In the UK again. What to write? Everything was splendid, apart from leaving. Being back will probably improve with time. Looking forward to the snow tomorrow and folding washing in the warm.

Having a brilliant time out of the office, left in rather a hurry and left more undone than I’d like, but can feel my shoulders going down more each day and am beginning to realise that living your whole life for work is stupid. Have been paintballing in Norfolk, walking on the Gower and am stopping off in Leighton to see folks before going off to Singapore for a couple of weeks tomorrow. See you next week if you’re there, in April if you’re not, and I hope you all have as nice a time as I intend to.

Countries that are in my µtorrent peers list

• USA
• Singapore
• Italy
• Finland
• Canada
• USA again (there’s lots of them)
• Germany
• Japan
• Malaysia
• Belgium
• Ireland

I feel like a CB radio ham in the early days of radio, looking for faint signs of people from far away and wanting to contact them just to say “hey you’re there! I’m here!”. I can’t talk to them — the only way I can signal them is to disconnect, and that goes to all of them at once, which is a bit blunt. But I feel like we’re connected. Well, we are. I mean obviously we are. I was thinking of the kind of connection I was taken taken to the Commonwealth Centre as a schoolchild to experience, the kind of connection that sounds cheesy and Hallmarkish, too utopian even for early Rheingold.

I guess we’ve all got at least two things in common, which is that we like Heroes, and we’d like there to be more of us. I wanted to be able to right-click on the Singapore IP and send them a message about having a singtel address and how slow their broadband is. Social objects again.

We’ve come a long way since the end of the nineteenth century. Only today I had occasion to gaze into the Abyss, and of course those words of warning were foremost in my mind, giving me pause until I thought, “of course!” What had I come up with? Mirrored sunglasses. You look one way, people looking into your eyes end up looking the same way you do, only back to front. Spent a happy hour or two watching the Abyss gaze at itself, till I felt I might be intruding.

These ruggedly-engineered, existentially-tested mirrored research lenses are just the first in a line of products from my new Institute for Experimental Philosophy (we’re going to need more than the glasses, after all, they’re only going to appeal to a Nietzsche market). Why should we, alone of all the speculative arts, be satisfied with the same eternal questions? Why should we not make best use that we can of our wonderful new technologies to shield ourselves from the harsh extremes of the philosophical working environment? What is wrong with a straight yes-or-no answer in this age of discovery and advance? We shouldn’t; we should; nothing: those are my answers.

You see how easy it is to break free from our rhetorical shackles, if one has half a mind? I was helped, of course, by these gloves: can’t say how they work at present, valuable commercial information, terribly sensitive, but they’re invaluable for dismantling metaphor of all kinds. Comfortable, too: we’re working on a new breathable fabric, Gorgias-Tex. Five minutes with these and you won’t want to describe anything else as fitting like a glove. It’s not just protective gear, either: we’re doing a lovely range of architechtonics, fizzy and still, really put the colour back in your arguments, and for the little ones a Lego version of Milinda’s chariot. And we’re working on a set of diagnostic tools: “Locke’s Socks” mast and axe-handle DNA-gathering kits, a set of nested plastic heap measures (“Soriteaspoons”) and a range of webcams and microphones specifically tailored for trees in all locations (quads, forests, makes no difference).

This is all awfully exciting, obviously: not just me involved, needless to say, tremendous amount of brain working away in the back rooms there, signal honour to be counted as a colleague, can only hope my humble efforts in some poor way support their great strides, &c., &c. Really, I wouldn’t talk about it at all, if it wasn’t for the fact that our new Google map affair is telling me I’m where I can speak, and so I feel I ought not to be silent.

to the tune of the Wayward Barber
Happy birthday to me
Happy birthday to me
Happy birthday to Richard
Happy birthday to me!

I hope I don’t grow any older. This is quite old enough.