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A trip up to Nottingham to see Simon who is stuck on his own while Fiona is on holiday in Australia. As ever it was hugely hard work, you know the usual plan of sleeping in late, having breakfast, read the paper, have lunch, watch football, have dinner, play pool all punctuated with appropriately spaced drinks.

On the pool theme, I think Simon and I proved our superiority over Matt and Judith, obviously we had to let them win (6-2) but overall it was undoubtedly a moral victory for us and no amount of comments here to the contrary are likely to persuade you, my loyal reader, otherwise. Are they?

And so, into the Christmas party season. The first one being tomorrow evening. I don’t think it will be a big one but you can never tell with these things.

I can sympathise with this. A good approach to the problem I think.

It appears that my domain 11tmr.com has been hijacked. I am doing my best to get the squatters out but in the meantime you have obviously found me! The best url to use is : http://www.fclonline.com/fclonline/11tmr.nsf.

A bad week all round is finally over. Things went from having a cold at the start of the week to, yesterday, having my PC die on me which meant a whole day of trying to persuade our prima dona support team that they really did want to rebuild it in less than a week. The key is to start installing it yourself and then they get all huffy, take the box off your desk and flounce off to rebuild it.

To top things off there was a suicide on the railways last night so it took me four hours to get home.

The positives now are that all of the work we have been doing has gone into test, I just have to do a couple of other things on Monday and Tuesday and things should (hopefully) quiten down for a few days.

Now to catch up on all the other work that I’ve ignored over the last few weeks. I am very much looking forward to the Christmas lull.

Things have been quiet here recently for which my apologies. A combination of a lot of work, a cold and a total lack of inspiration have contributed in equal measures.

Winter has kicked in in a big way over the last few days and I have managed to pick a cold which has left me feeling less than overflowing with life. It feels like it’s going to be one of those long, drawn out affairs which never completely takes over but which is always nagging in the background. Most annoying of all it meant that I wasn’t on great form for a visit by Simon and Fiona at the weekend and had to duck out of a lunch I had been looking forward to for ages yesterday. Apologies all round for that.

Work-wise things are going to peak later this week (hopefully) and then tail down to for a few weeks while testing is happening with a release just before Christmas which should be good fun as we are breaking all sorts of rules by doing it so late in the year.

On a completely different note there is a really interesting and disturbing tale here. Russell Beattie writes a good blog but has had the misfortune to become the target of an online stalker. You can shrug off the online abuse but when the guy starts calling your house it would start to get a little worrying. I hope by bringing it out into the open that a swift resolution is brought about for Russell and his family.

I will continue to be a bit slack here over the next week or so but will get back to it for Christmas and then Lotusphere. I promise… maybe…

It seems that the hope of a fully integrated media centre (i.e. PC, TV, Video recorder, stereo system etc) is getting a little closer with the Elonex Lumina. It’s very cool, but unfortunately comes a few months too late as I bought an LCD TV earlier in the year and even I can’t justify upgrading so soon.

I am sure this is probably old hat to a lot of Mac users but I have just discovered the coolest thing ever…

My K700i mobile phone can connect to my powerbook and control it remotely using bluetooth straight out of the box. Even cooler than that you can go to Jon Assalling and download a little utility for your phone to allow you to control iTunes (or a load of other applications) using your mobile phone keypad.

In conjunction with my Airport Express it means that I have a full, end to end living room stereo system that has access to my entire music collection without having to go near a CD.

A night out in London yesterday and a stay in a local hotel have left me with a very sore head this morning. It was a good evening but now I have to try and make myself useful today as there is a tonne of work on at the moment.

Tesco have launched a music download site to try and compete with iTMS. The issue with all of the competitors to iTMS seems to be that they can’t support the Apple encoding format (AAC) so are left with the Microsoft WMA format which the iPod doesn’t support.

It means that they are all left fighting over the scraps of the portable digital music market until there is a realistic competitor to the iPod and for that reason they are not going to work.

It will be interesting over the next year or so to see who caves in first – will Apple support WMA, will Apple open up the AAC format for other manufacturers to use it or will there be some compromise third way? Until there is some clarity about the way forward I think there are going to be some fairly massive casualties in the online music market place.

I’ve posted this before but reading it again, it’s more relevant than ever:

“Why of course the people don’t want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”

Herman Goering – 18th April 1946