meish dot org: life, unfolding

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This is a blog by Meg Pickard. YMMV.
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All photos » On the tube; they cannot let go of each other on reflection  Sofa sentry Keep left Playing piano in the rain That's quite the sky ...and be disappointed that the view doesn't match this advert? What other kinds of beastly behaviour do those MPs get up to when we're not looking? What the Palace of Westminster looks like from the inside Hello nice cat Woah, Betty (Boothroyd) 

 

About

Brief Bio

Self-portrait, Macy's liftHello. I’m Meg Pickard, and this is my site. There’s more info about this site and its history, below, but first, here’s a bit about me.

Meg is my real name. It’s not short for Megan, before you ask.

I originally trained in Social Anthropology, conducting ethnographic research into cultural identity with communities first in Bolivia and subsequently online, and eventually succumbed to the Internet industry’s bright lights over a decade ago.

I currently work at Guardian News & Media where I’m Head of Communities and User Experience, responsible for developing and managing existing and new social web strategy and experiences for guardian.co.uk.

I have also worked in magazine publishing, in a cybercafe running internet training courses and during holidays at university, I worked as a cook in a Scottish youth hostel. If required (and given enough onions and a big enough pot), I can make soup for 70 (though this doesn’t come in particularly handy these days, unfortunately).

I spend a lot of time taking photographs, drinking tea, creatively tinkering with things (and ideas, code…), having chilly walks, and exploring places by foot and vicariously, via map. If I had more time, I’d do more of the same.

I’m in my thirties. My birthday is on March 12. I’m a Pisces, but I think astrology is bollocks. My Amazon wishlist is here, and I like presents.

Distributed Me

Having been online for fun since 1993 and for work since 1996, I’m all over the place. The web, that is.

You can find me:

…and doubtless all sorts of other places.

Site History

I’ve been online since 1993, and I’ve had a site of some description since 1996. This is the latest incarnation. I started blogging in January 2000, painstakingly hand coding each new entry and uploading to my ISP’s filespace via FTP, over a wonky modem. I happily switched to Blogger and my own domain (now long-departed - notsosoft.com) a couple of months later.

In 2003, I moved everything to meish.org. What does meish mean? This site is a digital approximation of self. It’s a lot like me, and contains lots of bits of me, but it isn’t actually me. If you read or see anything here and think that you know exactly who I am based on that, then you’re sadly wrong. It’s not me. It’s me(ish).

Software

This site is created and edited using Wordpress, which I embraced wholeheartedly after years of wrangling with notepad, Homesite 4.5, html, php, perl, jibberish, Movable Type, and before that Blogger. Old skool.

Bits of it are powered by Flickr, tumblr, del.icio.us and last.fm. I’m generally powered by vegemite on toast and Yorkshire tea.

Any graphics are cooked up or faffed with using Photoshop, and photos are organised online using the ever-excellent Flickr and offline via an increasingly wheezing iPhoto database Adobe Lightroom. You can see more of my photos here. You can buy prints of some of them here.

In case you’re curious, you can keep up with what I’ve been listening to recently via my last.fm profile, though don’t pay too much attention to the charts of my “favourite” music - since 99% of the time I listen to mp3s with itunes in shuffle mode, it tends to be more representative of what the software likes, than me.

I browse the web using Mozilla (Firefox), and I aggregate all my mail from various domains in Gmail. This site is hosted with pair networks, who have always been truly excellent, even when I’ve exploded the server on Valentine’s Day (oops, sorry), as have my ISP, Zen, who continue to provide a flawless ADSL service.

Hardware

I’m mainly a Mac, both at home and at work: iMacs and MacBooks are my main consumption and creation tools. However, I’m happy with both Macs and PCs - they each do different things well. My netbook of choice is an MSI-WIND device, which runs XP (though since I use it 97.8% for web browsing, it’s much more about the form factor).

My Photos are taken mostly with a Nikon D80 DSLR, though I also carry around a Canon IXUS 750 compact digital camera pretty much everywhere I go. Some older pictures were taken using a Nikon D50, Canon IXUS 400/300, Kodak DC280 Digital, a Canon EF-M SLR or Canon EOS 1000F SLR, or an Olympus 100M 35mm. I also have a variety of toy cameras which I use irregularly, though getting film developed is a) a pain and b) increasingly difficult. Where from prints, photos were scanned using a trusty Agfa Snapscan Touch. I tend to order prints through the excellent Photobox service. They also do my photogallery fulfillment. I make annual photo books using Blurb.

I also take a lot of photos with my cameraphone: currently an Apple iPhone.

Where

Pickle hidingAlthough I’ve lived in Nigeria, British Columbia, southern Spain, Bolivia, Scotland (west and east coasts) and the north-west of England, these days home is in SW London, UK, where I live with my husband Paul and a small brown cat called Pickle.

We are within 200ft of the river Thames, which is a good place to be, unless it floods, when it won’t be at all. We live under the flight path into Heathrow (but that’s not saying much: most of West London could say the same), at the point where the wheels come down on the approach to land. I like thinking that as they hurtle overhead, people on board are just a few minutes from homecomings, reunions and holidays.

We have a wireless home network, many, many gadgets and the comfiest bed in the world, which we got from the Big Table furniture Co-op in West London. If it ever breaks (and as it’s guaranteed for 20 years, I doubt that it will) wherever I am living at the time, I will hurtle back to London to get a replacement. Yes, it’s that good.

I spend a lot of time on the west coast of Scotland, and the North-East of England, and not nearly enough time swimming in warm seas. Living in London, I also spend a lot of time on, or waiting for public transport.

Anything else you need to know? Please feel free to ask.

By way of explanation...

This is an individual post, which may not be very recent. For the latest stuff on meish dot org, please visit the main page.

By the way, I'm female. It doesn't have much impact on what I write about, or how I write, but I thought I'd point it out because so many people who link to this site seem to assume I'm male.

The clue's in the name: Meg. Like all those other female Megs.

Categories

What's all this, then?

This is a personal site, created and curated continuously since early 2000 by Meg Pickard, a creative geek, passionate photographer, anthropologist and web experience /community /social media specialist, who works for The Guardian & lives in London, UK.
 
The site includes a blog - a personal and evolving collection of links, opinions, thoughts, ideas, anecdotes and musings - as well as a variety of other projects. It is also a place to aggregate some of the author's distributed web activity, like photos, links and music.
 
More info about this site and its author.

Important note #1

This is a personal site. The contents and opinions contained within don't necessarily reflect those of my employer, family, or cat. They think for themselves (though mostly about tuna, in at least one case), and so do I.

Important note #2

Since the overwhelming majority of content on this site is historical, it should be regarded in light of the context in which it was originally published, and not as indicative or revealing of current perspectives, preferences or experience.

Important note #3

While I work and spend a lot of time thinking and talking about social media, participatory technologies and community development strategies, the vast majority of content on this site is not about that.

This personal site isn't about anything, except the perpetual unfolding of one person's experience, and the perspectives, observations and opinions that involves and inspires.