Birch smells amazing while it's still green. It is easier than I thought, shaping half a log into a bowl. It is harder than I thought possible to finish a simple curve with a straight blade. Countless generations have carved necessary items out of wood. It was the...
This spring has been an interesting season. Often, I put words up on a screen to make my thoughts make sense. If I can organise the paragraphs into something resembling a coherent piece of writing, maybe my own plans and priorities can follow. I use a tumblr blog for...
All change… For the past decade, my wife and I have been very busy, and constantly shifting. I emigrated, and started university. We were learning how to live together and be a couple, and survive Central London. We did a lot of moving. University ended, jobs started....
Update ZPM's espresso machine Kickstarter project failed to produce the machine. What follows is the original interview, published back in March, 2013: ZPM's Gleb Polyakov and Igor Zamlinsky introduced me to Kickstarter through their Nocturn espresso machine. I'm...
It is cold. I have just decided to carry on, trying to ignore the tightness in my chest, and the retching tickle at the back of my throat that says one thing: "Cough!" My ears are already tingling. "We are the Hellequin," I pick up the dialogue from a new audiobook....
Every aspect of society and economy that has been touched by the Web has been changed radically. Even the way we interact socially is very different to 15 years ago. ... These changes are being brought about by the Web’s ability to link documents together into a...
Does it start with: "It is time to move on..."? Should I begin biographically, and tell a story, ending with: "and now, I'm on to something new,"? When I met Talis towards the end of 2007, I knew very little about the web, but suffered from a problem of perspective...
Choosing a word with extra syllables seems like a kind of one-upmanship over drab, simpler words like: use; and do. Is this a form of snobbery even more unbecoming than non-standard, corporate English? Such marked words display a kind of vanity that doesn't add much...
"She'll sit on you!" my mother said as I tried to play when I should have been quiet. "Huh? Why will she sit on me?" i asked, confused. "Because that's what Gi-gi does. She'll sit on you if you're bad!" she said ever so seriously. Gi-gi, my great-grandmother was out...