January and February: so good at seeming unending. There are few good days, few clear days, because mostly the sky is like a silver lid pressing down on us. It’s a hard drag until the clocks change. Keeping busy at work helped. The new team – the Dennis Media Factory – is getting going, although I always forget how hiring just tends to take ages.

We went to New York right after new year to kick off this year’s biggest project, but there’s a long way to go with it. In early February, I spent a very enjoyable and intense 10 day period on the design for what will be our first app, and here I was lucky to find a terrific UX expert to mastermind the process, an old colleague I bumped into a Windows Phone 7 event. It was great to actually get out of meetings and strategising and start the sketching and questioning, plotting and planning for an actual product.

That said, it does feel like we’ve also made progress at Dennis when it comes to structure and strategy. It’s just a slow and far from straightforward process, and I’m not a patient person (as my friends and beaten computer keyboards can attest to).

Can’t really add anything more specific than that. When it’s done.

In terms of writing, January and February have been my two least productive months for perhaps the last ten years, if not longer. Life as a journalist is receding quickly: the only articles I’ve published this year are my Mac User columns. Incidentally, there’s a new editor on Mac User and the magazine is looking great, with some terrific covers. I should perhaps say practicing journalist. Like being a lapsed Catholic, it’s one of those things you never really shake, especially when half your friends and the people you work with remain true believers. It’s not just the career change that slowed down the writing, either: over Christmas I finished the first, very rough draft of my next personal project. The plan was to wait two months, then go back to it for the next draft and then see how it feels.

Photo-wise, despite the awful watery winter light, I managed to get some nice shots over the Christmas break, and some of New York, although home internet crappiness means there’s not that much stuff up on Flickr. The Wired Jester has begun its latest metamorphosis, and is now quite concerned with this year’s BHAG: cycling 2,011 miles over the course of 2011.