USA, Wanderer

p o t o m a c

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[ 14:50 sunday 11 february – washington dc, united states of america ]

a sunny day but bitingly cold. i’m sitting on the bank of the frozen potomac river with my feet resting on the ice. behind me is the gleaming white marble of the jefferson memorial. it took the best part of an hour to work out how to get here by foot from the other side of the river. such is the urban design it feels tantamount to an act of sedition to attempt such a passage without a motor vehicle.

but it was worth the effort. there is still the background roar of the traffic and of aircraft descending to reagan airport. but around me is parkland, dotted with patches of snow, and before me the frozen expanse of the river. i’m well wrapped up with greatcoat and a sheepskin hat covering my ears. the sunlight is warm upon my cheek.

i’m typing on my new mobile, a veritable swiss army knife of electronic wizardry. but the sensation is almost gone from my fingers so i must stop typing and put on my gloves again.

: c :

London, Wanderer

n a r c i s s i

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[ 00:39 tuesday 16 january – shipton street, london ]

today i took my breakfast on the roof for the first time since october. the sky was clear and i could feel the warmth of the sun on my face. the first tips of new leaves are starting to appear on the hydrangeas.

on sunday there were a few boxes of isles of scilly narcissi at the flower market, the first time i’ve seen them there. i bought a few bunches for the house. their distinct sweet perfume evokes so many memories.

: c :

London, Wanderer

z e r o s e v e n

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[ 22:47 monday 1 january 2007 – shipton street, london ]

the light, crisp scoring of monteverdi’s “il combattimento di tancredi e clorinda” makes for an excellent hangover restorative, aided by the dark roast coffee beans joe brought with him yesterday evening. the turning of each year is a moment to which i find myself attaching considerable symbolic importance. the urge to mark it with a certain extravagance is perhaps in the manner of a votive, an invocation to the fates that they may send good fortune in the coming twelvemonth.

last night sergio, joe and i dined here at shipton street then set out by foot for dexter’s house near london fields, brisk-paced as midnight was fast approaching. our path took us by half a dozen pubs, each crammed with ruddy-faced celebrants with its tinselly glow and boisterous hubbub leaking out onto the street. we reached dexter’s with five minutes to spare and saw in the year together with a group of friends gathered there.

around two joe and i found ourselves in mile end so we dropped into a party in an abandoned pub inhabited by friends of his. it was splendidly boisterous and i finally staggered home around seven, decidedly the worse for wear. waking up today was a struggle. methinks a teetotal week beckons. thus the oblations are completed for another year and the fates, we hope, are satisfied.

every year is significant in its own way but two thousand and seven is particularly freighted for me. so many of my hopes and labours are bound up in trampoline and the year ahead is likely to be decisive for the company. i have written little over recent months as we have been working to raise several millions of pounds in investment at the same time as closing a deal to implement our new sonar platform with a large american firm. these are good developments but they have been exceedingly demanding on my energy and attention. i cannot say it has been entertaining. tomorrow battle resumes and january will be equally intense. i feel ready though, fortified by ten days away from the furnace. i spent a lovely week over christmas with mum, dad, granny, anna and adam at home in gloucestershire. there was a time when i found christmas excruciatingly dull but now i relish this time of shared celebration with my family.

i don’t know how much i’ll manage to write over the coming months. for now i pray that the year will bring joy and wisdom to us all.

: c :

In transit, USA, Wanderer

w a s h i n g t o n

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[ 18:16 monday 13 november – washington dulles airport gate b32 ]

i’m used to arriving at airports at the last moment but today i heeded jodie’s warnings of impossible traffic on the freeway and hour-long queues at security and set out far in advance of my flight. however i evidently over-compensated and consequently my experience of the airport has been unusually relaxed. i had time to take some photographs of the beautiful swooping architecture of the main terminal (eero saarinen’s work?). now i’m sitting in the cavernous “concourse b” complex with its polished floor stretching off into the distance and a pervasive hush. my flight will start boarding any moment.

this has been an exciting week to be in the united states. many people, myself included, had a sense of foreboding that the democrats would not do as well as anticipated in the mid-term elections. there was an awful prospect that they might fail to gain a majority in the house, even against such an unpopular administration. but as i went to sleep in my hotel on tuesday night it was clear such anxieties were misplaced. virginia itself turned out to be one of the crucial contests in the senate elections but there was little excitement on the streets of charlottesville beyond a few balloons in the webb office on main street.

speaking with people in the days following the election i sensed a subtle shift, a new optimism. people are sanguine about the democrats’ capacity to screw things up royally over the next couple of years but more widely the election is seen as a symbol of momentum towards the centre. extreme candidates from both parties were rejected. the successful democrats were those who spoke like moderate republicans. in a polity that has been characterised by acute polarisation this, at least, is encouraging.

