Once I arrived at Kings Cross yesterday afternoon I took the Tube to London Bridge and had a touristy walk back along the Thames and on to the Regent Street Apple Store to pick up a new power adapter. Maybe I left my old one behind on purpose to give me an excuse to go and wander around and look at Shiny Apple goodness.
I used to hate London with a passion – kind of how Homer Simpson feels about New York. Maybe I’m mellowing in my old age or I just felt comfortable knowing where I was thanks to the iPhone’s Locate Me feature and Google Maps. Either way, I actually had quite a pleasant day.
Considering where I was today I had a bitch of a time getting any WiFi access. I was at Earls Court at Internet World 2008 which is expecting 18,000 visitors over three days. I certainly wasn’t expecting to be greeted by a host of attractive girls in rubber nurses outfits but I’m not complaining
I started off with the keynote presentation of the Future of the Social Web with Travis Katz which was basically a 30 minute MySpace spiel. There were a few seminars on content management systems which I took in over the afternoon that proved to be more interesting and I finished off the day at the Dangers of the Proprietary Web with the co-founder of Mozilla Europe, Tristan Nitot.
I wandered in between the 300 exhibitors in the gaps in the seminars where a metric ass-load of freebies were up for grabs but I controlled myself as I don’t really need to cart more crap around the World than is absolutely necessary.
I’ve just boarded the train that will take me on the first leg of my journey and have realised that I neglected to include my laptop power brick when finishing off my packing this morning.
I stopped off at Waterstones to pick up some books to read while I’m away and then passed the O2 Memory Project to record the start of my trip. I strolled through the East end of Princes Street Gardens, past the Scott Monument, pausing to take a look back at the National Galleries, Edinburgh Castle and the beautiful architecture of The Scotsman and Balmoral Hotels, the Edinburgh HQ of Halifax Bank of Scotland and made my way down to Waverley station.
Well that’s it. I depart tomorrow morning on my three month trip around the World and I just “worked” my last day. Actually, it was more like a half-day as I spent this morning with assorted other geeks at the Guardian tech podcast’s coffee morning in Home House. Thanks in part to the French rapping and American accent I didn’t realise that Yann Seznec was Edinburgh-based but he was in attendance and I got talking to him about his brilliant Wii Loop Machine that I saw online by chance the other day.
God forbid I actually ever leave Edinburgh for good as the leaving parties (yes, plural) for what is essentially just an extended holiday just about broke me. No longer is youthful vigour on my side: back-to-back nights out last weekend left me a little emotional, being over-tired and over-served as I was. A big thank you to my friends for giving me such a great send-off and my employers for letting me go.
I’m all Web 2.0′d up so as well as reading this here blog you’ll be able to keep up with:
I’ve decided that I’m too old for a rucksack, not old enough for a suitcase, I don’t have a steamer trunk so my large wheeled holdall is the bag for the job. I guess I’d better get packing!
The notebook of choice in the geek community is undoubtedly the Moleskine – favoured by Hemingway, Matisse and Van Gogh. Instead of fishing around in your bag for a pen when inspiration hits you, somehow tethering your pen to your notebook keeps it ready for use anytime. You can either shell out for a BookSling or buy a flat pen. However, I’ve come up with a free alternative that is compatible with most pens:
Recently there was some amount of ill feeling directed toward Apple after they started installing their Safari Internet browser with their iTunes software update. (I also just noticed that “up to date” is no longer hyphenated in OS X 10.5 Leopard Software Update but that’s a discussion for another day.)
While this in itself is bad enough behaviour for any software company, it is not the main annoyance I have with their practices. I like to keep things organised how I like them. Like my “Start Menu” for instance.
Every single frickin’ time that I update iTunes (and Quicktime) Apple deems it acceptable for them to place a couple of shortcuts in my Start Menu, Quick Launch area and on my Desktop which I then have to delete.
Update 18/04/08: It would seem that Apple have listened to the unrest in the community.
