“Adrià says he doesn’t listen to customers, yet his customers are some
of the most satisfied in the world. That’s an interesting riddle to
consider.”

One of the conversation’s participants, Phil, then noted that

“All indications point to Apple/Steve Jobs using the same strategy. El Bulli isn’t at all a mass market success, but the other is. Interesting indeed.”

Gastronomy and my favourite computers, together at last? That really got me going…

The key thing about both Adrià and Jobs is that they’ve taken a leap of faith, choosing to focus primarily on producing the best things they can – this, to me, is the primary goal of both businesses. Apple rarely if ever competes on price – in their view of the world, the profitability/viability of the business seems to be more of a constraint on how good they can make something, not a primary factor in considering how to build it.

This can seem expensive – Adrià’s huge test kitchen (not even mentioned in the HBS article) is an utterly ridiculous extravagance for one small restaurant out in the middle of the Spanish countryside. You can get a taste of the test kitchen (and the things that happen there) from this section of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations…

Apple. meanwhile, has taken some product ideas through many, many stages of development before deciding to shelve them entirely.

As Michael Lopp explained during an interesting session at SXSWi 2007, designers at Apple are often specifically briefed to come up with “whatever you can think of” in the early stages of product development, with no consideration of practicality or cost. They will produce around ten different designs, which are then pared down towards “the best stuff we can think of, within the constraints of shipping a profitable product”.

The key thing here, and the common thread between Apple and  Adrià is to truly believe that “if you build the best, they will come.”

As to the relative “mass market”-ness of the two, the biggest reason elBulli isn’t a mass-market success is that they’ve chosen not to be. Adrià could open a London elBulli, A New York elBulli and a Paris elBulli tomorrow, and all three would have overflowing reservation books. But a distributed restaurant empire would make it impossible to ensure the attention to detail and quality which makes the original restaurant so celebrated. And since producing “the best” is his absolute focus, expanding the restaurant would make no sense.

This is precisely why he’s branched out with Fast Good – it’s an opportunity to produce the “best possible convenience food experience” – a different set of constraints to being “the best dining experience in the world.”

“The best” is subjective, and depends partly on your market and the constraints under which you operate. But we live in a world where many companies seem to aim for “just good enough”, where “customer care” is a frustrating, maze-like mess and most products are serviceable but uninspiring. In such a world, it’s sometimes refreshing to remember that there is another way. That striving for excellence over budget streamlining; aiming for a defined audience rather than the mass-market can lead to the production of truly wonderful things, without necessarily sacrificing a sustainable, profitable business in the process.

For anyone who wants to see them, I’ve finally managed to upload the slides from my SXSWi talk “Taking over the World: the Flickr way”, a broad-sweep view of some of the issues and solutions we encountered whilst taking Flickr from an English-only site to supporting multiple languages.

You can find them over at the talks page, along with the details of my next scheduled talk at XTech in Dublin on May 5th 2008.

(Photo of me by Gareth on Flickr, used by permission)

I’ve started vague plans in that direction which will hopefully coincide with my rapidly-approaching 30th birthday.

But in the meantime, I’ll be at South by Southwest in Austin TX from this Thursday. The interactive portion of the festival will mean actual work for me, schmoozing with people who make me feel tremendously stupid in comparison, and speaking a couple of times.

If you want to see me and my new haircut fumbling their way rustily through public speaking, you can catch me at the following times:

Monday March 10th, 7-9:30pm – 20×2 at The Parish, 214 E. 6th St., Austin TX

Tuesday March 11th, 5-6pm – “Taking Over the World the Flickr Way“, Room A, Austin Convention Center, 500 East Cesar Chavez, Austin TX

The second event is the one which has me stressing manically over slides, being an hour-long presentation by little ol’ me on exactly how we turned Flickr from an English-only colossus into a globe-spanning 8-language slightly-bigger-colossus.

I promise that, as much as such things can, it’ll be fun.

It was one of those “blinding light” moments – the moment when you finally turn to acknowledge the feeling that’s been kicking around for many months and realise “oh yeah!”

I finally discovered that I really hate Facebook.

It’s not like I’m the first – the most famous incidence being Jason Calcanis’s decision to declare “Facebook Bankruptcy” back in July, an event which trickled by without actively triggering my own epiphany. My realisation was prompted by a conversation with someone who recently heard a talk by a Facebook developer. The salient point, from the horse’s mouth, was that Facebook believe that their application is compellingly relevant to its users “because everyone you add on Facebook is someone you want to hear from.”