: c :

USA, Wanderer

v i r g i n i a

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[ 21:12 tuesday 7 november – charlottesville, virginia ]

a vietnamese restaurant in an old garage by the railway tracks. there’s me and one other diner. outside the tarmac sparkles in the incessant rain.

i’ve been in washington dc for the last few days, staying with jodie in her flat above the firework explosions of the autumn trees in rock creek park. the congressional elections are today so i was a little sad to leave washington and travel to charlottesville. last night i walked around the white house at midnight. everything was silent and deserted.

charlottesville is home to the university of virginia. students are much in evidence. this afternoon i was stopped by a gaggle of them who wished to know if i had voted. good for them, i thought, and explained that as one of her majesty’s subjects i was sadly ineligible to vote. they smiled, looking a little uncertain.

: c :

London, Wanderer

e n r o n : c o n t i n u e d

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[ 23:07 thursday 26 october – shipton street, london ]

19,156 people have visited the enron explorer in the two days since my last despatch. nineteen thousand people! when i got home from the airport on tuesday night and turned on my computer i discovered that during the flight cory doctorow had posted my message from vienna onto his popular weblog “boingboing” and several thousand people had already been to the site. since then it’s been mentioned on eighty other weblogs around the world along with some items in traditional media. the financial times had a sweet little piece. the wall street journal’s was somewhat drier. forbes magazine interviewed me yesterday and there’ll be an article in their next issue.

i expect the hubbub will die down over the next couple of days. but this foray has brought us a good deal of attention and appears to have given pleasure to a large number of people. for me and my friends in trampoline it’s been an exciting and slightly surreal couple of days.

: c :

Austria, In transit, London, Wanderer

e n r o n

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[ 20:28 tuesday 24 october – austrian airlines flight 457, vienna to london ]

this afternoon i left a meeting in the middle of vienna and walked into a metro station. on the platform a video screen was announcing that jeffrey skilling, former boss of enron, had been sentenced by the houston courts to twenty-four years in prison. this was a moment i’d been waiting for. i quickly found a cafe with a wireless internet connection, got a link to trampoline hq in london and started putting wheels in motion.

over the last few weeks all of us in trampoline have been getting to know mr skilling and his colleagues via two hundred thousand of enron’s internal emails dating from 1999 to 2002. the archive was released into the public domain during the fraud investigation. earlier this year we needed a large body of data to test the analytic technologies we were developing and jan hit on the idea of using the enron material.

that’s how it started. but there was something hypnotic about the contents of the archive and it gradually took on a life beyond its testbed role. it’s an extraordinary snapshot of a large corporation going about its daily life, with you the viewer able to peek in voyeuristically at every level from the highest executives to the lowest clerical workers. the same mix of the mundane and the bizarre probably exists in any large corporate email system, but normally you don’t get to see it. what strikes one is not so much the pettiness, machismo and cynicism of day to day business; but the way outside life presses in from every side. endless mails organising tickets for baseball matches, fraught messages from kenneth lay’s daughter about arrangements for her marriage, travelogues from mark skilling (jeff’s brother) in istanbul, office romances of varying degrees of sordidness (one couple organised liaisons in a car park). all life is represented.

in the end we decided to put the whole test system on our website so anyone could explore it. we knew skilling’s sentencing was coming up and this seemed likely to be the point when most people would be interested. hence my reaction to this afternoon’s news report. after getting a green light from the team in london i spent the next three hours in the cafe pinging off emails telling people about “enron explorer”. who knows whether anything will come of it. for the next couple of hours i’m cut off from the world.

for anyone interested, you’ll find all the enron emails at http://enron.trampolinesystems.com

: c :

London, Photography

f o t o s : j u n e – a u g u s t

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[ 01:14 thursday 19 october – shipton street, london ]

in the summer apple kindly gave me a new speedy laptop to replace mine, which was suffering a crazy succession of hardware failures. big smiles all round, until i discovered the new machine wasn’t compatible with my nikon film scanner. cue a massive backlog of slides. finally i lugged another computer back from the office, scanned the slides with that, transfered them onto the office network then downloaded them onto my laptop. it’s been a bit of a palaver but here are four new sets of photos.

– in cornwall with anna and adam, june
– odds and ends from london, june to august
– the last days of dexter’s shop on brick lane, july
– the green man festival, august

: c :