're one of the 'little' people. Which is bollocks. But I do worry that I don't get to reply to everyone promptly, for which I can only apologise.
Right, nearly home. Time then for dinner and to get some more work done.

I found my favourite earring. There's a lesson in there somewhere, I'm sure, although it's probably less about the nature of possession and more about things you shouldn't do whilst wearing earrings.
Funny how a delay on the train when I have my Treo and a blog post to write isn't as bad as when I don't.
Things are really good at the moment, quite exceedingly so, and I'm mainly spending my time being obnoxiously happy, despite once more having more work than I can comfortably do in a mere 35 hours each week. I feel like I have a lost sight of the blog a little though, so I can only beg your forgiveness if that's truly the case. I hardly read any blogs at all now, which is ironic considering what I spend a lot of my time doing.
(For those of you who worry about me overworking, the reason I have been rather quiet of late is that I have spent the last three weekends in a place where my laptop isn't. Sometimes, ya gotta switch off, and these days I have good reason to.)
ORG is coming up to a sort of crescendo, with the pledge soon to top out. Frantically trying to get everything ready in time, which is a challenge but I think we'll make it. Keep an eye out for news on the ORG blog (the blorg?) of the event we're planning for the end of the month.
In a complete non sequiteur, I now have shelves (thanks brov!) so I have all my books nicely unpacked and neatly displayed. Well, I say 'all' but I brought such a tiny fraction of the books I own that 'all' is a gross misrepresentation. It pleases me very much, though, to finally have some books around me. I hardly have time to glance at them, let alone read them at the moment, but I have every intention of making at least a dent on them at Christmas. Not literally, obviously. That would be wilful vandalism.
So I have 20 minutes to wait for the next train, and am starting to feel that this post is just so much more about keeping me from being bored than about being entertaining or insightful or interesting for you. But then, I tell other people off for assuming that the most important thing about blogging is the reader when in fact it's the writer, so I'm just eating my own dogfood. (Assuming that the readers are the most important thing creates a sense of 'audience' which then wrongly encourages the broadcast mindset by compounding the false dichotomy and furthermore it devalues blogs with small readerships when the value there is inherent in the meaning to the participants, not to uninvolved onlookers.)
Wow, my bum is cold. Why can't they make benches at train stations out of something warm? Metal benches may be durable but they suck the heat out of you like a fruitarian vampire bat sucks the orange from an ice lolly.
10 minutes.
So, I was thinking the other day that horoscopes are just like weather reports: they are fun to read but are forgotten as soon as you finish; I only read them when I am expecting bad news but wish there were good; and they are usually a load of bollocks.
On the train now.
Bum beginning to thaw.
Mind now blank. Surely there must be something more to prattle on about? Oh well. Consider it a lucky escape.

The thing about having favourite things is that you face a dilemma. Either you put your favourite thing somewhere safe so that nothing ever damages it and it can't get lost, or you use it all the time so that you can delight in whatever it is that makes it your favourite particular thing but risk perhaps damage or loss. The more you use something, the more likely it is that it will get damaged or lost.
I believe that there's little point having a favourite thing if you closet it away and never use it. I had a pair of trousers like that. Expensive and pretty and I never wore them in case I ruined them and soon I became pathologically incapable of wearing them at all. Hardly worth the money.
So these days I use my favourite things. But then I end up losing them. Particularly amber earrings, it seems. I love amber, and I wear my amber jewellery every day, but yeserday I lost an earring.
I guess that's how it goes. Delight in it and lose it to the big wild world one day, or hide it away and lose it to yourself immediately.

