Last night caught the first 2 episodes of 24 Day 4 (or should I say Tivo’s them and caught up today). As a special ‘treat’ they were shown on Sky Travel, which is available on Freeview. So to continue watching I need to get Sky 1, which is difficult as none of the major cable companies supply here yet and I can’t put up a dish in the place I’m in (at least without some trouble). Or I can wait til the DVD comes out, most likely in August, or look elsewhere. As one of the prgrammes that I enjoy most, not sure wht I will do 😉

At least we’ve got rid of the addiction storyline!

This made me chuckle on the Tube this morning, from the Metro, or the BBC. Apparently a doodle from the desk of Tony Blair, at the Davos economic summit, has been analysed by ‘experts’, who proclaim that the Prime Minister is obviously ‘not a natural leader’ and ‘struggling under pressure’, plus he’s got a tendency towards meglomania! Unfortunately for the political pundits, the doodles are from Bill Gates. Wonder how that changes their analysis?

It’s Saturday, I’m sort of working, but decided to go out for a long lunch as a change from a week eating sandwiches at the desk. So went to a great place in Chiswick called Fishworks. I had a great people watching seat, on a balcony which allowed me to watch the fishmongers at the front of the restaurant. Although watching them gut and fillet a fish whilst eating may not be suitable for all.

A half bottle of Pinot Blanc, aportion of smoked salmon and then the main course – Suppe del Pescatore. Basically, what I would call an interactive dish; I got a warning when 6 utensils were bought to the table to allow me to eat the dish. A serving spoon, knife, fork, normal spoon, shell crackers and one of those peculiar thin little diggers for getting the meat out of shell fish.

The soup was wonderful, very messy, with a tomato and garlic base. One pile of shells later, I was ready to go. So back home I came to continue with site testing. But I did take this picture.

On a wonderful bright winter day, I took a wander along the river and down to Kew, snapping all the way. Instead of putting them on the site as I have with other photo’s, I’d thought I try out Flickr. So take a look here to see them. I’m going to try out their publish to blog facility as well on the next post

I was looking at my pattern of writing posts and realise I’m defintiely a consumer rather than a producer. I try and avoid posting from work, as at the moment I think it would push the interpretaion of valid use of computers, despite the fact that I do a lot of browsing – although I can always argue that is for research of the use of web technology . When I get home, I’m more in the mood to consume, to suck down content instead of writing stuff down.

So I tend to store things and write them up at the weekend. Hence the flurry of posts today!

Finally got some pictures framed. They’d taken 3 weeks and cost just over £90. There were 2 tapestries plus a screen print I’d picked up from Australia. Now all I need to do is find somewhere to put them; re-arranging the walls is on the cards for later.

As mentioned, I went along to the London Bloggers Meet on Wednesday. Met a good mix of people, who run a variety of blogs and here’s a few of them:

• Random Acts of Reality
• The Null Device
• pixeldiva
• chaotique
• Henri’s World

Looking at these later, I realised how quickly I’d come to rely on the aggregator, instead of trawling through the different sites. I currently use Bloglines, but it could be any of them. It’s harder to check thoese without RSS feeds than those with, which means I’d visit less.

The night was fun, there was a good conversation about a wide range of topics lasting til closing. I’d left work earlier than usual (if you can call 6.45 early) and it was great to think about different things. Of course, this had to be the day I’d been delivered some flowers – hauling those around the tube and the pub was a little difficult. Luckily they were in a large box, so better than a bunch
to manage.

Felt tired all of the next day though, did not get home to after 12.30. BUt will defintiely be going to the next one.

Just signed up to go to London Webblogger meetup. Could be interesting; let’s go see who else in London is doing this

Love Sunday mornings when there’s nothing to do except drink coffee, eat toast and actually get round to some of the programme’s that got TiVO’d during the week.

Julie Leung’s entry about Privacy and Secrecy resonated with me this monning, coming so soon after conversations at work about their blogging policy (or lack of it). Writing on a blog is sharing with a community, even if few people read it. You can share your thought processes, the things that are bugging you, the stuff you want to remember. But there’s always some kind of self-censorship, driven by both internal or external restrictions. I wouldn’t write here the same sort of things that I’d put in a hand written personal diary , but I may write more than I would relate in a conversation, partly because I’ve had time to reflect and can think during the writing process instead of the immediacy of talking.

The connectin to work? We don’t have a blogging policy, but they are slowly thinking their way towards them (i did have to explain what a blog is). We were discussing the dismissal of Joe Gordon from his job at Waterstones and the difference between commenting on a blog and havimg a loud conversation in a pub: permanacy. Something I say here could be round for a while. The team memeber I was in conversation with, is currently extremely conservative: employees should not document any aspect of their work life. I’m more in line with restricting discussion about company strategy, business decisions etc, which is in line with current policies about conversations, emails etc to other people. On our actual products, I should be able to say what I like and don’t like.

But if they go with the most extreme view, that makes a third to a half of my waking life off limits. And work is normally the area of the life that causes the most problems. If things piss me off, if I’m working silly hours or if things are going great, why shouldn’t i vent here. If I worked for Waterstone’s I definitely couldn’t. Where I am now, I’m not sure.

Back to Julie’s post, there are things that I would not share, things that I do share and things that I want to, but it may not be a good idea.