Things will look a little broken around here for a bit, I think. I’m trying to decide how I want to use the site, and what I want to change, and I think the first thing I want to change is how it looks on my phone. So I’m going to strip it right down and put things back when I miss them.

Since I’ve last been around here, I’ve been to Redmond and met some guys from Microsoft research, been to Boston and hung out with some of the Comparative Media group at MIT, and spent a lot of time everywhere talking about the future and how we see it. Once I’m done tinkering here I want to talk more about all those things, and some other things I’m working on and thinking about. It’s been a bit of a slow start in some ways, but 2008′s quite promising so far.

todo: display one post on front page, multiple elsewhere; get all nav items saying same thing; delicious links into side column;

There’s a graph, somewhere, that shows two lines crossing, one an upward and the other a downward curve, and in my mind the first is labelled “stuff worth writing about”, and the second is labelled “amount of time left to write about the stuff represented by the other line, once all the time spent doing that stuff has been accounted for”. As well as being an excellent illustration of why sometimes information is best communicated visually, this is why I haven’t written anything here.

I’ve got two days left in my job here, a weekend to pack up my house and post it back to the UK (and take in a play), and a flight to Cambodia on Tuesday: no time left to write about minimal interaction and using people as input devices through Mediascape, or Dopplr, or the ARG-like promotion of NIN’s new album, or synechdoche as a way of understanding why Singapore buses have pictures of cartons of egg white in little nests, or rhetorical scapes and walking worlds into existence. All that will have to wait for the time being. But I’m still alive: think of this post as a spike on a virtual electrocardiogram.

I just installed the Akismet spam plugin: previously I’d been adamant that a blog this little-read shouldn’t need to even acknowledge that spam was a problem, and had been manually deleting every comment. Naive; maybe even stubborn. But I’ve been proud of the fact I don’t get email spam, and I didn’t want to admit I suffered like everyone else.

So this was my first time going through the Akismet list, double-checking it was weeding things out correctly (and I’ll never do it again, so I’m sorry if your comment doesn’t ever show up). I’d never encountered so much spam in one place: the cumulative effect of it is very different to the way it seems when you’re just weeding a small number out each time. After a few screens, I realised that what I was watching was the gradual fall of language to a prelapsarian state when only our most basic needs and desires mattered, no fine words disguising the animal grunts that drive everything. And all this filth and depravity will from now on stay unseen, ignored, the only sign of it a tiny message on my WordPress dashboard (“Akismet stopped you facing up to 377 expressions of what humans really want”) and an ever-increasing load on the server where this lives.

Back in the wonderful days of the nineties, when transhumanists and believers in the singularity had columns in Wired and weren’t laughed at, there was a lot of talk about the machines achieving self-consciousness. I don’t remember anyone talking about what kind of subconscious they would have. Now I know: when the Net becomes a person, the hidden things that give it bad dreams will be made from the billions of three-word advertisements for the filthiest human pornography. We’re building the machines’ superego, one WordPress plugin at a time.

Well that was easy.

Guess I’ll leave the redesign thing till the weekend, then.

Time for a redesign, I think – new version of WordPress out, and while I’m ripping things out and breaking stuff I might as well fix a few things that annoy me. Specifically, in the new version I’d like to be able to read it nicely on my phone, and I think in general the whole thing is a bit unwieldy – might move the archives and categories off to their own pages, so I can just have my flickr photos, del.icio.us feed and a single post on the front. Simple. Nice.

See you in a few months, then.