It’s the new year, of course.

In a rash act of spontaneity I’ve spent this weekend updating Twitgit, my OSX Dashboard widget for Twitter.

The obligatory, music-centric review of the year

I’m really not in the mood to blog about anything at the moment. So in my absence, here are some ducks. On ice.

As the tech world continues to heat up year-on-year, the conference season starts up earlier and earlier. It’s reached a point where the entire year becomes one great big geek piss up, with a short break at Christmas to get drunk with our families instead.

BarCamp London 2 was a fantastic and enjoyable success this weekend.

Wordpress have inexplicably broken full-text feeds in Wordpress 2.1 but truncating any articles which contain a <!-- more --> separator — used to reduce the length of articles on the front page.

Another short post after the lengthy pieces of recent days. The BBC are developing a fabulous piece of software called ‘iPlayer’. It will let you watch BBC television and radio broadcasts in full over the internet for periods of time after their first airing. I want it now.

Due to travel arrangements over the weekend and beginning of next week, I’m having to pack for SXSW a week early. Please assist my frantic evening by adding comments with reminders for things I need to pack. Thank you.

I’m having an awful day. For some reason I woke up and my mind elected it was going to see every glass half-empty, feel irrational negativity and generally put a downer on everything that comes up and comes to mind. It’s the kind of day where really I’d have been better off staying in bed, burying my head and desperately hoping tomorrow would come around and give me a better chance.

I’m very late. SXSW was fantastic, that’s all needs saying at this point.

For my Last.FM update and syncing needs I’ve long been a user of iScrobbler — rather than the official client. It’s minimal, tidy and provides funcational-enough iPod updating too.

For quite some time now, She has been prodding me to keep fit. Specifically, she’s been encouraging me to start running, since it seems to work for her.

This blog post has been delayed about a month whilst a few issues got sorted out, but it’s with giddy excitement that I finally announce that I’ve got a new job; I’m now a web developer for Yahoo! in London.

Facebook is everyone’s least hated under-one-roof social networking monster. It’s aesthetically neutral, perhaps even pretty. It’s open with feeds and iCal subscriptions and least evil of all, it allows you to specify an external source for your Facebook blog.

I bought an XBox 360 back in the Spring. Fabulous machine, and has got me playing games again after a short age of disinterest.

It’s been too long and there’s too much to write about, so in unhelpful munged-together form, here’re the last few months of my life:

Publication of my mini Hack Day London effort to generate an RSS feed from a Flickr photoset.

A mid-thirties woman, with a skirt too short and cigarette hanging weakly from her lips, is wedging a closing train carriage door open with a high-healed foot. She’s struggling as the doors push to close. All so that her knife-scarred boyfriend can force two pinches of tobacco into her purse.

It’s what computers have become; a marketing slogan that’s over ambitious, pretentious and painfully accurate all at once.

As mentioned last week, my new phone handset is abysmally bad. What I didn’t go into is that I’m having problems with the new network as well.

“I’m stuck in a phase of not getting up promptly”, I say, pathetically.
“No, you’ve never ever been good at mornings”, says She.

This week I’ve been trying to resolve my long-going mobile phone issues by finally signing up to Vodafone and cancelling my T-Mobile contract. As well as an inclusive allowance that will let me ring Hanni it means I can escape the terrible N95 handset I currently endure.

This post is going to be rather less effective that I’d perhaps first thought. It was going to be rather blunt and pessimistic.

Dave and I spent the entire evening playing Pro Evo 6 on the XBox. It was awesome. Especially winning 7–2. I digress though, as more awesome was our soundtrack. I would like to highly recommend that you listen to all of the following:

My T-Mobile contract came to a premature end this week as I moved onto Vodafone, whose call package should permit me to call Hanni with less risk of my belongings being repossessed. The flip is that I’ve had to send away the Nokia N95 that I was so enjoying.

As you may perhaps have noticed, there are some changes afoot, visually. This was all rather done on the spur of the moment so I’m not yet entirely sure what those visual changes are going to be. There are sketches in my Moleskin I’m keen to try out, plus I want to better include Flickr photos and a stream from Tumblr (which is a fantastic way to post impulsively, I’ve found). I hope it will be awesome.

I’m back from day one of @media Ajax. I’m here because JavaScript is my weak hand. It’s the technology I’ve worked with the least, although I’m plenty experienced as a programmer more generally. It’s been a really very interesting day indeed, although perhaps not entirely for what I’ve learned.

This is totally not posted because Chris Mills is sitting next to me, although his presence here did prompt me to try this out.

I have a new mobile phone number. The old one will probably still function for a few months, but I won’t have it on me. If you know me and you want it and haven’t had it pushed at you from some other medium, just ask.

Strongbow‘s website is broken and I’m unable to email them, so instead, please read this aloud in your most quintessentially British voice.

I have never been as happy with a piece of electronics as I am with my iPhone. It is the finest example I know of a device which is superior because it performs its limited functions astoundingly well, rather than many functions badly. The absent features (picture messages, sending texts to multiple recipients, an RSS reader…) are simply irrelevant in day to day use when the remaining experience is so good. I said good, not perfect, by the way.

The blog design has made it’s first nervous steps out of default HTML styling. I’ve worked out the grid, I’ve got placeholders for some new content and most of the mark-up has been tidied up quite neatly.

The weeks roll by and those of us in the UK are slowly but inevitably discovering that everybody in the country is actually in possession of everybody else’s confidential information; all of which was accidentally printed onto the inside of seventy-five million packets of Kellogg’s Rice Krispies. I’m more aware than ever of the technological generation gap. It’s growing rapidly and the haves and have-nots in technical competence are heading for a clash.