Somehow it hasn't felt much like something to blog about.

Anyway. The diagnosis is becoming a little more nuanced, and some rather complicated surgery may turn out to be possible, benefits uncertain. Or it may not. The general picture remains pretty fucking dismal.

So. Tomorrow morning I'm flying off to Sydney for a few weeks. The prospect scares me. Dorigen said on parting today: "Make it all OK, Matt. Make it all OK." I would if I could.

I guess I'll probably touch base here from time to time.

Work proceeds at the rather glacial pace of any endeavour that depends on (i) the cultivation of cells and (ii) the design, manufacture and assembly of intricate machinery. Neither of these things is the ostensible purpose of my PhD, but you need the means before you can get to the end. Not that even having the means is any guarantee. And the means themselves might not be attainable. But, like, whatever.

In any case, (i) and (ii) are currently dominating my work time, especially (i). The general plan is to confine the bulk of cell culture duties to one day a week, but just now it's taking up more than three. This is partly on account of the New Year fresh start after clearing the decks before Christmas, partly because I'm experimenting with several different culture protocols, but anyway it's excessive.

Christmas, btw, lives on at home, as we have yet to bring ourselves to undec the tree. It's just too pretty, and goes so well with the flat. Perhaps tonight. Perhaps.

In case you were wondering, my most distinctive Christmas present was a ukulele, from Ian. However, I am not yet able to play Dy-na-mi-tee, Wuthering Heights or Smells Like Teen Spirit.

What else? Liked Avatar much more than I expected, doubtless because of expecting so little. It was a bit daft and a bit long and a teensy bit Roger Dean, but real prettylike. Especially Sam Worthington. The animation was fantastic, in a whole other universe from the leaden mo-cap-by-numbers mannequin ilk of Beowulf. And the 3D was mostly subtle and nice, and only occasionally fell apart when whooshing around too fast in too complex environments. Definitely worth going out to the big screen for, and how often can you say that these days?

Oh, and, it's that time again: birthdays. Happy Faustus yesterday and happy Alastair the weekend. See y'all around (but Alastair sooner, I suspect).

In any case, this new 10 year stretch has begun in mostly unremarkable fashion. True, we've got a new Doctor, after the most dragged-out regeneration ever, and can raise a glass to having seen the back of Russell T. And various people have been snowbound, prompting imbecile questions in the House about global warming. It's coming down right now and perhaps may even get a little foothold here in the chilly Smoke, though surely not for long. YMMV.

But the main thing for me is the return to the grind, embarking on the long slog of what ought to be my final year. We'll see about that, but just now I'm feeling oddly optimistic about the whole thing. I still have no data and only an outside chance of getting any, but I do have a plan of attack, a way forward, which makes a nice change. It's even possible, after some testing today, that the long-awaited (two years and counting) laser confocal additions to my SICM rig may be (very gradually) edging towards viability. That didn't seem the case at all before Christmas, and in all likelihood the hope will vanish again just like the falling snow, but for now let's cherish both.

And so: not this time.

After a decade of calmly strolling down to the river to see the pretty lights, this year we'll be hiding indoors and watching it on TV, away from the crush of screaming bodies, away from the echoes of Hillsborough and other crowd-control disasters past. Safely cocooned in our luxury flat, walled off from our fellows in cosy, glorious isolation.

Welcome to 2010: the year we make contact.

Have a good one, y'all.

And indeed was in many ways a complete success. The co-organiser henceforth known only as the weasel in a cardboard shirt couldn't resist a couple of last ditch bids for that Twat of the Year tiara, and attendance was not quite as high as registrations might have led one to hope, but only one speaker was kept at bay by the snow and the talks were of a startlingly high standard.

I actually enjoyed the day a lot. Which isn't to say I will ever do anything like it again.

Oh, and, for the record, the week also saw my first ever pub quiz, at the tail end of the Smart lab Xmas outing. My bowling may suck -- no denying -- but at least I can spot Mother Teresa in Santa drag FTW.

You know you want me on your team.

Question is, what will the effect be on our conference tomorrow? Various speakers have to travel from far flung reaches of the country. Will we be watching an empty space?

I shall report.

I was, in any case, reminded of how handy it is to have a record of what was going on back then, if not in exact detail day-to-day -- and how dull would that be? -- at least as a kind of mnemonic collage of some bits of what was on my mind.

