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Archive for the ‘The Wired Jester’ Category

Recently: January and February 2011

In Dennis Media Factory, Freelance, Photography, The Wired Jester on March 20, 2011 at 10:40 pm

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.

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Recently: September – December 2010

In Dennis Media Factory, Photography, The Wired Jester on December 21, 2010 at 4:30 pm

Only a man with a very busy life (or possibly, just possibly, a lackadaisical attitude to blogging) could seriously put the word “recently” and “September” together in a post title right at the end of the year. Regardless, that’s just how I roll. The other reason for this all-in-one four month update is because the Autumn and the first half of the Winter were all of a piece really. So, work: The new role that I mentioned last time came to pass, turning from a speculative secondment into a permanent move. I’m now working in a new team, looking at what Dennis Publishing can and should do with its content on mobile phones, tablets, eReaders and all kinds of other new hardware. My new team’s work also includes a bit of brainstorming of more general “new ideas” and some behind-the-scenes work on dull but important things like content management systems.

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Recently: July and August 2010

In bit-tech, Freelance, Photography, The Wired Jester on October 22, 2010 at 6:40 pm

* Work: Summer seems like a long time ago, even more so as my work in July and August is quite separate to what happened when September came along, and what I’m doing now. August saw me hand over the Custom PC and bit-tech Editor’s Chair – for it is a chair, nay, a throne more like, bejewelled wi’ rubies and emeralds and all the riches of the Orient – and I didn’t really do a whole lot of writing for the site in these two final months. Nothing on the blog, but I did contribute a couple of reviews of two fabulous Xbox Live Arcade games. I’ve never played a game that engages with death quite as viscerally and tenderly as Limbo. It’s a distinctive, bleak and audacious game that really stuck with me. The other game I looked at was the far lighter Snoopy Flying Ace, an arcade flying game that’s visually charming but with hard-hitting, exciting combat.
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Recently: May and June 2010

In bit-tech, Freelance, Photography, The Wired Jester on July 16, 2010 at 6:59 pm

* Work: Well, May and the start of June are all about Computex in Taiwan; we covered it in quite some style, with myself and two other reporters. It was good fun, especially as it was the first time for one of the guys, and Taipei delivered its usual craziness in spades. Not literally in a spade, although there are times when the jetlag and lack of rest mean you never feel something that surreal is too far off. The show this year lacked big product launches, but the behind the scenes jostling made it the most fascinating one I’ve been to yet. The battle between Intel and ARM is fascinating, as is Apple’s influence and the way that mobile smartphones/tablets are taking off. I tried to summarise it in a blog post. Speaking of mobiles, this blog post was a fun one to write: My iPhone told me what to have for lunch.

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Recently: March and April 2010

In bit-tech, Freelance, The Wired Jester on April 28, 2010 at 12:13 am

* Work: Well, we relaunched bit-tech! The new site looks lovely, it’s packed with additional features and functions and we improved the advertising (fewer annoying flashing things, better communication for advertisers and readers). I wrote two long blog posts about the redesign which go into details about the changes. I also spent a lot of time in the comment threads talking to readers. Bit-tech has a huge and passionate community who feel very connected to the site, and taking them through the redesign was tricky. A three week, open public beta really helped. So far, it’s worked well – traffic numbers are up, and the editorial team are able to write more content, and are less constrained, and more empowered. Happy days!

But that’s far from all…

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Recently: January and February 2010

In bit-tech, Photography, The Wired Jester on February 22, 2010 at 12:40 am

* Work: Technical piece of analysis - Why the iPad is Intel’s worst nightmare, and to balance that out, a distinctly less technical review of the marvellously simple Zombie Driver.

* First few photos from my epic trip to China on my sabbatical in September/October last year: Tea and Temples.

* The Wired Jester: My year in books, 2009.

Best of, 2009 edition

In bit-tech, Fiction, Non fiction, The Wired Jester on January 1, 2010 at 8:42 pm

So that was 2009; full as ever, although work gave up a little room to other things this year – I found the time to work on my photography, and it’s really developed(1), helped, of course, by a near seven week sabbatical break in September and October which took me to beautiful, strange, tasty Southwest China and Maryland and Virginia in the USA. It feels as if I wrote less than in previous years, both outside of work, where my current novel seemed to seize up, and at work, where a bigger team meant more management and less of a need for me to write. On the plus side, there were a few things I really liked from 2009 in terms of quality. They’re linked after the jump. Now, on to 2010.

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Rothko and 1984

In Photography, The Wired Jester on July 16, 2009 at 6:31 pm

Rothko colours

Camera: iPhone 3G, processed with Camerabag app.

A favourite image of mine, snapped on the iPhone at Tate’s Rothko show. I entered it into a competition run by Penguin to win a big print of the new cover artwork for 1984. To win, you had to enter an image that reflected 1984; I chose this shot because it’s funnier and stranger than a lot of 1984-derived images tend to be, although of course, it doesn’t shy away from the central darkness of the novel – how bleak life is when words cannot be trusted.

A trip to Taipei, Taiwan

In Photography, The Wired Jester on July 4, 2009 at 11:06 am

Waiting in the rain

Camera: Nikon D40
Lens: Nikon 18-55 (kit lens)

Not a place many people visit, but I’d agree with Rough Guide when they call Taipei Asia’s most under-rated city. Here’s some photos not of motherboards or netbooks, but of the place where they’re born.

A visit to a Tokyo park

In The Wired Jester on June 30, 2009 at 7:07 pm

Tokyo is not the easiest place to see traditional Japan. The damage Tokyo sustained in World War II, and the staggering amount of wealth it generated in the years after mean that its temples are all skyscrapers. Kyoto has the Zen gardens and rice-paper screens: in Tokyo, it’s shopping mazes and LED screens. Peaceful contemplation has given way to the wisdom of crowds. But you can still seek out more traditional aspects of Japan in the captial – one of the last places I visited was a stroll garden: Koishikawa Korakuen.

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