Well, life has been full and interesting these past few months. Plenty of things happening at work, but today I’m posting about my own new personal writing project which got underway last week. It’s called A Month In Music. I have all my MP3s in iTunes, and at first it tells you how many hours worth of music you have, and then how many days. I recently realised I had 30.3 days of music in my collection – a whole month. I was fascinated with the idea that I had, over 15 years, accumulated so much music that I could listen to it non stop for a whole month and never hear the same track repeated.

So that’s what I decided to do, writing about it as I went.The were rules of course: I was allowed to pick only the first song, and that after that, iTunes played randomly through the collection, and there would no skipping or pausing. Not at night, not during the day. Not at all. It was a really fascinating project, and I think it comes at an interesting time, as, thanks to Spotify and Youtube, the idea of a music collection with a definite border, an in/out, us/them split, becomes increasingly antiquated, despite music being such a key part of identity and pop culture. It was also a really good opportunity for me to revisit songs that once meant a lot to me, and go through some memories, because really, your music collection is a self-portrait in audio.

In addition to all the original writing, there’s a series of photos too. It’s going live once a day as a blog on monthinmusic.tumblr.com. I would, of course, be very happy if you checked it out.

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.

We’re also after some developers to build and design these apps, and we have two openings initially: an iOS Mobile & Tablet developer, and a Graduate Mobile & Tablet developer. We’ll be looking at taking our existing brands onto new devices in interesting and exciting ways, as well as launching mobile and tablet software based on completely new ideas. As developers you’ll be front and centre for this exciting initiative. If you’d like to apply, or just know more check out the links or drop me a line (alex_watson AT dennis.co.uk).

The team was initially called Emerging Platforms, but now goes by Dennis Media Factory. It’s a little vague, but intentionally so, giving a bit of room to change course, adapt, iterate. All important things when you consider this time last year the iPad wasn’t even on sale. At the same time, the name has a solidity and purpose and it suggests making things. Two simple words, but ones that promise a lot of change for media companies I think. Most of what they do – or see themselves doing – is creating on a very large, slightly vague scale (i.e. magazines that have become brands, containing print/online/event/merchandise/spinoffs), or, on a much smaller level – articles and features. Things - or better yet, products - are right in the middle of that. At the moment, by things, I mean Apps for the phones and tablets, digital magazines, eBooks. The challenge for us at work is to implement structure and processes that can achieve efficiency at scale and, of course, to make sure we sweat the details to make some absolutely cracking specific things.

My role (currently under the title Development Manager) is the second bit really. Talking to the different brands at Dennis about what they could, should and can do in terms of Apps. I’ve been reading and learning a lot about Product Management as a job function within media companies; went to a great AOP conference about it, and I’m enjoying the chance to have a lot of input into such a new, interesting bit of the company. If you want to keep up with what we’re doing, I’ve set up a link blog for DMF, and we have a Twitter account too.

Linked to that, I wrote a meandering piece on The Wired Jester about a week I spent up north, seeing the family, and what happened when they played with the iPad. I had almost a month off the bike in November as a result of bad weather and a minging cold, and I really missed it: 2010 has definitely been the year I got back into cycling, and it’s one of the best decisions I made all year. I’m getting quicker with doing stuff with my photos, thanks to Lightroom – here’s some pictures from my trip. In 2010 I upgraded to the D90 this year, and haven’t looked back. It’s a great camera – but nowhere near as significant to my pictures as Lightroom. Below, a few of my best pictures from the year.

Next year… well, next year will be very different to this one I think.

* Away from work, I spent the summer really getting into cycling, and over on The Wired Jester I posted some thoughts on riding the bike through London. It’s still not really a frequently updated blog, but stepping away from day-to-day journalism means I’ve had a bit more writing energy for the last couple of posts, which is a-good-thing(TM).

* Photography: I’ve finally put up some pictures from last year’s trip to Baltimore, Washington and the scenery inbetween. I also put up the photos from a brief trip to Gothenburg and the Swedish coast. Beautiful silvery light, and since I’ve started using Lightroom 3, I finally feel I’m getting a little closer to what I want from my photography. If you’re a digital SLR photographer and haven’t tried it yet, it’s an absolute must. It will make a bigger difference to your photography than any new lens or body, so stop saving for that, and get Lightroom instead.

I’m also using Instagr.am on the iPhone, as sifter if you want to add me.

* Freelance-wise, my Mac User column continues, and I was quite happy to revel in my geekery with this one, which begins with a debate as to which country has the best plug.

* Photos: I took my new Nikon D90 to the Far East – Taiwan for Computex, then gorgeous Hong Kong on the way back. The photos are on the all new Flickr, although I’ve not put them all up yet. Speaking of photos, I tried out Lightroom 3 and it’s terrific. The filters are amazing, and I think it’s had a great impact on my ability to take a photo that says what I think it’s going to say the moment before I push the button. You can see the results for yourself.

* My Mac User column continues; they’ve just relaunched their website into something more bloggy and individual, and it makes it easier to find my columns too. What more could you possibly want?

* I’ve found a bit of time for The Wired Jester, including some decent ramen links, a photo-post on jetlag and an extended ramble about clothes, particularly Uniqlo.

Other than that, I’ve been enjoying the warm weather – bit of gardening – I’m writing up a really exciting new project – and I’ve been to Sweden for a holiday.

But that’s far from all…

* I’ve also written for the site, a technical blog about Valve and OpenGL and a more personal one on the Bullfrog games I loved when I was a teenager.

