{"id":825,"date":"2008-07-21T09:56:42","date_gmt":"2008-07-21T08:56:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/?p=825"},"modified":"2008-07-30T15:03:35","modified_gmt":"2008-07-30T14:03:35","slug":"murphys-week-14072007","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/?p=825","title":{"rendered":"Murphy’s Week – 14\/07\/2007"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tuesday<\/strong>
\nI’m due down to London today – another flight, another early start. Still, it’s a routine of sorts – and one that I’m making as much use of as possible – lots of air-side typing (such as this, got it started early this week) and lots of user group attendance in London. I Woke up a moment or so before the alarm went off – it was rather bright outside, had I overslept, a moment of panic ensued before my bed-side partner Mr Nokia heralded the new day with his dulcet increasing ring. Routine has taught me about preparation – whilst I’ve been in this mindset for many years, I have today’s clothing lined up: from the point of waking, showering, getting dressed to being in the car can be done in 15 minutes without rushing. Of course, that 15-minute time-line is only if there’s a flight involved – for some reason it stretches the closer it is to rush hour.<\/p>\n

WordPress 2.6 was released today. I’ve been a happy WordPress user since May 2004 – it has been astoundingly stable. My only issue was spam – to solve that I use Spam Karma<\/a>. It seemed to do the job, spam just stopped. Recently however, some spam has been getting through – I suppose it’s time to consider another layer of protection, such as Akismet<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Visited a vendor over near Liverpool Street<\/a>. Successful visit, good demonstration, worked for me – possible future podcast victims! I took the tube from Marble Arch over to Liverpool Street – the Central Line. A rare site, a mother with her child in a buggy – we took our son in buggy on to the underground a couple of years ago – it’s not easy, lots of stairs and narrow angles. Being able to see the mother’s predicament, she was on her own, I stepped in to carry the buggy to the surface. Good deed for the day done, tick.<\/p>\n

Doh! I’m staying in a different hotel tonight, which means that I’ll have to pick up the whole \u00a3289.00 (+VAT) room rate myself. Geez, that’s a lot of cash. For \u00a3289.00 (+VAT) per night, you can expect laundry to be left out in the corridor, black rubbish bags also left in the corridor and Dusty Bins<\/a> with KFC wrappers as decoration. In the room, you can expect belly button fluff left in the bath. Don’t believe me? Check out the photographs below. However, \u00a3289.00 (+VAT) per night does buy me access<\/em> to BT OpenZone<\/a> – I still have to either pay the hotel for use or make use of an existing BT OpenZone account. <\/p>\n

Wednesday<\/strong>
\nI was hoping to attend Oliver Sturm’s F# session in Livingston tonight, however since I’m 400 miles south, that won’t be happening. Not all is lost, I am able to attend the VistaSquad meet up at Microsoft’s Victoria office. It’s a shame as I had been trying hard to plan my travel around Oliver’s session. Obviously didn’t try hard enough, such is the peril of frequent travel: I’ve lost count of the number of meet ups, golf range trips, evening golf trips, etc. that I’ve either missed or had to re-schedule because of 3-4 days week in London. Let’s not count the number of podcasts, photos and video content that I have to process… And it’s best not to think about the three inches of snail mail that I have to open and and process – thankfully most of my bills are sent to me via e-mail – what did we do before electronic billing?<\/p>\n

Sadly I didn’t make it to the Vista Squad meet up – I came down with a dose of ‘flu-like symptoms (shivers, sweats, aching joints). What do you do in a situation like this – away from home, with nowhere to go until a hotel room becomes available from 1600? Being ill whilst away from home sucks. <\/p>\n

On the positive side, tonight’s hotel, the Hilton Metropole<\/a>, was a mere \u00a3149 (including VAT and breakfast). A far cry from the \u00a3340 charge of the night before.<\/p>\n

Thursday<\/strong>
\nConceded and changed my 1825 flight home to the 1715 – turns out these ‘flu-like symptoms have been doing the rounds in the office. Missed the 1525 Heathrow Express to LHR so had to make do with the 1540…<\/p>\n

Sunday<\/strong>
\nTried hard to watch as much of The Open<\/a> as I could. Wife invited the mother-in-law up to the house to “clean”. Even with Sky+, the noise and constant visible obstructions made watching the golf a trying process. Why today? Who knows? I’m sure that in some countries it may be considered grounds for divorce – again, who knows?<\/p>\n

This week<\/strong>
\nListened to<\/em>
\n107 Digital Photography Explained (for Geeks) with Aaron Hockley <\/a>
\n118 Lean Software Development with Tom and Mary Poppendieck<\/a>
\n84 Parallel Programming with .NET<\/a><\/p>\n

Interesting links<\/em>
\nWordPress 2.6<\/a>
\nKnowing what’s on your phone–and on those of your employees<\/a><\/p>\n

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Tuesday I’m due down to London today – another flight, another early start. Still, it’s a routine of sorts – and one that I’m making as much use of as possible – lots of air-side typing (such as this, got it started early this week) and lots of user group attendance in London. I Woke … Continue reading Murphy’s Week – 14\/07\/2007<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-murphys-week"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}