Evidently no-one on Facebook staff is being bombarded with the constant “Zombie requests”, Quiz requests, “rate your movies” requests and other effluvia which, post-trumpeted-API-launch, have become a veritable Face-tsunami. Furthermore, no-one at Facebook seems to know anything about psychology, social networks or the interaction between the two.

There are two major problems with the “all your Facebook friends are relevant to you” hypothesis.

Firstly, social networks tend to morph under the weight of human psychology into a Pokemon-like popularity contest – “gotta catch ‘em all” – you add everyone you’ve ever so much as exchanged glances with, and anyone with less than 50 friends looks like a lonely loser.

Secondly, it’s very hard to deny friend requests since it’s obvious that you’ve done so and it’s a pretty blunt snub. Even if you don’t care much about the latest “addee” in your stream, few people want to be seen by their former schoolfriends as an unfriendly snob, and even fewer people want to upset a professional contact who may be a key ally at some point in the future…

…which is why everyone’s contact list balloons over time – for many months I had only 8 contacts on Facebook; by the time of last night’s revelation, that had grown to 125. There are only three possible answers to this -

1. Bite the bullet, and reconcile yourself to the idea of coming across as an asshole.
2. Add people until your “Feed” looks like a cross between Toys’R'Us and a warzone.
3. Get the hell out of Dodge (my current preferred solution).

I care in some way about every single one of the people I added on Facebook, but I don’t want to answer their movie quizzes, become their “zombie victim” or engage in an online “food fight” with them. And here’s the ultimate kicker – for the people I really care about, I have (or should have) far more direct contact with them – phone calls, personal emails, real-life meetings; all of which render the fairly cursory, sterile experience of a Facebook exchange irrelevant. And if anyone else wants to get hold of me, it’s not hard to find me – search engines have a pretty good idea of where I am, for one thing.

We’ve forgotten something in the Great Web 2.0 Social Circlejerk, and that is: you can only really have a small number of true friends, because friendship takes time – meeting, communicating, supporting… there’s nothing lonelier than having 200 “friends”, and realising that you couldn’t really turn to a single one of them if the bottom fell out of your world tomorrow. I’m reminded here of a line from Mary Schmich’s “Wear Sunscreen” (as immortalised in the incredibly cheesy Baz Luhrman track)…

Understand that friends come and go, but for the precious few you
should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and
lifestyle because the older you get, the more you need the people you
knew when you were young.

Many people will probably disagree at this point, which is just fine, although as the days whizz by I find myself hearing “Facebook is annoying” from more and more people. But here’s the real kicker about Facebook, and the inspiration for the title of this post…

You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave…

I logged on this morning, resolving to kick Facebook into touch, and looking for a “delete my profile” button. Only there isn’t one. Instead, you can “deactivate” your profile.

I decided to do that, and went through the form which asks about your reason for leaving and then pops up patronising DHTML prompts which attempt to counter that reason. Then I came to the checkbox at the bottom of the form – “Opt out of Facebook emails”. I’ll need to paraphrase here as I no longer have Facebook access, but it was explained along these lines:

Your friends will still be able to tag photos of you, and invite you to groups and events. Check this box if you’d like to opt out of notifications of these events.

Huh. So if I leave Facebook, stuff can still happen on my profile, even though I’m no longer there? That feels… wrong. I completed the deactivation, but was curious… if I reactivated my profile, what would happen?

Reactivating is a case of logging in, and then clicking on a link they email to you.

Click… and “bam!”, there was my profile, complete with all the contacts, groups and “zombie invite” clutter there’d been before. Clearly, truly quitting Facebook takes work. Lots of work.

To opt out of any friend-related activity, it seems that you need to actually delete those friendships. Three clicks per delete – the “delete” link, an “Are you sure?”/”OK” exchange, and another “OK” to dimiss confirmation. 375 mouse-clicks to drop those 125 nodes on my “social graph”… plus more to actually dismiss the zombie crap, leave groups and generally close things down. Just the thought of it gives my brain RSI.

This is, plainly, an unforgivably shitty user experience. I don’t expect any service to insist that once I have an account, I will always have an account – not my bank, not an online retailer, and certainly not something as inessential and inconsequential as a social network.

