About
I’m Emmet Connolly, and this is my weblog. I’ve worked as a web developer at Google since 2006, where I build things for the web and try to figure out if I’m a designer or an engineer.
I’m an Irishman living in Zurich, Switzerland with my girlfriend Paula, though our hearts will always partly remain in Galway. I studied an Arts degree in NUI Galway (I.T. and Sociology & Politics), and a Masters in Digital Art in the University of Plymouth. I’m twenty-nine years old, six foot two inches tall.
I write here quite sporadically, mostly about art, design, culture, ideas, books, the web — the usual blog stuff. Sometimes I wish I had the ability to write better or the tenacity to write more often, but that’s how it goes. There are little bits of me scattered all over the web: on Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, Google Reader, Google Books, Tumblr, Vimeo, GitHub.
My latest thing is trying to be healthy; last year I completed my first triathlon and I did a half marathon this year. I consider myself a moderate liberal and secular humanist, but I’m wary of dogmatism. I love dogs. If I wasn’t doing what I’m doing today, I think I’d like to be a filmmaker. I have a beard and don’t eat red meat. I used to play music, but now I just listen to it.
I believe that we live in a potentially brief window of history where the opportunity to see the world is a real possibility for ordinary people. Here are the cities I’ve been to since January 2006:
- 2010: Galway, Dublin, Zürich, Amsterdam, Berlin, Como, London, Belfast, Lisbon.
- 2009: Dublin, London, Galway, Valetta, Belfast, Edinburgh, Barcelona, Zürich, Basel, Lausanne.
- 2008: Aukland, Seoul, Dublin, Cork, Galway, Innsbruck, San Francisco, London, Liverpool, Amsterdam.
- 2007: Dublin, Turin, San Francisco, Galway, Agadir, Essaouira, Marrakesh, Newcastle, Seville, Belfast, Christchurch, Queenstown.
- 2006: Galway, Dublin, Berlin, London, Plymouth, Bristol, Manchester, Vienna.
Everyone should have a project, a once friend told me, and she was right. I’ve tinkered on a bunch of random personal things over the years:
- TTTTUMBLWAX, a collection of images.
- Pictures of Moving Pictures, a collection of films stills. I haven’t really figured out the what or why of this yet.
- Twitter Pedometer, for tracking your runs with Twitter and a wristwatch.
- Paula’s website, a gallery of her fine art.
- Adpative Spaces my Masters project and thesis.
- theirwork.org a community mapping project done in collaboration with my friend Dom.
- playitfuckingloud.com, my contribution to the world of single serving sites.
- Travel, a short 8mm film I made.
- The Prophet, a blog that republished the twenty-eight chapters of Kahlil Gibran’s book during the month of February.
- Walk/Shuffle, an sound and walking art thing.
- Re-News, a live remix of world news.
I uploaded my first website to Geocities on March 17th 1996, which makes me quite old in internet years. It had scans of my drawings and a repeating starfield background. This website started around 2001 as a design portfolio, and later I added the blog part. In the beginning it ran on a homemade ASP engine, and at some stage I transferred everything over to Wordpress. I use a Mac and sometimes Ubuntu. I design in Photoshop and write code in TextMate. All content here is published under a Creative Commons license. These are my views, not those of my employer.
The word “thoughtwax” doesn’t mean anything at all, but I hope it solidifies my credentials as someone who has been putting things on the internet since it was fashionable to do so under a vaguely mysterious codename.
You can email me at emmetc@thoughtwax.com.