I never really marketed it much but I wrote a book called ‘Explanating’ a couple of years ago. I even decided to self-publish¹ and organised ISBNs and everything.

The book is an "illustrated collection of completely plausible but entirely untrue explanations of everyday phenomena". Basically, it's lots of the kinds of things you might make up to explain something to a kid if you really have no idea. Hence the name ‘Explanating’ – it's kinda like explaining but not quite right. It also has a rather nice cheesecake recipe in the appendix. I put it on Lulu and Amazon and didn't really do anything else with it. I did try to get it in the iBookstore but that seems to be a horribly complicated process if you aren't based in the US.

Now available for the low, low price of...

Rather than have the book sit around for another few years not doing anything useful, I've decided to try something new. You can now download the book for free from explanating.com in your ebook format of choice (PDF, ePub, Mobi). You don't have to pay anything.

Unless you want to.

If you read it and decide you like it, you can come back to the site any time and buy it from Lulu or Amazon for £1.71 (or the equivalent in USD or EUR or wherever you happen to be). Or not, you could like it and keep it and not pay anything. It's entirely up to you. And your conscience :D.

Download, read, buy

I have no idea if anyone will actually take me up on this offer but I hope some people do, at least, enjoy the book. If nothing else, make the cheesecake, it's delicious.

And that URL once more

explanating.com

When I was a young game designer wannabe living in St Andrews, I interviewed with a company in Manchester. For years, this was my biggest travel time:interview time ratio in that I got up shortly before 6, took a taxi, train and different train to get there by 1, had a 15 minute interview and then took two trains and a bus to get home by 11pm 1.

Now, the ratio is still unbeaten (31:1) but I have now definitely overtaken the basic numbers. I've recently travelled to Berlin twice to interview with Nokia's Ovi offices. I have since come to the conclusion that there is some mysterious force at work who really doesn't like me travelling through Schiphol. Note: I don't mean an omniscient being, I mean some actual arch enemy.

Trip one

Leaving on a Tuesday afternoon, I jumped on a plane at Edinburgh Airport to Amsterdam Schiphol then changed onto a plane to Berlin Tegel. I eventually arrived at my hotel in Berlin around 11pm. After checking in, hanging up my interview shirt and scrubbing my face to get rid of the sheen of fellow air passengers, it was after midnight. Not the best prep for a full day of interviews, to be honest. The next morning, I got up, tried to partake of a German breakfast of rye bread and wurst, settled for a croissant and coffee and headed out into the -10°C weather. I won't go into the details of the interview process but by the end of the day, I'd been interviewed by 8 different people, drunk two pots of coffee myself and been told that I don't look particularly German. Not being German, I thought this statement was accurate.

I left the office, caught a taxi back to the airport and relaxed safe in the knowledge that I'd be back in Edinburgh in a few hours. An incorrect assumption, it would seem.

I arrived in plenty time to double-check the flights were all okay. There was even a flight to Schiphol before mine that some passengers were offered the chance to catch. I was relaxed, it was fine, I wasn't in a hurry, I'll catch the next one. Several hours later, I regretted that decision. The second flight was held in Schiphol before coming to Tegel due to broken air conditioning. By the time it had landed, turned round and let us board, I should have already been half way to Edinburgh and had missed the last connection. Boo.

One over night in a hotel later, I finally made it back to Edinburgh at 8am. Approximately 40 hours after I left. About 5.7:1.

Trip two

When it came to my second round of face-to-face interviews, I wasn't lucky enough to get an overnight stay, unfortunately. I had to get to Berlin and back in a day. The 2.45am start would have been bad enough under any circumstances but when you have a teething 5-month old and have generally been running on empty for the best part of 2 months, it very nearly killed me. Still...

Edinburgh to Schiphol � fine; Schiphol to Tegel � also fine. I arrived at the office only 3 minutes late for my 12 o�clock interview which isn't too bad after travelling about 800miles. Three hours of geek talk later, I'm back in the taxi on the way to Tegel, snapping photos out the taxi windows just to prove I was there. This time there's no delay at Tegel and I land in Amsterdam with about 2 hours to make it to my gate. I'm not exactly a relaxed traveller so I'm not the kind who can go via the airport pub, have a sit-down meal and casually meander to the gate in time to board. I'm more inclined to high-speed sprints and panicked departure board-scanning just to make sure I get to the gate several hours early so I can sit and do nothing. That's exactly what I did. I got to the gate in plenty of time to see the �Flight delayed� ticker come up. Plenty of time to watch the �Estimated Departure� go from 21:00 to 22:00 to 23:00 to 00:00. It was when it flashed �00:30� it finally decided to stop.

I made it back to Edinburgh around 1am and got back to my house around 2.30am. Just in time to pick up Oskar as another night of painful teething screams started off, in fact. 7:1, this time.

So, after almost 2 years at National Museums Scotland, I'm moving on. And not just me, Jenni's coming too (and Oskar, of course).

After delivering a kick-ass, ground-breaking website and implementing some cool shiny stuff, I feel confident I can move on having made a bit of a difference. I initially took the job for two main reasons:

1. To bring advanced web-awesome to the cultural sector
2. To prove my technical ability to myself at an international level

I'm happy I've done that. The National Museums Scotland site looks a lot nicer above and below the surface than it did when I and the rest of the web team arrived in 2009. Hopefully the systems and techniques I've put in place will ensure it stays at the front edge of the culture sector in terms of well-considered use of technology. The rest of the web team are still there, of course, and will continue to make cool stuff. I'll be satisfying my urge to build cool cultural stuff by providing the tech behind the various Museum 140 projects.

The second reason is just as important. Working on a large national organisation website made me triple-check everything I wrote but my desire to build ‘Cool Stuff’ meant that I couldn't play it too safe. Favourable reviews from .NET magazine and ReadWriteWeb suggest that we got the balance right.

Personal projects

In the last 12 months, I've also had a fair amount of success with my various personal tech projects – 8bitalpha, harmonious, The Elementals, Whithr, Shelvi.st as well as being a featured case study on phonegap.com. All of which have served to remind me I like the challenge of doing something beyond what I can already do.

Where now, then?

Now is the right time to step up from the top half of the First Division to somewhere in the middle of the Premier League (yeah, that's right, sport analogies). I'm going to be starting in July as Senior CSS Developer at Nokia in Berlin. I'll be working on the desktop interface for the services that used to be ovi.com (until a couple of weeks ago) building interface frameworks and UI components.

Nokia have been going through a bunch of changes recently so I'm excited to be joining them now when there's a great opportunity to make a significant difference on a big scale.

I've only been to Berlin twice (an upcoming blog post will give more details about that) and, despite being German, Jenni's never been so it'll be an interesting move. Berlin does, however, have over 170 museums so if there's anywhere Jenni can perform her particular brand of museum-wizardry, it'll be there. We've asked Oskar's opinion but he's not saying much. He's mostly drooling.

Über-curricular activities

I'm also hoping to give more conference talks and presentations (like yesterday's) as well as write more educational articles for this blog and others. I've got a few written that I've not had the chance to present anywhere so I might put them here at some point.

If you have any questions, throw a tweet in my direction.