It also belies a stunning level of insecurity. “Lock-in” is the last refuge of the weak – a tactic used by people convinced that their service is so awful that everyone will up and walk away if they don’t force them to stay. Prisons have locked gates for a reason; Facebook (if they’re as truly confident about the “essential” nature of their service as they say in public) should not.

I’m really interested as to how this plays out in the long run. Facebook has more hype than you can shake a stick at and a strongly-rumored big queue of Big Money at the door. Furthermore, as Google’s stock price tops out and its “Don’t be Evil; have a free gourmet lunch; take 20% for a personal project” culture dissipates under the inevitable strains of growth, Facebook is becoming the Hot New Place for smart developers to pitch tent and get to work.

They may yet do something truly revolutionary, or tweak the model so it actually appeals to grumpy old bastards like me. If I were them, I’d lock the API down a lot more and insist on reviewing apps before they’re allowed onto the site – rather like console manufacturers do with games. Cut the deluge of useless apps, and concentrate on the ones which actually add value.

Facebook, as it is, is just unbearable in a way that even MySpace (for all its unreliability and layout hideousness) just can’t muster. Even though it was a chore to quit it, I feel better already.

I’m periodically fascinated by how people view online life, and the differences in the boundaries that they set (or perceive) on the internet, versus that “other” life with the blue ceiling and the third dimension.

My curiosity was piqued again this weekend when one of my posts here attracted a totally unrelated comment asking a Flickr support question.

I’m astounded that someone managed to take a path from my recent occasional stints helping out on Flickr’s support forum, all the way to this place which (save for occasional posts where my personal interests or life experiences overlap with work) is totally unrelated to my place of employment.

I can very well imagine the route they took – they saw my posts on the forum, followed them to my profile, and followed the link from there to here before posting. But…

…To me, such an action is the online equivalent of visiting a local store, and rather than resolving an issue at the “Customer Service” desk, instead following a store employee home, knocking on their door and asking for resolution of your issue then and there.

The two simply aren’t connected, and making them so leaves me feeling a little unsettled. Yes, I work as an engineer for a popular website, and yes, I occasionally pitch in to help with people’s concerns and worries, especially when my fellow Flickr-ers are out of commission for one reason or another.

But… that’s my day job. When I come home (or post on hitherto.net), I really don’t want my work life to follow me there.

I feel the same way, incidentally, about my Flickr stream – even though I work on the site, I don’t expect people to take my personal little corner of it and attempt to vent their frustration or seek a resolution through it (any more than I’d expect them to come to the office in person and berate me in the break room).

It’s very easy to see online entities as impersonal “machines” – many sites have even cultivated that image, seemingly as a way to streamline their customer interactions into manageable processes. Flickr has, in fact, tried to avoid that where possible – most of the staff still pitch in and try to offer assistance on the site’s forum, and we try to be polite and efficiently helpful whilst injecting a little humour and personality into the mix.

So, a quick plea to the world in general – when you’re seeking assistance online, please do try to apply the same boundaries to your interactions as you would in real life. Otherwise, you’re going to trigger a quick blog post and very little else in response.

The “Penguins Only” photo on this post is from QuestingBeast on Flickr.

I’m trying to keep photos up to date on Flickr – the Collection will give you a good overview of the weird and wonderful experiences we’re having out here.

In the past week, I’ve…

• …attended 2 Flickr launch parties.
• …given a talk to Korean developers.
• …luxuriated in the second best hotel room I’ve ever stayed in.
• …been to a Crazy Bar.
• …visited to the Korean DMZ
• …frequented a bar where all the waiters are dwarves… with a guy who’s dwarf-phobic.
• …eaten Balut.

A quick bit of site update news – I’ve added a Talks page in the uber-optimistic hope that I’ll be giving more presentations on Flickr, Internationalisation and related topics in the near future. For now, it just contains one set of slides from the Korean talk, notable for the fact that the lovely folks at Yahoo! Korea translated all the text into Korean, to make things easier for those developers who didn’t have perfect English.

The talks page is here:

http://hitherto.net/talks/

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to fly to Kuala Lumpur…

This is not a new observation, but it’s something which just popped back onto my radar, sitting as I am in a hotel in Seoul, Korea.

Google really did introduce a horrible flaw when they first internationalised their site; one which hasn’t been corrected to this day.

The flaw is simple: they assume (seemingly by IP detection and nothing else) that the country you’re in is the language you speak, and that you will get a site localised in that language for as long as you’re surfing the web from there.

