techno-culture

I’m a journalist and columnist with the Irish Times, primarily covering technology but I dip my hand into a lot of other areas as well. Technology and its intersection with culture, society, and politics especially interests me. I write or have written for a wide range of publications — most regularly for the Irish Times, The Guardian, and Wired News, but also have written for the (London) Sunday Times (as an occasional columnist filling in for Danny O’Brien in years past), the San Jose Mercury News, The Scientist, Red Herring, Business 2.0, Industry Standard, eCompany Now, Salon.com, New Scientist, and others. I occasionally do radio and television appearances, including (radio): in the past, a weekly tech slot on Newstalk 106-108’s The Right Hook show with George Hook, and occasional visits to Dave Fanning’s past and present RTE shows and Ryan Tubridy’s morning RTE programme; and (TV): for occasional news programmes, and the programme on Fran Rooney in RTE’s recent Raging Bulls series on entrepreneurs.

I regularly speak at conferences and events both in Ireland and abroad, as well as chair sessions, appear on panels, and moderate discussions, all the kind of things that I should put on to my professional website but forget to. If you want to talk to me about doing any of these things feel free to email me.

I  am also a board member of RTE, the Irish national broadcasting company (radio and television) — as a 2009 government appointee to the non-executive board of the RTE  Authority. The Authority will expand slightly and  become known as the RTE Board as soon as the 2008 broadcasting bill is enacted. People can also email me with their opinions and views on RTE though  there are as usual with a board,  restrictions on what individual members can say, and I usually cannot comment on specific issues and queries. Any request for comment needs to be directed at the Authority chairman, Tom Savage.

I also worked for a year for the rock band U2 as a consultant for their U2.com website — which was great fun, and of course, really, really cool.

Past curious jobs  included production and design for a printer (back before computers did all the work) and briefly, managing the English Literature department at Foyle’s Bookshop in London back when most of us were employed for only 6 month stretches there (an issue that eventually and famously became a literary cause amongst many prominent writers).

I was born in Canada and grew up in California, in and around Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Atherton — where my father worked for the Palo Alto Medical Clinic and was a clinical professor of medicine at Stanford University — then spent a couple of high school years in the central valley when my parents moved to work for the University of California, Davis. I also have lived in Santa Barbara for four years and San Francisco for about the same, but most of my adult life has been spent in Ireland, after I came here to do a one year course on Anglo Irish literature a long time ago… ! I commute regularly back and forth to the Palo Alto area during the year to see family and cover tech events.

Other odds and ends:

• I have a PhD (1996) from Trinity College in Anglo Irish Literature (Dissertation: “Gender and Metaphor in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney”). So yes, officially I am Dr Lillington, but my father has better claim to the title.
• I run CavalierTalk, the largest online community for people who love Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, which has been a great way of learning about online communities as well as some basic programming. I also have a website dedicated to a serious and widespread neurological health problem in the breed, the Syringomyelia Infosite.
• I also do breed rescue for cavaliers, and am the only formal rescue in Ireland for CKCS. You can visit my rescue website, CKCSrescue.com, for more information.
• I live in a small 100+ year old house in Dublin filled with cavalier spaniels, rescue cats, a few fish tanks, books, bicycles and computers.