Seems the only time I get to blog these days is on the journey home. Fifteen minute wait now til the next train so fifteen minutes to stand and write meaningless drivel on the Treo for your delight and delectation.
Almost entirely unprepared for my trip to New York on Saturday. Haven't packed, found my stash of dollars left over from San Francisco, written my talk for Tuesday (although I do know that it will involve pigeons, in hommage to Hammersley), or made any significant arrangements other than the bare essentials such as how I am getting there and where I'll be staying.
If you are in NY and want to meet up on 20 or 21 Oct, email me. I'll be coming home on the 22.
Hmm… I can say 'home' now and it nearly feels accurate. Finally starting to settle in although still haven't been shopping yet so still no food in.
On balance, and despite yesterday's rant, the tediousness of commuting is outweighed by the benefits of contact with real, living, breathing human beings. I'm enjoying having my part-time consultancy teaching people to use Socialtext. It's kinda cool when you show people how this stuff works and see their eyes light up as they realise how useful it's going to be.
The Open Rights Group is going well too. Lots of great responses from the people I am meeting. I'm looking forward to really getting stuck into it when I get back from NYC – so much to do, and so many people to meet and talk to and convince of our place in the digital rights ecosystem. Plus lots of research to do, which will be great.
And, of course, BlogOn is fast approaching. I haven't blogged about it much because by the time I've finished working for the day the last thing I've felt like doing is blogging about it. But I've just finished a string of conference calls with our speakers and that has got me really excited. We have some really cool people coming, and I am so looking forward to meeting them all, particularly as some are people I've known online for a while but never met. So can't wait for Monday, although equally Wednesday will be nice too.
Have tickets for Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's film, Mirrormask, and tickets to the Chihuly glass exhibition at Kew, both of which I am looking forward to for slightly different reasons. RSA IP Charter launch tomorrow, followed by the geek dinner for Tim O'Reilly.
At this point it looks like November could be described as quite quiet, but I'm betting that won't last. Like the proverbial fridge, my diary seems to fill itself to brimming without me actually doing anything.
So now you know as much as I do, although I'm not quite sure why you would want to.

We regret to inform you that, due to years of chronic underfunding and shameful mismanagement, there will be significant delays on your journey home this evening. When the train does finally turn up it will be overcrowded and hot, and you may well feel ill within moments of boarding. If you do faint, don't worry as you will be so tightly wedged in that you'll be unable to actually hit the floor. London Underground Limited has absolutely no regrets about this whatsoever as we've been creaming off the profits for years now and have a nice little villa out on St Lucia to which we'll be taking early retirement and our golden handshake very soon.
Normal service will not be resumed at any point in your lifetime or ours, as the system is in such a state of terminal collapse that nothing short of a miracle can save it. And we don't mean the sort of 'miracle' that any mere mortal transport 'czar' can achieve, but a full-on deity-driven bells, whistles and chorus of angels miracle. We think you'll agree that that is unlikely to occur.
We would also like to apologise for the chaos caused by the new signals which don't work, rolling stock with buggered brakes, and engineering work which overruns because half the sub-sub-sub-contractors are either taking a piss, sleeping, or making a brew. We'd like to apologise, but we won't because frankly we don't give a shit. However, as we think cars are really great we're going to encourage you not to use public transport at all. We hope you won't notice that we all have lots and lots shares in the oil and automotive industries.
To ensure that your journey home is as miserable as possible, we have been working closely with our colleagues at Network Rail on a countrywide harmonisation project so that their standards are as astonishingly low as ours. This means that whilst we make sure you miss your intended train, they make sure that the one after that is cancelled. Because of the multi-platform capacity at many mainline stations, it will be possible for Network Rail to further confuse and delay you by repeatedly changing platforms for the train they previously told you was cancelled so that you manage to miss it anyway. Any homocides you commit during this period will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Your safety and security is paramount, and we aim to keep the British public transport system 100 per cent safe and secure by making it 100 per cent impossible to use. To this end, we have extended rush 'hour'. It will now begin at 6am and end at 12 midnight, with a special new peak 'Super Rush Hour, Version 2.hell' to replace the old version. Please ensure your immune system is fully up to date as you will be spending a lot of time nose-to-nose with lurghi-ridden commuters.
Should you need any help, please do not hesitate to ask station staff, who will have precisely bugger-all information and be entirely unable to assist. Should you need to actually get anywhere, we suggest that you buy a horse.