I like having my history scrawled down in this haphazard form. I don't want to have to put much work into maintaining it, but I definitely don't want it just vaporising. This is one of the reasons I took so badly to the MT4 upgrade: I'm not willing to lose my past to the pushy whims of SixApart's developers. The previous WTs need to stay as they are. Remaking them in a new form would be cheating. (As well as far too much effort...)

Still, let's face it, that kind of haphazard scrawling isn't really happening around here much anymore. And though I don't necessarily miss it right now, I have a feeling I'll be a bit miffed in years to come about these great gaps in the fossil record.

Which doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to do much about it -- the posting frequency of those early years is certainly a thing of the past -- but perhaps I'll try to leave my future self a few clues from time to time.

And look, here's one now.

Lea Anderson's boy band The Featherstonehaughs were instrumental in the creation of my abiding interest in contemporary dance, and are now being reconstituted as a distinct company for the first time in many years. Their R&D show -- also at The Place -- combined fragments of their last proper solo outing, The Featherstonehaughs draw on the sketchbooks of Egon Schiele, which is being prepared for revival, with some preliminary feints towards a new, as yet untitled, work intended to premiere next year. The company now boasts nine (count 'em) dancers, all but one of them completely new; they're all talented and have clearly been working very hard. The material wasn't any kind of radical departure, but it was distinctive and very enjoyable and generally seemed to bode well for next year's tour. Perhaps put off by the evening's "work in progress" status, none of my usual partners in crime were willing to come along to this, but it was actually surprisingly polished and entertaining. Given what I've seen I think I'll probably manage to drag at least one or two to the finished product. For anyone else, it's definitely worth a look.

And then there was Shunt, very much up to their old tricks again with new show Money. Easily their best work since the excellent Dance Bear Dance, this was another exercise in playing games with the audience, this time inside a brilliant machine set whose whirring and clanking seemed -- these things are hazy at best -- to embody the grinding awfulness of modern capitalism. Amidst much weird Lynchian awkwardness, the show makes its viewers complicit in an ill-advised entrepreneurial enterprise that may or may not be The Future. It's true that the set pieces don't really add up to much in the end, and there's never the sort of transformative surprise that DBD furnished, but it's highly enjoyable along the way, and leaves one with some memorable images, skewed perspectives, and perhaps a balloon. Not many shows serve you up a glass of bubbly partway through, or pelt you with brightly coloured balls, and who can resist either tactic?

We now return you to your scheduled uneventfulness.

Isn't MT an absolute joy? The more I use it, the more I get a thrill at the way it meekly and rather perfectly does its job and doesn't demand anything in return. Sort of like an efficient public-sector librarian. The real antithesis of your Microsoft Bloatware all-singing all-dancing West-End production. Let's hear it for software which doesn't insult your intelligence!

I mean, can you imagine: Microsoft buy Moveable Type:

"It looks like you're writing a blog entry. Would you like some help?"

Those days are gone. I fucking hate MT4. The gaudy, self-congratulatory, overweight obstructive shitpile that is its current interface is to the old MT what Windows is to Mac -- and I mean Windows Me, not anything vaguely tolerable like XP. It is cluttered, dog slow and fucking useless.

And intrusive. It thinks it knows best. It is, of course, wrong.

MT's security has always been a bit shit. Now they've plastered all kinds of crap over the top to try to stop up the holes, and who knows? Maybe it would work -- if it would fucking work. Instead, it just makes it actually impossible for my own -- never beaten, btw -- spam avoidance measure to run at all, and instead demands my whole site be substantially restructured or forego comments.

FUCK OFF!

I'm not interested in your clunky paraphernalia of user registrations and such. And I'm not interested in your enforcement of irrelevant accessibility guidelines. And I don't want to scrub through a bunch of fucking pop-up menus just to change an entry's excerpt.

Hate. Hate. Hate.

At the moment I'm using an unholy bodge to get comments working, a sort of Frankenstein monster stitched together from parallel installs of MT3 and 4. This is clearly a very bad idea, probably leaving my whole database in some hopelessly broken state only days away from catastrophic failure, but the alternatives are even less appealing. Probably the best option is just to downgrade -- but then I don't think I'd be able properly to do what I am now, which is posting from my phone.

It's a dilemma.

