Been quiet here; it’s been busy at work (more on that next week) and it’s been busy outside work, working on my talk for Reboot.

Looking forward to Reboot hugely. The lineup looks fabulous – really mind-expanding, powerful stuff – and I’m really looking forward to meeting the many new faces I don’t know, as well as seeing old friends again.

I hope to put the PDF of the slides, big as it may be, online soon, along with a rough PDF script. Let me polish them off, first. Also, there’s now a pReboot podcast interview with me over at bloxpert which you can listen to. Not sure how it came across – a bit enthusiastic, a bit dorky – but hope it all makes sense.

Post-Denmark, things will really kick off around these parts. Hoping to be writing more, taking more pictures, and making sure it’s all very visible here. What Ben writes about building and sculpting the tangible, the physical is really striking a chord right now. Now, I just need to work out how to build these things.

Well, that was America. Thanks to the very generous Dan Heaf, I’m sitting in the Virgin Atlantic Lounge at LAX, sipping free drinks and catching up the world online. The presentation went down well, it seems; I’ve had some interesting emails as a result and some kind words. The PDF isn’t up online yet, but the most indepthwrite-up – featuring pictures of yours truly + slides – is over at Near Near Future. Given Regine was in the front row, hammering away at her notes, there are obviously some gaps but the basic premise is there. I’d argue it’s less a “consumer” perspective and more just a perspective on the gaming industry (rather than academic/research perspectives), but it’s still great to see it out there, and to a huge audience. Thanks very much for the write-up, Regine!

And so I’m about to board a plane and hop back to the UK. I’ve had a great time at Etech – it all began sinking in late on Thursday (and especially very late on Thursday, when I had a fantastic night, thanks to danah, Matt, Alex, and many others).

Many thanks must also go to the organisers of the conference, O’Reilly and especially to all those (friends and new acquaintances) in the British contingent who put up with me, nerves and all, and steered me through safely. It’s slowly sinking in just how wonderful an experience it was. My further thoughts from the conference – and there are, as ever, several, will follow in due course.

So, I made it. Been in the states a few days now and I’m pretty much over the jetlag. I think.

ETech kicks off today – I’m sitting watching Cal set up for an eight-hour marathon on How We Built Flickr – well, I missed it in the UK, so I may as well take all the opportunities I can get. My talk is in rude health – pretty much there, just requires a degree of fine tuning.

Have been having a great time in the US so far. The train ride down from LA to SD was just awesome; I’ve got a big stack of gorgeous photos that’ll be gracing Flickr soon, I hope. Then I hung around with Simon and Tom for a while – watching them eat a $200 lunch, hitting up the Apple Store for goodies, and then finally (and much documented), watching the Oscars.

Last night a huge stack of UK geeks went to the Kansas City barbeque joint – as the sign outside said, where the “Top Gun Sleazy Bar Scene” got filmed. Good barbeque, I tell you.

And now the talk’s about to begin. More later…

There’s been a long silence here, punctuated by del.icio.us links and the odd post (and the odd picture) but not much else.

There are various reasons for this. The first is the new job – and everything that’s entailed, namely, trying to tie up loose ends at my current job before I leave, today. It’s also been a busy month at work anyway, so that’s made things even more hectic.

And then for the past month or two, at night, and at those weekends, I’ve been working pretty hard on my talk for ETech. I’ve been nervous about that – still am – and it’s taken a fair amount of work to knock it into the shape it’s in. I’m pretty pleased with it now – just hoping it doesn’t bomb at the conference. So that’s the other reason I’ve been busy.

Now, though, it’s practically all done. I’m flying out to LA tomorrow, and then down to San Diego for a week, Saturday to Saturday. I’m really looking forward to ETech. Bar the fear of speaking, I’ve followed it for a fair few years and have always wanted to go; now I’ve got the chance. It’s my first visit to the US, too; the last transatlantic flight I did was Canada when I was 11. So it’s all rather exciting, all told.

If you’re interested in saying hello during ETech, do drop me a line (tom at this domain), or look out for the redhead with the sideburns. I’m going to try and update this blog a bit more frequently when I’m there (which won’t be hard), but it’s not going to approach live-blogging or anything – I’m going to be too busy taking notes, I hope. Keep an eye on my Flickr stream, too.

