Chris and Melanie finally got hitched after 17 years. I don’t know what weather god they worshipped but it paid off, the day was glorious sunshine. Somehow our table managed to acquire lots of extra bottles of wine, and then as the evening progressed, more and more half finished bottles were abducted. It was a grand day, I wish all weddings were like that.

Saw Dylan Moran at Cambridge Corn Exchange, has anyone else noticed their eyebrows turning into wiry radio receivers? Made me chuckle.

How does a cat end up with a patella (knee cap) that keeps popping out? No-one knows and he certainly isn’t telling me. But he’s paying the price now after a lengthy operation and two days in cat hospital. The somewhat overexcited vet phoned me after the op to say he’d taken lots of photos and was hoping to present the case as he’d never seen anything like it. Would I like to see the photos? Er no. But please tell me how my cat is doing….. Went to visit him and he’s doing well - extremely shaved but still with a fluffy tail. The blue spray on his bum was particularly funny. The next four weeks living in a cage is not going to be fun. Off to pick him up soon…..

I’ve been reading a few academic papers, websites and articles lately. Primarily to get some background for a new team I’ve joined at work.

The topics I’ve been looking at are mostly usability, HCI and ethnography related. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at academic writing, but certainly readability and clarity would not be a strong point (amusing in a paper extolling the virtues of usability).

Why is this always explained away as academic speak? Is it more a case of grant maintenance through obfuscation? It’s a struggle to read something that can at best be described as a bad case of ‘a thesaurus threw up on my homework sir’.

A lot of people seem to be putting a lot of time and effort into trying to represent emotions digitally. I have a suspicion they may be, at least partially, wasting their time. Even when systems are released that purport to allow some subset of emotions to be mimicked the end result is frequently that the system is used and interpreted by its human users in a completely different way (for example the Miro system installed in an office to convey the emotional climate).

Like it or not, I believe the future lies in moving away from trying to digitise emotions and instead in providing systems where people can freely experience their own emotions. After all how do you define emotions? There are huge differences and interpretations across cultures.

Successful applications and tools allow us to express and understand our own emotions without needing an internal representation of those emotions. We no longer need to constrain our emotions to the limited definitions provided but instead use technology to participate in society.