Monday & Tuesday
Bad back, stayed at home. Perhaps I rode the roller-coasters too much in Blackpool last week?

Wednesday
Flew down to London. My son is *still* thinking “home” is London – must fix this soon as he is at an impressionable age. I learn that I have two vendor meetings lined up for Thursday – this is both good and bad. Good insofar as it will fix some problems. Bad such that it would negate some of the work I’ve been doing over the past few months.

Thursday
Tried to arrange a meet-up with @irascian. The meet-up would have to be early in the evening as there is some ‘phone being launched tomorrow – Ian wants one…as do plenty of other folks on Twitter.

The vendor meetings went well. Both products look impressive with differing feature sets and price tags. Whichever product we choose to adopt will mean that our current vendor’s product will cease to be and my work of the last three months will pretty much be wasted. Granted the current vendor’s product is dated, clunky and has a less than productive user interface.

Left Paddington to went over to our Holborn office to find a test server had been switched off. A test server that’s found itself running a production app…go figure. Walked back to Foyles and Borders -both bookstores – in search of Paddington Bear books for my son (got this suitcase of books for half price – so treated myself to a copy of La Repubblica [wikipedia definition]

Beer and dinner had been arranged for a venue near Leicester Square. Despite being in the right part of town, I decided to go back to the hotel in order to drop off the laptop. I then made my way back into Leicester Square to meet up at the Salisbury pub. Dinner was next door at St Martin’s Spice.

Friday
I chose to use myOpenID as my primary OpenID and InfoCard provider – I needed it to register for the ALT.NET conference held on 12 September (clashes with SQL Bits and NRW08, choices choices)

@irascian accidentally calls, gave me a chance to find out how he got on getting his hands on that 3G iPhone thing – he did get one but it seems that O2’s activation and contracts site went down. So a lot of folks bought a device that will be nothing more than a brick for a few days. Too bad. Although I see Ian managed to get his activated at 2038 on Friday!

The flight home was late, something my colleague has noted is a fairly regular problem for the 1825 LHR T5 to Edinburgh service. Annoyingly, I get on board the ‘plane only to realise that I didn’t copy Hanselminutes 119 with Ken Schwaber on Scrum. C’est la vie – still I did manage to download enough to keep my ears busy on the short one-hour flight. I also had plenty of reading material in the form of Business Week and The New Statesman.

I found myself writing the bulk of this blog post on my Palm Treo 750 – it has a great keyboard, runs Windows Mobile 6 and has a great screen.

This week
Listened to – podcasts
104 Dave Laribee on ALT.NET

Wrote – blog posts
Where are you most productive?

Interesting links
Text-2-Go – cut text from web pages to be converted to MP3 format – great for listening to content you would normally have found yourself reading.

Technorati Tags: ALT.NET, David Laribee, Hanselminutes, Ken Schwaber, La Repubblica, NRW08, Paddington Bear, Scott Hanselman, Scrum, SQLBITS, Text2Go