The intriguing thing about weeknotes (or monthnotes, I suppose, in my case) is that when you are inside them, all the weeks feel the same.

August has felt like I’m hunkered down, day after day, doing the same sort of things: writing, thinking, reading, deliberating, deciding. Yet zoom out and you realise there’s a lot of variation in there. There’s a real topography to the month, with ups and downs and slow days and fast.

Anyway, taking a Hubble-like approach, this month has actually been significant. My work with GigaOM continues to warm up, and after Steve Jobs stepped I wrote A length piece for the Times about my bizarre encounter with him.

As I said elsewhere, most coverage of his move has been either hagiography or obituary - running under the simple assumptions that (a) he is a great man who (b) doesn’t have long left. Life (and death) is more complex than that.

After a few months of relative silence on the freelance front, that story marked a noisy return to action. I’d been drifting a little. Perhaps a little too much. But hopefully this piece, and two other abortive moments - a commission that got killed and a TV interview that was knocked on the head - will help get my head back in that game.

Meanwhile: some serious progress made on Project Alika. It’s not quite there yet, but it’s turning into a reality. And being able to play with it makes a real difference. Now, hopefully, it’s a case of making it really sing.

Also, the previous week we took a trip up to Derbyshire for Laptops and Looms - and there’s more to come on that front, I promise - and though I managed an (ahem) creditable performance during the post-event cricket match, I can only imagine that this moment is the reason I am now enjoying some lovely prescription drugs to fix the pain in my back.

(photo by Toby Barnes)