Whilst only mildly annoying when in, say, France, this is utterly disastrous for most western travelers to places like Korea, because we have no idea what the page is saying. Even worse, there’s no obvious way to navigate back to the English site, barring a small link on the site homepage (which you won’t see if you’re visiting the results page from a browser plugin; and is still bloody useless if you’re, say, German).

It’s always interesting when a company like Google – feted for their flawless execution, makes a schoolboy error like this, because it tends to reveal interesting things about that company’s culture.

In this case, it belies a certain arrogance, a “we know best” sort of attitude in forcing you down a path without really trying to work out what you might want. They don’t look at your site usage history (which they cookie to death, so there must be room somewhere for “is usually happy using the site in English), or your browser’s default language (less unreliable than it used to be), or… well, anything. “We know best, and we can’t be arsed to help you.”

As I say, there are some routes back to a site you can actually read – the link on the homepage or visiting the site via www.google.us (or .co.uk, or whatever – still no good for browser plugins). Somehow, these make it worse, though. Even a half-assed solution is an admission that there’s a problem somewhere; and if you know there’s a problem, why not… just fix it properly?

Yahoo! goes in completely the opposite direction with localisation, providing fairly “siloed” international sites, one for each territory they operate in, each with its own URL. This nicely sidesteps the issue of Google’s “forcing” a localisation on you without really knowing which one is suitable, and it allows Yahoo! to develop versions of a product which are truly geared towards the national community which they’re trying to serve, rather than seeming like an ivory-tower Silicon Valley linguistic concession to the rest of the world.

The major downsides are potential duplication of effort (is uk.answers.yahoo.com really different to answers.yahoo.com?), and the tying of language (or, more properly, localisation) to jurisdiction and other internationalisation concerns, which can marginalise sizable populations of foreign-language speakers who are living abroad. I believe this last point is only becoming more important as global mobility continues to increase.

These issues all interest me because I had to make my own decisions about them when designing the international model for Flickr, and (perhaps predictably), with Flickr we tried to take a more flexible “middle path”.

It’s not the kind of thing which should be readily apparent to visitors of the site, if I’ve got it right because it should “just work”.

On Flickr, we try to take into account your browser settings, where you are, where you came from (if you arrived from an external site) and various other factors to provide what I hope is a pretty accurate “best guess” at the correct language to serve you in (and, seperately, the best “place” to tie internationalisation concerns to).

As a fallback, every page (barring our really complicated javascripty maps and organizr features) has a set of links – in native language – to help you get to the language you want, if needed.

They may all be small markets, but ultimately I want to cater to the German living in Missouri, the Frenchman in Seoul and the Korean in São Paulo.

There may well be flaws in the approach as it stands today, but if so I hope they’re fixable (and I’ve not seen any negative feedback on language weirdness, so I assume we’re doing okay). Certainly, I hope that, unlike Google, our efforts aren’t a definite FAIL.

Veering onto another topic entirely, though, today’s major preoccupation is international in nature. Right now I’m working n a talk I’ll be giving soon to a bunch of Korean developers in Seoul, regarding Flickr’s API. What’s interesting about this is the peculiar challenges it raises.

Firstly, I’m not 100% confident that my inevitably-slightly-manic English presentation will be all that understandable to a diverse group of Korean speakers. I’ve brewed up something of a defense against this – designing slides for the presentation which contain both an English component (so that the presentation matches the talk, and I know what’s going on, more-or-less), and a Korean translation. Hence the hurry to get the slides done – so that a Korean co-worker can translate! Nevertheless, it means that every design has to be somewhat “symmetrical”; and that there’s half the usual space per slide for any given concept.

But the really weird thing is how much uncertainty a foreign culture injects into the process of building entertaining presentations. In the circles I move in (amongst my fellow Flickr-ites, for example, and other talented presenters such as the lovely Mr Coates), the Done Thing these days is to illustrate one’s slides with somewhat-relevant photographs, usually as a background to the slide.

The approach makes a lot of sense for the Flickr team (we are, after all, in the business of hosting awesome photos), and has taken off in general due to the ease with which anyone can find good creative-commons licensed imagery through Flickr.

Using photography in this way also has the advantage of making the presentation immediately more visually appealing, and allows for a host of sly (or not so sly) jokes in the form of tangentially-related imagery, or flat-out visual punnery.

For example, one might illustrate a slide on the “flexibility” of various feed formats like this:

A bad pun, but good enough for a sympathetic laugh to humour the hapless presenter…

Such puns fall apart when you’re thinking in more than one language, though.

