TO POST OR NOT TO POST, THAT IS THE QUESTION

How much information do people who read your blog want to know about you? This question seems odd coming from me since anyone regularly visiting this place already knows more about me than even I do. But there's stuff I don't talk about, of course. My day-to-day life is not eventful enough to provide blogging material and anyway, who really needs to hear daily trivia? Okay, I'll get to the point. I'm about tell you what I did today which was to get a needle stuck into my cheek while a computer screen showed wavy ultrasound pictures of the inside of my face where the needle was being inserted by the X-ray technician....

MORE

OUT OF THE BOX GOES LIVE TODAY!

Check it out now. It's there and awaiting your OOB thoughts. Subscribe to it, or whatever it is that people do on successful sites. Let's see where this goes, it's an adventure. Please only enter comments over there that are relevant to the month's theme, nothing else. Anything you want to say to me about the project, or whatever, is welcome right here as usual.

Another interesting project that has gone live in the last couple of days is BOOKARAZZI and I'm in it, along with many other much shinier luminaries in the world of published books. It started out as a private email group Bloggers With Book Deals and has now acquired a bright new online presence. It's still in formative stage but there's plenty to browse through so go and see it.

MORE

OUTSIDE THE BOX BOX

Just had an idea, inspired by the comments to my last post.

I would create a separate blog and set a monthly theme - for example Identity for this month - then anyone who has thoughts concerning the given subject can drop them into a Comments box: thoughts that are 'outside the box' - original ideas, questions, observations or intuitions rather than received opinions. This would be neither a chat-room or a literary project but only a collection of individual cogitations about specific philosophical issues.

The entire contents of a month's Box would be posted on one page at the end of the month, each entry signed by its author (if they wish, or anonymous if they prefer). I might add illustrations for each theme. After a year, if the contents of the Outside The Box Box are sufficiently interesting, we could think about publishing it as a book via print-on-demand and distributing it via the internet and/or any other way.

What do y'all think about this - would you participate in the project if I set it up?

This is where I work

Click to Play

A brief glimpse of my working space with a musical background composed by me with Logic and Garage Band on a Mac.

CATCHING UP

I've been so busy converting people to bloggery that I haven't had time to blog. So this is going to be a very mixed bag in no chronological order.

MY APPLE PERFORMANCE
I had written a short introductory speech, complete with jokes, to warm up the audience before switching on my PowerPoint show. I rehearsed it in front of the bathroom mirror, in the street, in the bus, in the taxi and I thought I had it down pat. But as soon as I got up on the platform, facing the cinema-style seats filling up with people who had actually come to hear me, I forgot it completely. Apart from one joke which could have done with better timing:

I see there are some...(pause)....mature faces here tonight. Like mine. Well, I want to tell you that anything you've heard about brain cells dying when you get older is a lie. They don't die. They just get bored....(pause) And then they die. (pause). The way to keep them bouncy is to work on something you love.

Okay it's not that funny. But it's true. I got more relaxed when my slide show started and the audience attention was on that. I will find the way to post most of it as a QuickTime or Flash movie. Meanwhile, let me quote from the personal reports of two people who were there. Why blow your trumpet when others can do it so much better for you?

It was a wonderful and inspiring evening. Natalie was superb - power point presentation with embedded links and video! Wired for sound, she strolled up and down the platform as though she's spent all her life doing it. And gave live demonstrations of some of the techniques she uses to transfer pencil drawing to pdf image. Hugely practical advice about which software to use, different printing options, marketing and sales strategies. The audience space was nearly entirely full and the listeners very engaged, and there were a lot of interesting questions. By the end I was utterly convinced that I not only had a book inside me but that it could emerge into the daylight and hob-nob with its destined audience. R.R.

Natalie was ...tremendous. Absolutely charming and involving and a pro, and inspired me too to want to publish a book, and ended with a joyous, completely off-the-wall video tour of her studio, with loud self-electronically-composed music. Wonderful stuff. J.M.

The car-bomb that was defused earlier that day in the Haymarket, only a short distance from the Apple store, understandably deterred some people from coming to my gig but there was still a good audience - friends, strangers and passers-by. I had fun and I'll do it again, anywhere, anytime, if I'm asked.

AM I TURNING INTO MY MUMMY?

MORE