Apologies to the only people who might actually have tried looking for this site — those looking for my WordPress plugins. But all’s back and well now; I’ll be posting a couple of updates to a couple of plugins sometime in the next fortnight. Maybe.

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I’m leaving soon; I think I’ve mentioned that. No more shall my daily view be this:

…and I’m saying goodbye to here:

…and moving in to a lovely little house in White Gum Valley! Katie’s found us somewhere to live, and she’s moving in today! Good news.

But I won’t go on now; I’m waiting for the removalists to arrive and then I’m off to work. And the blog-self-consciousness has set in (so please don’t read this).

So I’ve left the place, earlier than I should’ve, walked across town towards the dam wall, and am now sittin gleaning against a long, low, drystone wall. It’s something that I never should have expected to find here &hdash; seems to have been put here quite recently and possibly as part of the design of Tuggeranong. Although, maybe not, as it’s not absolutely straight; it wobbles a bit, heading off down the hill, through the trees and towards the river. I like it.

I’m only about thirty meters from the road, and as rush-hour is building so is the noise. But I was cold, walking over here, and now I’m out of the wind and fairly comfortable, so I might stay for a bit. I can’t see much, from here, that suggests I’m not on some random grazed hillside in the bush proper; the street lights poke above the grass off to my right, but mostly it’s all the dry brown-yellow of the soil and grass, with dark-green blotches of trees all over.

But this wall is starting to feel a bit too ‘new’ (or something) for this ground &hdash; maybe it’s that its path down the hill has been all-too-obviously cut by a bulldozer: there are no trees for three or four meters either side of the thing for as far as I can see, despite there being quite thick bush all around.

Having walked on a ways…

It is so good to be out of the office! So good to sit by this smelly creek with sharp rocks and wire to sit on, the clanking of an ibis and the roar of the traffic in my ears, and this beautiful, cooling, dusk all around.

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So, I scrambled down the gully; squished my way across the pitifully-small trickle that seeps out from the bottom of the dam wall; climbed up the other side (burrowing under fences just whenever I could, wishing for a more robust, and smaller, bag for my notebook and camera); and got back to the main road just as a 314 was pulling up to take me home.

My idea, this week, is to write more. So far, I have failed.

I have nothing to say. There is nothing going on, nothing worth talking about. But I want to write.

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I have six weeks and two days to go at IBM. I’ve bought my train ticket, and started to pack up my belongings. I feel nothing much other than that I am marking time until I leave. Work drears on (if that’s a word; I’m not sure that it is) with excursions away from AIX to read about typography and distributed authentication (i.e. OpenID) punctuating my workdays. The view from my desk is unchanged, not even in that Canberran way of the trees turning orange in April, because this is Tuggers and no one plants deciduous trees here. I would take a photo, but a) I don’t have a camera (more on that in a moment, however); b) I’m probably not allowed to anyway, for some daft security reason; and c) it’s a silly thing to do, and posting the photo here would be even sillier.

Not that I particularly mind people thinking I’m silly; of course I don’t: I write a blog.

Not that by writing a blog I intend to pronounce what I write worthy of being read. I do not. I most certainly and unequivocally do not. However, I do want to write more, and more regularly. I started this blog when I was actively working with wood on a daily basis, and so I had something to write about. Now that I’m stuck in the rotten world of IT on a daily basis, I do not feel inspired. Hence posts such as this one. Sorry.

Nevertheless, I am soon — thanks to Tom‘s return from the States next week — to be the owner of a new Nikon D60. Therefore I am one further step down this long road of commitment to technology, and not thinking that I’ll chuck it all in to fuck off to the bush somewhere. Oh dear. What am I doing? I don’t know, but I will be taking more photos, and posting them here.

I have always been attracted to the idea that one can be quite out in the open and public about what one does. I remember reading some strange geeks’ diaries in 1996 or thereabouts, and marveling at their unabashed exposition of their lives. It’s not about having anything interesting to say or reveal, or wanting anyone to read my words — but just dumping these thoughts out there in public view.

I’m sure there’s more I could say about cameras and blogging or waistcoats and slippers, and the absurd split that I feel between the two, but I am rather thinking that I’ve gone on quite long enough already.

More tomorrow…

He also spoke about the difficulty with telework being the only mode of work for an emloyee. Generally, one or two days each week should be spent in a more communal workspace — but this is of course when one is thinking about teleworking as ‘working from home’ and working alone, and not other arrangements such as telecottaging (which poorly-named practice, I must add, has no relationship to ‘cottaging’). People have complained that it is hard to share knowledge with their co-workers when teleworking, but the results of studies of the actual situation (and not just perception) show that it can be easier for teleworkers to share knowledge. This struck a chord with me also: thinking about the differences in the levels of collaboration and documentation at IBM as compared to any of a number of open source project that I’ve been involved in. At IBM, there are people doing very similar work but who never share anything about how best to do the work ( and I realise, of course, that this is more to do with the culture at IBM than anything else), but who can imagine a FOSS project these days that doesn’t have a wiki?!

All up, and depite feeling pretty rotten all day yesterday, I enjoyed the talk. The question session was a bit of a failure, though, with England fiddling with the computer to try to explain a point that wasn’t really connected to the question he’d been asked. I got the impression that there were also people there who were just trying to ‘catch him out’, to show that teleworking isn’t any good — as though the fact, for example, that the company doesn’t benefit from reduced traffic and CO₂ emssions means that these things are not worth working for! But perhaps I’m too harsh.

(Kudos must go to the ACS, by the way, for providing what I most want at that time of the day: a glass of wine! And the hors d’œuvres even had vegetarian eatability; all most unexpected.)