I don’t speak a word of Korean, so I have no reliable way of telling whether the concept of “flexibility” is as, um, flexible in that language. It’s quite possible that “human flexibility” and “versatility of web feeds” are two entirely different words. At which point the pun falls apart and I start to look like a pervert who likes pictures of people stretching their feet above their heads. It might still get a laugh, but for oh so wrong a reason.

I have no timely way of finding out which puns will work and which ones won’t, so my only sensible course of action is to limit the punnery as much as possible, which in turn limits the images I can use.

Even where puns aren’t involved, some concepts may not be universal. It took me 15 minutes of research to determine that, yes, Korea uses the “no entry” sign prevalent elsewhere.

And finally, there’s the issue of cultural sensitivity. I’m thinking of introducing myself with this awesome picture that Stew took of me wearing his “Bacon of the Month Club” nose…

…but I really should ascertain if there’s any Korean taboo around pigs or animal noses. Nothing says “awkward” like debasing your own image five and a half thousand miles from home.

This, in short, is like doing a vast, multi-cultural jigsaw puzzle. It’s kinda fun in a way, but also pretty weird.

Images from Flickr, and by (in order) marekj, elle_rigby and the inimitable Stewart

Okay, so I broke. It took twelve days, but in the end I just couldn’t wait any longer to get an iPhone into my life.

I’d rationalised against it for weeks before launch – “the keyboard looks like it needs some work”; “never buy 1st Gen Apple hardware”; “wait for 3G instead of EDGE”. But this thing seemed truly amazing – a whole new experience as far as mobile devices are concerned. Ultimately, I wanted in on the ground floor.

So I’m slightly late to the party, and possibly not adding much at this point (I really haven’t scanned the interblogwebnet to see what others are saying about their phones), but I wanted to write down some first impressions, partly for my own later reference, partly for any of the 5 readers of this site who might not have got their hands on an actual iPhone yet.

Getting the boring stuff out of the way first, yes, it’s amazing. The UI is fluid and responsive – the original MacWorld demo and the existent tutorials aren’t gussied up to make it look any better; it really works like that. It is, in short, a thing of utter beauty, and takes mobile usability to a completely different level.

There are several worries I had which have proved unfounded so far.

Battery life seems good. I’ve been using the phone exhaustively (hey, it’s a new toy) and haven’t run into any “argh, battery low” moments yet. We’ll see how it holds out in the long term.

The EDGE thing is less annoying than I thought it would be – the slight speed problems of the connection are more than made up for by the ease-of-navigation around networked content.

The keyboard is perfectly usable after about an hour of practice. In some ways tactile feedback would be nice, but… I’ve never found the teeny-tiny button keyboards on any smartphones to be any better.

All in all, if I was at Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola or Samsung right now I’d be sick as a dog.

That said, here’s the problem with being Apple. Their products are often so very nearly perfect. You can tell that a lot of very dedicated people have spent a lot of time applying a breathtaking eye for detail. The downside of this is that the smallest details which are forgotten (and there will always be a few) stand out so much more.

So, with the basic assumption that the iPhone is jaw-dropping, here are the niggles I’ve found in the first few days…

1) Inconsistency with portrait vs. landscape

The best part about the keyboard is that in landscape mode (mainly in Safari at present) it’s super-usable because there’s more space. This fact makes it really really annoying that in other apps (including Mail, Notes, Calendar, SMS and Contacts) there’s no landscape mode. Turn the phone sideways and nothing happens. More consistency on this would be a godsend – I’d go so far as to suggest that all apps (except iPod video, maybe) should honour the orientation of the phone.

Also, the accelerometer needs the phone to be fairly upright in order to trigger, which leads to some odd “hokey cokey”-like hand movements to get the view to shift, but I suspect that’s pretty much an unsolvable problem.

Finally, the orientation “locks” if the keyboard is open. So you can’t flip your safari view if, say, you’re halfway through typing a URL on the small “portrait” keyboard and want to switch to the bigger one.

2) International number support seems a bit shaky

I have most international numbers (UK-based friends and family) stored as “+44 XXXX XXX XXX”, the standard international format. On my N73 these were always parsed correctly, connecting through to the number in question whether I was in the US or abroad. The iPhone doesn’t seem to handle this though – a text that I tried to a UK phone got a return error message from AT&T complaining that the number was in the wrong format

This is more than a little wrong, and becomes truly annoying when you hit the Phone options pane and see an “International Assist” setting which, I quote, “automatically adds the correct prefix to US numbers when dialling from abroad.”

