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of issues - from research and teaching planning sessions to team meetings for the ACID Press project (which has a very outdated outline on the ACID Website, I'm afraid), meetings of the AoIR 2006 conference organising team, preliminary work for a new book project, and a PhD confirmation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.)

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!

(Buffalo) Well, after 24 hours on progressively smaller planes I'm finally here in Buffalo, arriving late last night. An eventless flight on Qantas and American Airlines - a nice sunrise over the Californian coastline flying into LAX, and luckily none of the landing gear problems that occurred so dramatically and telegenically on a JetBlue flight at the same airport just a few days ago. Flying across the U.S. by daylight for the first time I was struck by the vast and barren expanses of land still left more or less untouched especially in the West (this would have been Arizona in particular, I guess) - perhaps its just me, but you don't think about America in such terms these days... Of course I also couldn't help but think 'Google Earth' at the same time - will have to revisit some of the sites along the way later (was that the Las Vegas or Phoenix speedway I saw from the air?).

OK, I really have to get back to blogging again. I suppose I blog the most when exciting and interesting things are happening, but the last few weeks, filled with chores between the end of one semester and the start of the next, have been difficult to say the least. I have tried hard to keep my weekends free from work-related tasks at least, though - with varying levels of success. Will try and post a few updates on current projects over the next few days.

One thing I have been able to do is to compile Iceworld, a CD of some ambient soundscapes I've tinkered with over the last few months. These are mainly improvs very much in a 'drone, bleep, blurt' mode, recorded live and edited into a series of individual tracks. The CD clocks in at just over 70 minutes and generally has a somewhat antarctic feel to me (hence the title); I've made it available here in MP3 format under a Creative Commons licence. Having listened to them a few times today, I'm quite fond of these tracks - "The Factory Ship" in particular has some very impressive bottom end on a good sub-woofer... Any comments are very welcome. (I might write a little more about how I've recorded these at another time.)

Backing up from an equally annoying and upsetting week - I lost a harddrive just after Easter. Luckily I had backed up most of my work-related files just before, but much other data seems gone, including all of my emails, my calendar, and my address book. You don't realise how much you depend on Outlook until it's gone... Data recovery services charge through the nose and I can't justify spending a cool $6000 for a 70% chance of getting my data back.