Palau. Well worth the 28 hours door to door to get here.
SE London to London Bridge.
London Bridge to Charing Cross.
Charing Cross to Paddington (Bakerloo)
Paddington to Heathrow (Heathrow Express)
Heathrow to Tokyo Narita
Narita to Haneda (Bus)
Haneda to Koror, capital of Palau
Categories: In My Life
One thing I’m surprised I’ve not done more of this year is travel writing; this year I’ve been fortunate enough to go to places that, while within easy reach, are still somehow slightly out of reach, out of frame at the same time - Monaco, Syria, rural Ibiza, and in about two hours, Palau1 and my third trip to Japan.
Thinking - and writing is often just thinking with a keyboard - about this is something I should do, because next year, I’m taking a sabbatical. Having worked for Dennis/Custom PC for 5 years (!), I’m eligible for 8 weeks extra holiday, which I can combine with 2 weeks of my usual leave for… 10 weeks, more than 2 months, away. Not sure where I will go yet, but I’d like to do some travelling in that time. I’ve never ‘done’ South America, have never been to to India to find myself and I’m not about to start now. But I do think about travel as a part of life; the difference between there and then and here and now; about how it can/should work as applied curiosity.
1 Palau?!? Yeah, Palau. The CIA knows all about Palau. It’s a real country. In the middle of the pacific, about here.
Categories: In My Life · Travel
Well, it’s slightly more than halfway through the year, but part of me, deep down, still runs on a school calendar I think, and it’s the tail end of July, when all the exams are done and the holidays are up and running, that feels like the year’s mid-point. The Wired Jester has gotten a bit dusty - the last update was back in March (!!) - owing to a very busy first four months of the year at Custom PC. We’ve now finished hiring, and the team is up to six people in the office, which feels excellent. So now that I have a bit of time, where am I at, nearly seven months through 2008?
Categories: In My Life · Site Stuff
A quick post: I was asked to be a guest on BBC Radio 5 Live last week - a really fun experience this time round (much better than last time,with the CPC podcast having made me feel more confident about speaking on air). If you fancy a listen, have a look at my work blog, where I’ve posted an MP3 of the show.
Categories: Custom PC · In My Life
Picture caption: The road to the future, yesterday. Lots of concrete and white light. No robots in sight.
It’s been a while since there’s been a longer post on the Wired Jester, so I thought I’d drop one in, partly because I’m quite proud of the above shot at London Bridge and wanted to show it off, and partly because I have genuinely been thinking about what to do with this site going forward. At the moment, I’m enjoying the link blogging - it’s quick, light and easy, and it fits in well with all the DIY I’ve been doing in my spare time in new house, but I have got a new idea for the Jester that will hopefully see it getting a little more use than just as a link repository. As ever, it’s just a matter of finding the time and figuring out priorities…
Categories: Creativity · In My Life · Site Stuff
And I am so relieved. For the past 18 months or so, helping create a new website for Custom PC has been something of an obsession for me. I’ve talked endlessly about it on flights, in bars, in many, many meetings and bored the Jesteress to tears with all my ideas and frustrations. I’ve scribbled brainwaves in notebooks and written thousands of words to try and get the ball rolling and convince people/the company that what Custom PC needed was a really, truly, good website - and that what this would entail would be a very different site, organisation and approach to the one we already had.
One of the biggest problems Dennis has had (and it’s one shared by many other publishers, I think) is that when taking its print brands online, in the rush to ‘get down with this new thing called the web’, a lot of the good ways of working that we had developed on the magazine editorial side were thrown out - although they were of course accompanied along with some ones that did need to go. Baby and the bath water etc. So the creation and maintence of the sites was made largely separate from the print editorial side, etc etc. It is easy to see why; the web is, after all, very different to print. To some extent it’s true that a magazine should not work on the web - that’s why it is a magazine. A
website should not work if you print it out or disconnect it.