A bit of a holiday, then, mixed up with a frenetic burst of data that I can’t wait to see. In a few weeks, once I’ve settled into the new jobs, I can start pulling the chocks out of a few other little side-projects. (And, of course, giving myself and the girl some quality time).

All good things come to an end.

I’d been meaning to write this for a while, and then I saw Alex’s post on his leaving-bash, and decided now was as probably a good a time as ever.

So: I’m leaving the New Statesman after nearly two years there. It’s been a great two years, and a fantastic first job. I’ve had a lot of great opportunities, learned a vast amount, and been given the space to put that learning to use. I’ve also worked with some lovely people, who I’m not planning on losing contact with anytime soon. I’ve developed a great deal – as a designer, as a developer, as a writer, and most importantly as a person – in those two years, and enjoyed them hugely.

But, you know, first jobs come to an end, and we move on. And so I’m soon going to be starting work at the Nature Publishing Group, publishers of Nature and a whole host of other journals, to work as a CSS Developer. It’s a slightly bigger operation than the Statesman, which will be an interesting experience for me, and I’m looking forward to the new challenges it’ll bring.

I’ve got two weeks left at the Statesman; then it’s off to Etech, and when I return from there, I’ll be starting at Nature. Then, 2006 can really begin.

That’s the upshot of this weekend.

Over the past few days, I’ve had a slowly growing pain in my right thigh. Like needles, jabbing away, and it really hurts when I bash it into things. By Saturday, it had spread from a single spot to the whole thigh, and it hurt quite a bit. So I called NHS Direct – rather late, I must admit – and they suggested I go to the local hospital. Which is a half hour walk, so I took a taxi.

At one in the morning.

Turns out I don’t have Deep Vein Thrombosis, after all.

No, I have pulled a muscle in my right thigh. The muscle that keeps you sitting upright. “Have you been doing a lot of sitting?” asked the doctor. Yes, I said, yes I have. All day at work, and then all night at home (or for a few hours at least) bashing away at my presentation for Emerging Tech. And it’s not just duration – stress levels are quite high, too, regarding that.

In short: I’ve been sitting too hard.

Then I walked back from the hospital at 1.30am. Which pretty much threw Sunday out of joint.

So Coudal have this thing called Verse by Voice, where you leave short poetry on their answerphone. Now, it’s a while since I read poetry aloud, but I remember being alright at it, and I remembered a particularly apposite poem. So I phoned them up.

The upshot is, there’s a recording of me reading Timer by Tony Harrison on the CP website for a while.

The way the guitar part in The Rakes’ Binary Love sounds like a scratchy 56k modem.

Red wine.

Sleep.

Dancing monkeys in Timesplitters 3

New razorblades on thick facial fuzz.

It’s al been a bit crazy recently; busy at work, fear setting in regarding Etech (which I’m sure will be fine), pressures of sorting out travel to latter, plans for after March. del.icio.us keeps this place busy, and turns the lights out at night.

OK, so my big news is public on the internets. I’m going to be speaking at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in March, over in San Diego. The talk is called From Paddles to Pads: Is Controller Design Is Killing Creativity in Videogames? (the title you can see on that page is the one I originally submitted it under, but then I realised that I’d much rather ask a question than answer one).

The talk is about hardware interfaces to games, what they teach us, what’s wrong with them, and how they’re fundamental to gaming as a whole. The precis over at that link is roughly right, but I wrote it a long while ago and it’s definitely subject to change – so don’t hold me to it 100%.

I’m very excited.

I’m also very scared.

Tips, advice, comments, questions, all appreciated. Looking forward to seeing some of you in San Diego, maybe.

Happy Christmas, y’all.

It’s been a lovely day here, doing not a lot. Eating good food, ringing the relatives, a lovely selection of presents given and received, and lots of time to chill out. All quite tiring in fact, so off to bed quite soon. Tomorrow it’s off to Bedford to see aunts, uncles, cousins and grandmother, and then on Tuesday I’m off to Derby to visit the Girl’s extended family. Back in London towards the end of the week, for New Year.

I’ll be posting again before the New Year; a few things to mention, perhaps a retrospective on 2005, and the usual stream from del.icio.us will all be happening before that. Enjoy yourselves!