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).

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.