However, good magazines do tend to be produed by relatively small, dedicated teams who are passionate about both their subject and the medium in which they are working. In any good publication, there’s an awareness of how style, form and content can be blended together. The same is true for good websites. Make the teams too large and too dispersed, go for an approach that’s too generic, too rule-based and disconnected with what the content relates to and you get a site - or a magazine - that lacks any sense of life. So what you want is a magazine and the website to have shared DNA -
shared editorial values, perhaps some shared content
(depending on the project) and the same overall quality - but, crucially, this all needs to find a different form of expression in print and on the web. The DNA needs to create two seperate, independent, unique characters. Brother and sister, rather than two clones.
We work hard to produce a magazine that makes best use of the printed format (for instance, see this post),
and it became obvious to me that we needed to take a similar approach
online, and make a site that really, genuinely worked as a website. Not just a repository of text and picture content,
but a resource for PC hardware and news, a place for people to discuss
their computers, mods, tips and tricks: a flexible tool that could be
the hub of a techy community.
With our new site, I think we’re starting to get towards this nirvana: it’s all written by the same team as the magazine, it has both articles from the mag plus web-specific stuff (particularly the news, which my colleague Ben is doing a great job with), lots of RSS feeds, sensible URLs for ease-of-use, plus WordPress-powered blogs for both staff and readers, complete with file space, so you can chuck up your pictures, benchmarks, CPU-Z screenies and mod shots and not worry about hosting.
The next big upgrade will come when we start writing our copy using a database and then we’ll be able to do very smart things with benchmark data and tech specs. This is just one of the improvements scheduled to be added - we tinker with the magazine every issue, trying new things, improving it, honing it, and now that we’ve rebalanced the editorial team so that we all work across print and web, this should also be the case with the website.
In terms of inspirations, personally, this post by Information Architects Japan was what convinced me of the need for ‘big, clear text’ (although IA probably wouldn’t like the bright colours of the rest of our design), while the excellent Journerdism provided a constant stream of challenging, thought provoking discussions on the way print media was working (or not) online. Wordblog, Modern Life, Publishing 2.0 and MagCulture have all given me great ideas, too.
The editorial team and the project team at Dennis Interactive (DI) has worked really hard on making the site happen. The project has been a huge learning curve, because not only has it involved a lot of technical engineering for the coders and designers of DI, it’s also required a re-engineering and re-balancing of how editorial and interactive work together, and a reassessment of many, many aspects of the company’s old approach to the web. There is still a long way to go, but the new site is a good first step.
And, so without further ado, here it is. www.custompc.co.uk. I now have a work blog, www.custompc.co.uk/blogs/alexwatson, and if you want to subscribe to it the RSS feed is here.
Also, the Media Guardian has written up the site launch.
Categories: In My Life · On Journalism and Media · Tech · Web
I wonder what it is that causes jetlag - the distance? the effort and energy of the travelling? the fact you pass from the real world into the strangeness of airports and planes and duty free shopping at midnight? being separated, so viscerally, from home and all its rhythms? or is it just all to do with the ropey food on the plane?
I am back from Taiwan now; the Computex trade show itself was excellent, and we put some good coverage onto the CPC site. Still the old site, as the dev team missed the deadline for getting the new one ready, which was… frustrating. I am also in the middle of moving, as the Jesteress and I have moved out of our rented flat in North London, and have a week before we can move into the new house in South London. So we’re staying with friends, and with all the running around, boxes, packing, lifting, moving and different routine, in a way, I feel like I am jetlagged again. We did have a huge amount of help from friends when it came to moving all our stuff to the new house, which was brilliant - it’s lovely to be surrounded by enthusiastic people! Especially when they’re all so good at carrying things 
So I’m really looking forward to the new place now. Just need to wait for the workmen to finish de-damping the place.
And in the meantime, I’m going to enjoy being in the meantime.
[Photo: Taipei from the observation deck of Taipei 101, the world's tallest building]
Categories: In My Life
Amazingly, this traffic guy is there every morning, and hasn’t been totalled by a scooter rush. As ever, everything in Taipei seems to have a slight edge of madness to it, especially during the show, when we’, the observers of said mad things, are also running around like mad.
See post below for a link to all the stuff we’ve done so far.
