The days and weeks since leaving Headshift have been a bit of a blur. I took a week off and did very little except watch the Twenty-20 World Cup, read feeds, drink tea and ponder my forthcoming attempt to take over the world. After that, it's been all action - much of which has been all the various things one needs to get sorted to enter the world of the self-employed - bank accounts, VAT registration, choosing a trading name from the small portfolio of catchy domain names I've built up, buying Moo cards, reading though a book on tax (more fun than it sounded !), catching up on some long overdue tech immersion (Movable Type 4, WP2.3, backups to Amazon's cloud, etc) and thinking about the kind of things I want to do. The thing is, I enjoy so many aspects of this industry (where this industry = Enterprise 2.0, Web 2.0, blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, tagging, intranets, information architecture, social networks [and analysis], user centred design, linux, OS X, Windows XP and Vista, command line systems administration, mashups...you get the picture) that it's hard thinking about narrowing down my focus. And I guess I realised what I already knew - I'm best at being a generalist and having fingers in many pies, some of which may well be a little bit too hot and end up burning me. But that's ok - failure is ok if you've tried your best, and you learn from it. I've met many many people in the last 10 years who are excellent at what they do, but who have a very narrow focus and steadfastly refuse to lift their heads up and look outside their valley - 'not my problem, get <insert name of different specialist here> to look at it'. I can't do that - I find being constricted an uncomfortable experience - and it quickly bores me. All this to say that although my main tag line may say social software and intranet consultant, I'll be looking to do more than just that - whether it be some simple sysadmin for a client I'm already doing work for, or some card sorting and analysis, or providing strategic advice on developing an social infrastructure within an organisation. So -if you need someone smart, enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and committed - get in touch ! Oh - hello, by the way. Welcome to my new site. my new business, and the first post. I've been blogging for many years over at scale|free, but I'll be spending more time here from now on. I'll mainly blog about professional stuff that interests me, as well as some of the things someone starting up in the UK should know about. It's all very exciting !

"Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."

Samuel Johnson, London resident, September 20, 1777

"Get me out of here"

Anu Gupta, London resident, September 20, 2007

It's no secret that over the years that I've lived in London, I've enjoyed it less and less. The sub-current of irritation that constantly and insistently accompanies almost any public interaction resonates through me and starts to feel like tinnitus of the soul. So, time to change, time to get out. The plan, or should that be The Plan, is to move. Far away to Montreal where seasons are seasons, cost of living is low, and everyone walks around with an adorable French accent. Well, everyone except me. My language skills are virtually non-existent, a failing that I acknowledged around the time of 'le singe est dans l'arbre'. I don't speak French, despite the constant prodding of my French speaking girlfriend. I can get away with it here, but over there it'll be harder. So, rather than waste more money on a French tutor (because that was 6 weeks of Wednesday evening back-to-school torture), and various flavours of Learn French CD (I won't even start on how bad they were), I've been digging around to see if there's any help available online. And of course there is - but two recently announced sites look like they might be pretty cool, and one of them had me almost slapping my head (I had to stop myself) as an obvious solution that no one had thought about before (not to my knowledge anyway). So - first up is Mango, billed as "the first Free enterprise language learning course available on the Internet.". What you get is a Flash application delivering learning in a slide show format. Different situations are covered (at the post office, at customs - I didn't check whether at the Apple Store was included). Pretty conventional, but free. Much more interesting is LiveMocha, which adds a Web 2.0 social something to the mix, and not only provides the basics of language tuition, but also provides a community of like minded people to practice with. So, sign up, say what languages you speak, and which you're learning, and you can match up with people doing the opposite, so that you both get something out of it. You can friend people, and there are scoreboards to encourage you to keep on going, and probably some more stuff that I haven't seen yet. Initial impressions are good - the site looks clean and well designed, and this is a great idea. Let's see if it can take a language dunce like me and get him conversing en francais. A bientôt. [tags]web2.0, web20, language, learning[/tags]

Hmm...just as I'm about to buy my own Macbook, a lazy Sunday trawl through the interwebs shows some rumours of a new thinner, shinier Macbook that may or may not be announced sometime in the near future, or next year, or never.

Now normally I'm pragmatic about this kind of stuff and generally resistant to buyer's remorse. If the only change was a faster processor or more hard disk, then I wouldn't have a problem, but boy would I be completely gutted if I bought a Macbook next week and watch Apple launch a complete replacement.

The problem is, of course not helped by the fact that I'm currently without a laptop (well a proper one - I've got a 5 year old Dell ultraportable that only works when plugged into the mains, but that doesn't really count).

So, really struggling with what to do - probably wait until OS X 10.5 (leopard) is released and see if anything is announced.

[tags]Mac, Apple, Macbook, laptop, hardware[/tags]

I've recently started to get a lot of comment spam forwarded to me for moderation, which means that Akismet can't decide what to do. This might be because I've recently posted here again, after an over-long break from blogging.

Rather than continue to plough through hundreds of spam comments a week, I'm taking the simpler path and have installed the rather wonderful Comment Timeout plugin. Essentially this closes comments on old posts, but generally does so relative to the last approved comment - so old posts that are still generating some worthwhile conversation won't get shut down.

We'll see how it goes, but I think this will help a lot.

[tags]spam, comments, wordpress, blogging, plugins [/tags]

SixApart have announced that Chris Alden is the new Chairman and CEO. Mena Trott makes a rare posting on her corporate blog about the move, and Chris also posts about the change on his blog. I met Chris at the beginning of the year, while I was at Headshift, and was impressed - and I think having someone who has developed and innovated in the blogging space can only be good for SixApart. GigaOm and TechCrunch also have the announcement, and you can follow any reaction on Techmeme. [tags]SixApart, Movable Type, MovableType[/tags]

I've been at Headshift for almost exactly a year now, and in that time have had a chance to work on and contribute to some very exciting social software projects, meet some great people and be totally immersed in the world of social software.

But, with other things happening in my life, I've decided that it's time for a change, and Friday will be my last day at Headshift. I want to thank Lee and Livio for giving me the opportunity to work here, and wave a warm goodbye at the great team here.

So - what's next ? Not really sure - but it will be something social, that's for sure ;)

[tags]headshift, socialsoftware, london, consultant[/tags]