We’re just back from a Caribbean vacation — with a couple of interesting souvenirs in tow. Under normal circumstances I’d feel a twinge of regret about turning around a day later and heading out again. But I’m not really in the mood to build an ark, which after 40 days of rain is about to become the new summer sport here in New England. And while the wet isn’t letting up yet here, the weather looks lovely in Old England. So it’s actually a great time to head off to London for a Tuesday visit and talk at Nature Publishing, panels and a talk at the Activate conference on Wednesday, and another talk at the Guardian on Thursday. That one is open to the guests — for the first time, I gather. The writeup also notes:

Many people will then head down to the Rotunda bar for drinks on the canal waterfront after the talk at about 6.

In all these venues I’ll be expanding on the themes I’ve written about here lately: collaborative curation, computational thinking for everyone, community calendars as a motivating case study, and Azure as platform for doing stuff in the cloud.

By the time I get home for July 4, it ought to be dry here. If not, I’ll break out my cubit-calibrated tape measure and get to work on that ark.