Beautiful promo art for the new season of Six Feet Under. Am still flicking back to this in browser tabs just to gaze. Also, the trailer, cut to Nina Simone’s Feeling Good, is so worth your time it’s untrue.

No doubt I will see this in the UK in about a year’s time. Bah.

Notcon was, in retrospect, very good. Just-organised-enough, very friendly (even though I appeared to be lacking courage to talk to people – really, it was because I felt stupid) and I found a good deal to ruminate on. Danny O’Brien’s Lifehacks talk was very interesting, even if I’d read the notes from ETCON already – a great speaker and some good topics. James Larsson’s Prawn Sandwich Clock was inspired, and the whole Hardware panel was a wonderful cross-section of geekdom: tinkerers, bodgers, and compscis-turned good. The cameraphone tricknology was really great – nicely implemented and all.

TheyWorkForYou has been praised and applauded all over the web, so it’ll only get a brief mention here, but it deserves more. I’m definitely going to be keeping tabs on it – who knows, might get me being more proactive about politics after all. A mightly impressive project, congrats to all involved.

Other stuff I enjoyed? A better-than-I-expected discussion about blogging, with all expected DaveGreenisms, and a talk about mashups that turned into an excellent copyright discussion. The social software talk was a real disappointment – it appeared to have been jumped by people wanting to talk and bending the rules to fit their project. A shame; hopefully there’ll be a subsequent event to catch up on that.

I guess the thing I really enjoyed was the backchannel. I had a fairly good SubEthaEdit document for the final politics chat (will upload soon), and enjoyed the IRC channel all day – often irrelevant, but some useful insight, most often into what was going on in the other room. I was, if you’re interested, twra2 – my old university alias.

In the end, the whole thing made me aware of the gaps in my knowledge and skills. The former, I can probably append; but I know there’ll be some things I’ll never do. I’m a content person, a design person, an information person. I am hopefully going to learn some PHP/database stuff, and maybe also some scripting, but don’t hold your breath. I’m still learning how to design – both what buttons to push, and what colour to make said buttons. A lot of the time, what I really want is to be artistically creative: the novel is progressing now, so is some music. Sometimes, I feel that I could also get the same satisfaction digitally. Anyhow; this is the path I have chosen, and I like it. I will learn a scripting language when the novel is done.

Promise.

Sunday approaches. So, therefore, does NotCon. I will be there, and I’m really looking forward to it. If you’re a familiar face, it’d be lovely to see you.

I always seem to be trying to catch myself up. Perhaps it’s trying to do too many things – too many creative things – outside the office. I get scared by the bulk of them and retreat. Still, I had a pretty good bank holiday weekend. Saturday saw an afternoon in Putney drinking beer and passing time with the delightful Brooke, Sunday was a trip to see the Remix at the Metropolitan (Go Home Productions still rock my world), and then on Monday, a slow day indoors pottering.

I also trimmed my hedge for the first time, and it felt very satisfying.

I’m getting close to done with a piece of music for the first time in a long while. I’m also on the cusp of writing a big chunk of novel; unfortunately, post-work exhaustion usually leaves me unable to quite engage at that pace, but by the end of the week, I should be a good chapter down.

I still haven’t done my ironing, though. I keep on planning stuff, and then it all begins to run out of control. Need to slow down again, catch myself up. Tomorrow is ironing, novel. Thursday is something new. Friday, it’ll be the weekend again, and I shall again do my best not to procrastinate.

Oh, and I’m still taking some quite good pictures. I think, anyhow.