General

Phew. I have spent four out of the last five working days virtually in non-stop meetings on a wide variety of issues - from research and teaching planning sessions to team meetings for the ACID Press project (which has a very outdated outline on the ACID Website, I'm afraid), meetings of the AoIR 2006 conference organising team, preliminary work for a new book project, and a PhD confirmation presentation by Creative Industries student Stephen Harrington - and tomorrow is looking no better, with an all-day meeting of the team of our teaching and learning project using blogs and wikis at QUT. In between all the meetings about what work needs to be done, it would be nice to find some time to actually do some work... (At least I did find the time to accept an invitation to join the editorial board of New Media & Society, and I look forward to being part of it.)

Heh. I've been tagged by Jean, who'd herself been tagged by Mel, I think. So, in the blogosphere's best version of a not-for-profit pyramid scheme, lessee:

Four jobs I've had:

1. Listening into Soviet Red Army transmissions in Eastern Germany, from the West German border
2. Hardware import agent
3. Helpdesk dude (these two both for VillageTronic when they were still doing Amiga hardware)
4. Translator

Four movies I can watch over and over:

Southeast Queensland has been getting some cracker storms in recent weeks, and there's been some good footage of them online as well. I spent the last weekend over on Moreton Island, across the bay from Brisbane, and we got a great one just as we were snorkelling around the wrecks at Tangalooma. Here's a video of the storm approaching, courtesy of Ann - and I have a brief cameo as well...

Yes, I'm still alive - just got back from a two-week holiday on Queensland's Sunshine Coast, and currently downloading the last fortnight's worth of emails (this has been going for the best part of an hour so far). Also deleted a bevy of spam trackbacks; no, I'm still not interested in playing Texas Hold'em poker while consolidating my debt with a dose of Viagra, thankyouverymuch.

And just by way of a note to self (making sure this doesn't get lost under a mountain of other mail) - Nature did an interesting comparison of scientific entries in the Wikipedia and the Britannica, which appears to have found little difference in quality... Good work.

Well, I can't say New York City exactly put its best face forward for me - it's been alternately drizzly, rainy, windy, or just plain miserable here at least as far as the weather was concerned. With the talks on Tuesday and the Boston/Providence and Philadelphia trips on Wednesday and Friday, Thursday was my only 'off' day here, but it wasn't exactly great for sightseeing. In fact, around mid-day it rained so hard that I had to buy a pair of jeans because my other trousers were soaking wet... (Well, the other reason was that on the flight to the U.S. my old jeans developed what here they'd probably call a 'wardrobe malfunction', putting me in danger of mooning people each time I bent over.)

Well, after a long day's travelling I've now made it back to rainy New York City again. It's been a great day - very good debate at the panel at Northeastern University in Boston, great to catch up again with David Marshall at NEU, and a nice evening lecture at Brown University. I managed to record both events and will post up some audio once I've had a chance to edit it. My thanks to everyone who's helped set up these events, and particularly also to Mark Tribe who was my host at Brown (and accompanied me back to NYC on the train). A quick T train trip in Boston also reminded me that this city has far and away some of the best subway station names in the world. I mean, wouldn't you want to get on the subway to 'Alewife'? 'Wonderland'? 'Braintree'? Or my favourite, NEU's local station 'Ruggles'?

Well, after various delays getting out of Chicago I finally made it to New York City this afternoon. Haven't had a chance to do much more than have a wander around and organise my trip to Boston and Providence on Wednesday. I'm staying at the Wolcott in central Manhattan, just a couple of blocks down from the Empire State Building which never quite emerged from the clouds this afternoon. Other than the great location and a history stretching over more than a century, the Wolcott's most distinguishing feature is a ridiculously ornamental foyer - I'll try and take a few photos tomorrow morning... Also tomorrow are my talks at the New School (10 a.m.) and The Thing (6 p.m.) - look forward to seeing people there!

(Chicago) The one thing which sets the United States apart from anywhere else in the world is this, of course: donuts. I noticed this when I first visited Boston two years ago, and so the first thing I did after I arrived here was to wander down to Dunkin' Donuts to reacquaint myself with this national specialty (well, the first thing I did after a day spent wandering downtown Toronto, which left me with large blisters on both feet, and a very short night was sleep, actually). Donuts in the U.S. aren't the boring, stale, cinnamon-flavoured dough-rings you get elsewhere, but fresh, soft, and available in all manner of exciting flavours. Today I picked a glazed chocolate and a butternut donut for lunch, and wandered down to Linkin, er, Lincoln Park on the Chicago waterfront for an afternoon stroll.

(Toronto) Well, after all the excitement of the Creative Places + Spaces conference over the last couple of days, today is my day off in Toronto, and I've used it to wander all over town. Toronto is an extremely easy place to get around in, and it's impossible to get lost - the city is neatly divided into a western and an eastern half by Yonge Street, which runs from the lakeshore all the way through town, and on, all up for around 1900km in total! Other than that, the place feels like a bit of a mixed bag to me - big modern shopping centres, office buildings, and hotels are interspersed with dingy strips of shops and a lot of building sites, with little sense of a real centre; the city is also somewhat disconnected from its lakeshore by the rail line and Gardiner Expressway, as well as a large number of parking lots around the baseball and hockey stadiums. And even on Yonge St, as soon as you get just slightly away from the big shopping centres almost every other shop seems to be a sex shop - Torontonians must be a randy lot...

(Buffalo) I went out to Niagara Falls this morning - just a 30 minute trip up the highway from Buffalo itself, right up to the Canadian border. In theory I could have just continued on from there to Toronto, my next stop on this trip, which wouldn't have been too much further to go, but strangely enough I'm booked on a flight this afternoon which takes me there via Toronto (adding a good three or four hours of transit time to my day). Not entirely sure my travel agent checked the map when we made the booking...

Niagara was beautiful, if windy and quite chilly - but the intermittent sun brought out multiple rainbows over the falls and really blew up the mist from the water cascades. I can't imagine what the falls would have been like before the power generation scheme reduced the flow over the actual falls themselves. It's clearly going towards autumn here - I saw plenty of squirrels (including one of the rarer black ones) burying their nuts and other goodies in the ground for the cold season.