phew!: "Tomorrow I'm going to pick up the joint of wild boar ready for marianading. I will do this for approx 48 hours with red wine, ginger, chilli, bay leaves, garlic and onion and will also use this mix as a baste whilst I slow roast it on Monday. I'm then going to make the Biscuit Tortoni for the dessert, a frozen mixture of sherry, cream and biscuit that was my favourite for a number of years."

Wow. It's going to be a good Christmas I think. See you in 2006, if I survive this culinary onslaught :)

MMS taking off? "During the third quarter of 2006, an astonishing 88 million picture messages (MMS) were sent throughout the UK'saverage, almost 1 million per day throughout July, August and September. October's total was the highest yet, with 30 million picture messages sent across the networks."

Paul from M:Metrics made a couple of really interesting observations at the last Mobile Monday: that mobile photography gets much more compelling once camera quality passes the 1 megapixel threshold, and that in many areas, mobile data usage is growing - just slowly. I don't personally expect MMS to reach anywhere near the level of SMS traffic - and why should it? It's not a straight substitute for text messaging, it's more like gift-giving than conversation in my experience.

But with WAP showing decent usage, 3G uptake growing and MMS now seeming to go beyond non-trivial levels, it looks like this mobile data thing might actually be going somewhere :) Kudos for the Mobile Data Association for tracking this stuff over the years (even if they have quietly stopped showing the graph indicating that WAP traffic has stalled since mid-2005, and replaced it with this one showing unique users).

We're sponsoring the first Brighton Geek Girl Dinner: "an opportunity to meet up and socialise with interesting people over dinner. "

It's not just for geeks and you don't have to be a girl, but I can confirm the existence of the dinner ;)

I came across this lovely presentation from Yilbu after Stephanie commented here. Great stuff, beautifully presented: "Creating ‘Casual’ Games, Content and Applications for the (Mobile) Long Tail"

And on the subject of mobile play, Mr Jones has an article in the latest Receiver mag: "...in play we explore, try new things and push our limits more than in any other state. The practice of experience design often tries to prescribe set paths for the end-user of the device, rather than allow the frustrations of a free exploration of the system. What would it mean to create truly playful space in our systems, services and devices?"

At Aikido last night, Tom came out with a great Rumi quote which I've spent much of this morning trying to remember: "There is a field beyond right and wrong. I'll meet you there."