* Which leads me on to the fact I went to SXSW in beautiful, sunny Austin, Texas. I met ex-Bullfrog head Peter Molyneux, and wrote a lot about the conference, including Molyneux’s excellent talk on emotion in games. A second piece on bit-tech looked at Microsoft’s exploration of designing touch-screen games, while a hands on with the Windows 7 Phone and a write up of a talk on Google and China went up on PC Pro.

* The photos of Texas are on Flickr.

* On The Wired Jester, I’ve been noting down what I’ve been adding to the wishlist – mostly books – and it is expanding like the waistline of someone who’s drinking ten pints of cream a day. I saw David Mitchell read from his new book, which was thought provoking and I remembered an old book of mine, A Terrible Beauty.

* I’ve also started a new column in Mac User, Dennis’ Mac magazine. It’s called Mac to the Future, and it’s about new tech and how it will (might!) impact Apple. The first two are online, a look at the Apple A4 CPU inside the iPad, the second a piece on Apple’s use of Intel’s new Core i5 and Core i7 chips.

* 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.

For Custom PC and bit-tech

* Killing is fun. This was a blog post for bit-tech, and looked at the problem with FPS games set in a war-time environment: namely that the mechanics of the game are in opposition to the morality of the situation: to make the game fun, the killing has to be fun also:

“In every FPS you need to kill hundreds, if not thousands of people as you progress through the game. In fact, you’re not killing people: you’re removing obstacles, because single player games that aren’t primarily puzzle games or simulators are always about progress through the level. To impede progress and to make it challenging for the player, you need obstacles. These can be puzzles, but since you’re not making a puzzle game, it’s better if these are enemies, and it’s better if these enemies can tax the player by fighting back. When you, as the player, eliminate the enemies, you’re granted power-ups, new weapons and keys to enable you to access more of the game (and in turn cope with more powerful enemies). It’s such a simple and recursive formula that it needs to be jazzed up – it needs to be made fun, because you need to do it over and over and over again. It’s work.”

* My Best Gaming Moment of 2009. My contribution to a feature written for that flat period at the end of the year when there’s not much new happening but the site still needs updating. I picked playing Rock Band as my ‘moment’:

“The things I write and pictures I take are somehow less personal, less meaningful than things I read and the movies I see. This is especially the case with the songs I hear. If I’m taking notes for a piece of writing, I’ll often end up scrawling favourite song lyrics in the margins, signposts to where I want to get to. It often feels as if my meaning is inside the song, and I need to hear it to get to what I want. Fragments of melody lodge themselves in my head, and I’ll end up needing exactly the right song to write certain paragraphs. So it was obvious I was going to love Guitar Hero.”

* Noby Noby Boy review. A look at the newest game from the Lead Designer of Katamari Damacy:

“Despite Noby Noby Boy’s cute, naïve looks and non-lethal gameplay it will probably be one of the more divisive games of the year. Some will look at it as a beautiful piece of art that expands the notion that videogames are a more complex and involving form of art than anything else we currently have. Others will take one look at the flat shading, coy terminology and recoil in disgust. Several members of the bit-tech team certainly did when we had Noby Noby Boy running in the labs.”

For The Wired Jester

* Already mentioned a lot, but it was from 2009 so deserves a place in this round up post: write up of my visit to Peleliu, in the South Pacific, and its haunting WW2 relics.

* Virtual Reality, Then and Now. A short post on the fact VR is about computers bleeding into real life, not the other way around:

“In the 1980s and 1990s, the term ‘virtual reality’ was understood to mean the creation of reality inside the computer – and thus we would need to experience it using complex imaging and interaction systems (3D googles, cursors mapped to the movement of a glove etc.) The implication behind this was the reality itself would be untouched… Few people imaginged that when VR came to pass, it would actually involve computers altering the way we acted in reality.”

* On the importance of The Beatles releasing their music digitally:

“And so now they’re missing. Everyone learns the truth that the Beatles are Important with a capital I. The Best. The Greatest. Whatever is left that the other Apple has done well to build up. But the music just isn’t there. It’s absent from the places where the kids – the people who live and breathe music – are, and where everyone is increasingly going to be. iTunes is the biggest music retailer now, Guitar Hero is mainstream entertainment. The Beatles are abstract, venerated, protected. Their name is known, but I suspect knowledge – and love – of their songs is dipping lower and lower.”

(Somewhat dated now, with the release of Rock Band, but the points about their absence from TV/Film/iTunes stands.)

Fiction

The book is currently called The Fine Sort. Seven or eight chapters done, about 30,000 words or so. Nothing to post here just yet, but I did put together a collection of short stories and print them via Lulu. The result was excellent – great quality printing, lovely cover, nice stock. Some samples to follow on here.

(1) Pun not intended, and only applicable to those who remember film cameras.

Plant portraits

Stalk of Fire. An old photo that I rescued from a dusty folder on the hard disk to brighten up a dull winter day. Taken an August ago, in the gardens of one of South East London’s best days out, Eltham Palace.

Nature will find a way. Close up of an abandoned WW2 tank on Peleliu. I think it made a nice memorial; nature is reclaiming it. The full story on my trip to Peleliu is here.

Engine lichen. Another shot from Peleliu, this time of lichen-spotted machinery in the engine bay of an old landing craft.

Garden views

A path winds through the grounds of Wuhou temple in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, China.

Reflections of the garden in a cup of tea at the teahouse in Wenshu temple, Chengdu. The city’s temple teahouses are full of people reading the papers, chatting and playing cards and relaxing on rickety bamboo furniture over endlessly refilled cups of tea. As a tourist they’re a perfect experience; everything from the colours to the smells feels right. The only strange thing is that most of the Chinese there are old. The kids are all in KFC or Starbucks.