Just shows how much those same moments (the water curtain thing and the confetti in particular) have stuck in people’s minds…

Today I caused a flurry of productive activity at work by sticking a big bit of paper on the wall.

At the top, I wrote ‘Frequently Unanswered Questions’. On big yellow post-it notes, I started writing all the annoying gorilla-in-the-corner-of-the-room questions I could think of. The questions that consistently get asked on the way out of meetings, or over cups of tea and exasperated looks. The things that have become assumed unanswerable questions.

People started adding more questions. We collected a lot of them. And people started trying to answer them.

I moved the ones that looked like they might have been answered to another big bit of paper, to one side. The questions with unsatisfactory or contradictory answers were left in limbo, in the middle.

We now have lots of things to think about, and a way to see with our own eyes the progress we’re making to clear this mess up.

And a new acronym to use, cos there aren’t enough of those.

We bought a house.

It’s gonna take a lot of work, but… we bought a house.

Just don’t view source.

So, by way of a frantic catch-up: since we were last here, I have…

• been to India, to escape parental carnage over the New Year. Spent three weeks in Kerala, discovering memorable individuals, more amazing food than we could have imagined (and we could have imagined a lot), and plenty of new and clever ways to get killed. All in all, months ago, now, but unforgettable.
• continued to try to buy a house, though things are closer to actually happening this time. The closer we get, the more gutwrenchingly awful it will be if things fall through… but let’s not think about it that way, shall we?
• observed that the old saying about the only constant being ‘change’ is proving itself to be a genius description for life at the Beeb, with things in another exciting new structure (hey, why stop now?), and me in a new (or rather, renamed) job. It’s all going to be OK, though, actually. Which is nice.
• been to France, for a bit of camping and eating and being in the sunshine. Got a new tent, which makes me very happy.
• failed to blog as regularly as all that… but trying to justify it. Succeeding, mostly.
• read increasing amounts about things like RDF and FOAF and OWL and all that sort of thing. It’s all very clever, this web stuff. (More about these things and more, quite likely, at the soon-to-arrive BBC Developers Blog. You heard it here first. Although, to be honest, I’d be quite surprised if it launched before the heat death of the universe.)
• not done any woodwork, which is making Jenny angry ‘cos I’m not making her the breadbin which she desires.
• made bread a bit more frequently than my recent average, which is quite low. Y’just can’t beat freshly toasted toast from freshly baked bread, with Marmite on it, all with a cup of tea. You just can’t.
• read lots of rants from my old friend Stu, who is nearly always right about these and other things.
• tried not to get any Big Ideas… they’re not gonna happen. Failed, however, and they might just…

There seems to be an awful lot happening right now. Time for another list.

I have mostly been:

• Trying to buy a house, and failing miserably due to the fact that some people find it amusing to change their mind and not sell their house after all, even though we paid money for things. Not a survey yet, though, thankfully. But still.
• Doing presentations at work, trying to convince people that they should allow us to totally overhaul the part of the BBC’s site that I work on. It’s a long story, and one which I might find time to explain some time. (But let’s face it: probably not.) It’s all good though, the presentations seem to be doing the trick for now.
• Saving the lives of people who have massive fits in Tesco by swiftly putting them into the recovery position. Well, one person.
• Cycling around in my new red jacket in the freezing cold.
• Installing Mac OS X Leopard, and having fun with the new speech synthesis addition: ‘Alex’. It’s one of those hugely impressive things that comes around once in a while. One or two other bits of Leopard are a bit less impressive, but hey.
• And so on…

• not really going with my resolution to keep this site up-to-date with illuminating posts on life in general
• travelling on the tube between Holborn and White City, reading The Metro and thinking that everyone else in the world must be completely mad for reading it every morning, no doubt surrounded by people who see me as one of the completely mad people (although some of them are, I am sure, actually completely mad)
• making a box out of ash, and taking far too long about it
• drinking more than normal, and assuming that it’s perfectly fine because there are definitely people in the world who drink much more than that
• really actually seriously considering buying a house, which, needless to say, is quite a scary thought
• realising that my family, who for most of my life have seemed quite sane, are actually totally fucking insane
• doing yoga, which I didn’t ever consider one of the things I should do, and quite liking it to be honest
• not reading very many novels, which seems a shame because I’m sure there are lots out there that I was planning to read, although I did read jPod the other day, and it’s quite funny, because some of the people I work with are like that
• going to lots of weddings, which, I gather, is something that starts to happen about this time
• not playing guitar at all, and feeling a bit guilty and stupid about it
• seeing my dad more often, going for a pint after work at a very nice pub and being rather pleased about it
• not being the most efficient human being on the planet
• ranting, which I have to teach myself to do less of
• reading Daring Fireball in a slightly all-the-time kind of way
• cycling around London and noticing bits linking with other bits in ways I never noticed, like Kings Cross and Angel.

Make iTunes Music Store arrows search within your library, rather than going out to iTMS:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool true

Allow Dashboard Widgets to be dragged away from the Dashboard and onto the ‘normal’ layer you work on:

defaults write com.apple.dashboard devmode -bool true

A different progress indicator in Safari 3:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugUsePieProgressIndicator -bool true

Safari debug menu:

defaults write com.apple.safari IncludeDebugMenu -bool true

Safari Web Inspector - not as good as Firebug, but pretty good:

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitDeveloperExtras -bool true

I returned to haunt my former haunt in Edinburgh for a couple of days, this time for a web conference.

The conference itself was great. I had the chance to chat with clever people like the ones from Clearleft and Yahoo!, and I really did get a lot from it. Being a new conference, it was all quite small, so there were plenty of opportunities to shoot the breeze. Discussing the idea of Web Principles with people outside the BBC was especially cool, and a useful reality check.

On the other hand, being back in the ‘Burgh was, as ever, a bit odd. It’s good odd, overall, but still bloody odd. My good friend Dr Vines, who left for Canada a couple of years before I moved to London, described his eventual return as being “like coming back to the scene of a crime”, and at the time I couldn’t quite see what he meant. This time I see.

I think Edinburgh has an bizarrely intense personality. Everywhere has a certain something, of course: London, Manchester, Glasgow… all have a distinct feeling about them, and anywhere you spend any significant time is bound to get under your skin somehow. London has obvious massive capitalness, but Edinburgh is so much smaller that it has a kind of condensed capitalness. And maybe the smell of malt and breweries that pervades the place somehow connects directly to some inner emotional-olfactory-psychotic-nostalgic part of the brain…

London has enough pubs and parks and corners-you-never-knew to last you the rest of your life without repeating yourself. Every nook and cranny of Edinburgh seemed exactly as I left it. Just as if I never left.

As for Tim’s crime scene metaphor, I think it’s something to do with the feeling of leaving something unresolved. Just as if you never left. Here’s the thing: if you go away from a place while you’re in a bit of a state for some reason, you’ll rediscover it all when you go back, even if you’ve done a great job of sorting things out in the meantime. Especially if the place in question is small and smells strangely of breweries.

It was actually meant to happen a full year ago; the course was a present from Jen for my 30th. But procrastinator that I am, it’s taken until now (and until I have Ben, my old Edinburgh flatmate, to do it with) for me to get round to it.

I have made lots of things before, and been taught a lot of useful things by my uncle (who can make amazing things). But now that I have access to all the tools and all the expertise and all the time in the world… I can’t quite decide what to make.

It’s quite a seriously difficult decision, because it’s real. That’s the whole thing. If something goes wrong, or I change my mind, I can’t just press ⌘-Z.

But it’s very exciting. I think I’ll make a box.