Categories: In My Life
Tomorrow I’m off to Taiwan for the Computex trade show; while Spring’s Cebit is physically bigger and CES is shinier, Computex is the one that really matters for Custom PC; its main focus is on PC components, and it’s in the hometown of the big kit manufacturers. As well as being a lot warmer than Cebit (and with much better food), it’s also a really useful place to pick up background info and to get a sense of the work culture which produces so much of the stuff we spend the year covering. And I don’t just mean Engrish 
It’s my 2nd consecutive year at the show and one thing struck me as I was packing just now: Last year I had only a crappy little Dell laptop borrowed from work; this year, my case is already half full just from audio equipment, and what you can’t see even in this shot is my laptop, my Nikon D40 and tripod (plus the PSP and iPod for the flights…). Despite being a print journalist, the impending launch of our new website (not in time for the show, rather annoyingly), and the success of the CPC podcast means coverage has gone a lot beyond the humble notepad - although said humble notepad is still lurking on the right of the shot. Should be a lot of fun - I’m looking forward to it a lot
Categories: In My Life · On Journalism and Media
I think it is the dream - or has been the dream, at one point - of nearly everyone in the media to work for the BBC. For me, that dream may now be over.
I was on the radio this evening, on BBC Radio 5 Live’s Drive show. Someone who freelances for Custom PC also works for the Beeb and needed a person to talk about a news story. I ended up being that person. Very exciting. First time on radio, on a show with 1.6 million listeners. That’s 1 in every 75 people. I know more than 75 people. Odds are, at least someone I know heard me.
The story concerned a German research institute who were experimenting with a computer that would respond to the emotional state of the user - partly by using facial scanning technology, and partly by the user wearing a glove, so the system could read temperature and heartbeat. The idea is that the computer would become easier to use when you got annoyed with it. When asked about this, I replied that “the glove would make typing difficult. It’s not skiing.”
From there on in, I just couldn’t get out of the nervous jokes vain. Towards the end of the extremely brief two minute segment, the presenter said “you’re not taking this seriously! Are you saying I’ve wasted my time with this story?” and then something like “Normally I make the jokes around here.” I must stress, this is the BBC, so it was all good humoured, not angry at all, but still…. I got told off on national radio…!!
Earlier in the week, I watched the excellent Ricky Gervais meets Larry David programme, in which both comedians complain that interviewers never listen to them and have a proper conversation, and just blindly zip through their questions. I sort of have an idea how they feel now - a radio “conversation” is so different from a normal face-to-face or even phone conversation. The pacing, the interaction, it’s all different.
Listening to the show on the web just now (yes, the BBC keep an archive!), there’s not a lot of connection between my responses and the presenter’s comments/questions. While he takes one tack, I take another, so it almost seems like I’m taking part in a different conversation to him. I think this is because everything goes *so* quickly - I didn’t don’t want to sit there umming and arrrring, so came out with responses before my brain really vetted them. Because you’re aware beforehand of the limited time you’re going to have, you go into the conversation with either pre-scripted questions or responses, and these don’t really mesh in the way that responses in a normal back-n-forth conversation go.
And of course, now that the radio has moved on to another show, my head is filled with far more sensible responses.
Ultimately, I do still think a computer that responds to the user’s emotional state is a silly idea. After all, a computer shouldn’t require you to get angry and frustrated before getting easier to use. It should be easy to use all the time. If an interface to a piece of software is not clear to the point that it induces frustration in the user, the design of the interface is not very good. It doesn’t need sensitivity training, it need a re-design so that it does make people angry. Any piece of software that requires you to read a manual is not intuitive enough.
Every recent IT success story is built on the back of simplicity and usability: Google and the iPod, the two that most obviously spring to mind, attract users from across the spectrum of technical knowledge because they’re easy to figure out. The experience can go very deep if you’re technically adept - Google offers extensive personalisation services, the iPod some nifty smart playlist ideas - but equally, at point of first entry, it’s very easy to get Google and iPod to perform their main task. Both have few buttons. Neither has a little camera to check how pissed off you are.
Update: Post edited/ammended for clarity and to add a bit more consideration. Heard back from the Beeb, apparently they didn’t think I was too bad, which is a relief!
Categories: In My Life · On Journalism and Media · Tech
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