That’s the kind of slightly embarrassing US-centric error I don’t really expect Apple to make, and I’m not sure what to do about it. I really don’t want to store my UK contacts as “011 44 XXXX XXX XXX”, because then the numbers won’t work when I’m abroad.

“Sit back and hope for a software fix” seems to be the only option.

3) You can’t add contacts to groups

iPhone supports the OS X Address Book’s concept of “groups”, which is great for creating a quick list of co-workers, friends, or local restaurants, say. But there’s no method (that I can find) of adding contacts to those groups on the phone itself. You have to organise them on your computer and then sync the phone. This is particularly annoying because of the good Contacts integration in many iPhone apps.

I noticed this niggle last night when I added a local pizza restaurant to my contacts list direct from the Google Maps app where I found it, and then couldn’t add it to my “Local Businesses” group inside the phone.

4) No re-ordering in the Stock or Weather widgets

In most list views on the iPhone (favourite contacts, for example), there are little buttons you can hold and drag to reorder the list. Not in the widgets though, which is annoying if you have a particular order you want (most visited to least visited places’ weather, for example) because you have to delete the whole list and re-enter it if you really want that order.

5) Mail can’t count

Okay, this is small and petty, but Mail keeps telling me that my account (currently accessed through POP) has “-1 Messages Read”, which is kinda dumb. It shouldn’t matter, but I expect this shiny object, a piece of the Star Trek future somehow warped into my lap, to be utterly perfect in every way.

6) Um… I only have 5 tiny things to whine about

iPhone is a truly stunning achievement. I’ve not been so happy to use (and excited about) a mobile device since I got my first mobile, a Nokia 8110 “banana phone” about 10 years ago. And the big promise of this thing is that regular software updates will be forthcoming from Apple. So hopefully 3 or 4 months from now, the entire list above will be obsolete.

And if that happens, Apple will have pretty much achieved the unachievable – a highly complex device which is, to all intents and purposes, flawless.

Wow.

So, this site fell a bit quiet again over the last… oooh, I dunno, nearly 8 months. Partly, that’s because I didn’t have much to write about, and (stubborn as I am), I refuse to contribute to the ever-expanding web of wiffle just so that my RSS feed contains some more entries.

But it’s also telling that the last blog post just about coincides with the time that I started planning the infrastructure needed to take Flickr from a 1-language interface to 8, a roller-coaster ride of a project which swallowed a lot of my thought-space and eventually time (I was working 16-18 hour days for the last 3 weeks), but which is finally done, and has been live to the world for a whole month now.

I’m proud to have done that, the minor glitches and post-launch issues (which won’t be discussed here, because this is my personal site) aside.

Immediately post-launch I was whisked away on a whirlwind tour (Paris for 24 hours, London for 5 days, Montreal for 3) during which I lost my luggage, had my camera and credit-card stolen, and spent a great deal of the scant “downtime” in interminable conference calls.

I wound up back in the Bay Area about 3 weeks ago seriously exhausted and disoriented, and have been slowly pulling my life back together since then. Which is where we come to this l’il update, and the (undoubtedly sporadic and random) resumption of me posting here.

In short, I’m back, baby!

Coming up, in no particular order (but noted so that you can ridicule me if the posts don’t appear):

• iPhone – yes, I have one. Yes, it’s amazing. Yes, it has a few UI niggles.
• Mojito cupcakes – a recipe from last weekend.
• A couple of quick travelogue-type things:
  • San Diego – the lighter side of SoCal, with diversions into Californian history.
  • Montreal – cute town, cuter people, Joe Beef, Poutine and my reacquaintance with the French language.
• Web Internationalisation 101 (being a rough draft of a talk I’m putting together).
• Cheese – a rant/ramble on one of my favourite foods.
• The Bastard Son of GTD – How I’m getting things done, without exactly Getting Things Done.
• An update on how I’m faring after 2 1/2 years as a British Californian.
• Sustainable eating in the Bay Area – more thoughts on an old topic.
• Plus, possibly, an extra special bonus item I’m deeply unsure of until I finish writing it.

I’m going for a mix of things I like writing about – food, tech and life as a Brit abroad. Hopefully there will be fewer 8-month gaps in future…