So I gave up on the delusion that I would ever be one of those women who need carry no more than a tiny little handbag, the sort that fit a purse and lipstick and perhaps a single, dainty housekey.
My keys alone wouldn't fit in one of those things. Where the hell would I put my laptop?
I've recently got somewhat fed up of the compromise too – having one slimish laptop bag that's not quite big enough to fit everything in, thus forcing me to also carry a handbag of the non-dainty sort for the overflow. Not good for the shoulders or sanity, that combination. Patricularly when said set of keys, recently grown to jailer's proportions, manages to get lost in both bags. Possibly at once. Hmm. Enanglement in a luggage-housekey array could be a fascinating new branch of quantum physics.
I am quite particular about my bags. Not that you'd believe it if you saw them, mind. I like to have lots of pockets so that I can segregate everything: there's the pocket for my keys, there's the pocket for my pens, there's the pocket the useless bit of paper I've been carrying round for three months without fully understanding why. Bags with no pockets, where purse sits upon phone upon notepad upon power supply just fill me with the night horrors. But bags with sufficient pockets are hard to come by.
So I started my search up again. The search that never truly ceases, and the unsuccessful results of which lie buried at the back of the wardrobe or hidden inside each other in a suitcase in the loft like particularly floppy Russian dolls.
I remember seeing what looked like a nice bag in an Apple shop in Holborn, so went to take a look. Nice bag. Pockets. Not too big. Designed to keep your laptop safe or, more importantly, my laptop safe. Decided after much tooing and froing and discussion with the sales assistant (who showed patience of saintlike magnitude) to buy it. Because it wasn't as big as the bigger one, or as enormous as the rucksack version, and it looked quite, dare I say it, dainty compared to some of the monstrosities I've seen over the years.
So I bought it. Took it proudly back to the office. Disembagulated all my posessions and then set about reembagulating them. (Note invention of two new words there. Three if you count the root 'embagulation' – the act of putting something into a bag with pockets.)
Paused.
Disembagulated.
Reembagulated.
Realised that if it ain't gonna all fit, it simply ain't gonna all fit, no matter how cunningly you try to pack it. See, that's the problem with nice padded bags. They are full of padding, thus making them an anti-TARDIS – smaller on the inside than they look. (Also not able to move through space and time except for in the usual manner.)
One slightly embarassed trip back to the shop later and I am now the proud owner of a large, well padded, moderately pocketed laptop backpack. The kind of bag that tells you that a girl means business. And that her laptop is worth more to her than mere dainty aesthetics.
I like to think that it gives me an air of mystery, as if I might be going away somewhere exciting and exotic and preferably tropical. I always seem to end up in Marble Arch instead, though.
Must work on that.

Well, clothes at least. No shelves for the books so they will stay in boxes.
I do still rather feel that I've not yet left my yurt behind, though. There are pieces of the puzzle still left to find and put in place before I shake the feelings of temporariness. Whether that's just eight years worth of insecurity, including my recent nomadic period, catching up with me I'm not sure, but it's hard to resist the urge to start considering what my next move will be.
I would prefer to feel settled though, relaxed, comfortable and secure, and to shake off this constant aprehension that soon I will have to pack up and move on lest I outstay my welcome.

After two years untouched in my parents' loft, only two strings were out of tune on my Takamine. How's that for quality?
Pity my callouses *ouch* didn't last *ouch* so *ouch* well. Gonna take me a while to build them back up again and relearn all I've forgotten. *ouchouchouch*

For reasons currently unclear, our internet connection is completely b0rked. It just died this afternoon, so I am reduced to using the Treo. This means no email, IM, or IRC and makes working nigh on impossible.
Grrrr. I could so have lived without this.
UPDATE: At last, it's back. Phew.