In the meantime, if you haven't upgraded to MT4, my advice is: don't. It sucks.

Central London

£Competitive

This is a multi award winning leader in the development and commercial exploitation of broadband entertainment. They are world leaders in the manipulation, delivery and verification of digital televisual content and advertising.

Their team is made up of the cream of video game industry talent who, not content with life in the console industry, have traded in their years of experience for a role within a dynamic and exciting firm where their skills are enjoyed by millions of viewers each and everyday.

Based in the heart of London, they have a relaxed and yet explosive office with no dress policy and in a good location for shops, bars, clubs and restaurants.

They are looking to recruit an ambitious systems engineer. The successful candidate will have flexible working patterns, including evenings and weekend and there is also the potential for overseas travel.

Role:

- Monitor the performance of a proprietary real-time global delivery and tracking system

- Effective diagnosis of capacity, security and various third party issues across their global network

- design and development of custom tools to aid and automate the operations process

- Hardware procurement, installation and maintenance at their London and New York data centres

- Overseeing operational projects to completion

Required skills:

- A high level of technical ability and understanding of network systems, design, diagnostics and scalability

- A clear understanding of the workings of the internet

- Knowledge of Linux systems administration, in particular Debian 4 and above

- An obsession with network security and a loathing for reckless and risky approaches

Advantageous:

- Use of various programming / scripting languages in order to build tools to aid system management

- Hardware maintenance skills, specifically Intel based Linux servers

- Experience with Linux VPN and VOIP systems

- Monitoring systems eg. Nagios

- Flair for automation of tasks and notifications in order to minimise human effort and out of hours disruption

- Have a general understanding of Windows server technologies in an office environment

Interesting job spec, but the last line lets it down badly.

That's by the by. I am not available. I have left the industry. I've been telling you people -- and I mean [agency] people specifically, not just recruitment agents generally, although them too -- I've been telling you this repeatedly for *years*. Please stop sending me these things. I don't care how appropriate you might think they are. I am not interested.

I mean it. I am *so* not interested. I will *never* be interested. We will have world peace, cheap antigravity, and skiing holidays in Hell, long, long, long before I am interested. Please stop sending me these things. Take me off your database. Delete me from your email lists. Wipe me from whatever passes for your minds.

Please.

Um, anyway.

Dyed in the wool dance enfant terrible Michael Clark puts on a good show, but when it comes right down to it he hasn't had a new idea in the last two decades. This was thrown into stark relief by tonight's Barbican programme, which presented material old and new side by side in a kind of highbrow game of spot the difference.

I turned out to be not quite as au fait with the older work as I thought, needing Ian's ex Euan (pictured somewhere hereabouts if you know where to look) to point out that the first act was not merely in the Clark house style almost to the point of parody, but actually authentically ancient, first choreographed for Rambert back in the 1980s. This blast from the past served mainly to demonstrate how little Michael's product has changed in all that time.

(Euan and I had several minutes talking at cross purposes in the first interval with me saying, basically, "haven't we seen this all before?" and him agreeing. It took awhile for me to understand that he actually had seen this exact piece back when he was a teenager.)

It has to be said that some parts of tonight's show were familiar to the point of hilarity. Act 3's opening, for instance, seemed to reprise almost exactly a big chunk of Mmm with only a change of music. But since that chunk is the best thing Clark has ever done, it's hard to begrudge the recycling.

There was a lot of familiar material in last week's Mark Morris programmes as well -- and again the new work didn't represent much of a departure. But the oldies were mostly goodies, particularly V and the brilliant finale of Grand Duo, and it was all wonderfully performed by both dancers and musicians. Thankfully, there was little sign of the useless tat that's marred several recent Morris visits (some of which I've whined about here in the past). And in the spring he's bringing back his masterpiece L'Allegro -- hurrah!

To come in the next few weeks are new pieces by Shunt and (as a work in progress) The Featherstonehaughs, along with another viewing of Jasmin Vardimon's great self mash-up Yesterday. Which should help relieve the autumnal gloom and severe lack of work progress. I shall report, perhaps.

I've now added an FTP client and used that to upload an image (itself drawn on the phone), so let's see how including that pans out:

Update: yep, that seems to have worked. Only obvious loose end is the excerpt, but I can live with that. Welcome to a new era of mobile blogging. Or, you know, quite possibly not.