None

A few of us went for some beers after work last night (it was meant to be more but the dedication to the cause here is sometimes lacking). So we put the world to rights, hatched plans for world domination… all the usual stuff and finished with a pizza. Advancing years were proved when all of us chose to have soft drinks with the food, I would have laughed at myself a few years ago for doing that but I still feel a little rough this morning and am glad that I stopped when I did.

An article on the BBC News website states that: Overall, the study found that 51.5% of babies born to couples living together at the time of conception were boys, compared to 49.9% among parents who were not.

A couple of issues with this:

As things currently stand, MS Office has total control over the word processing / spreadsheet / presentation market. There are a few little minows nibbling at Microsoft’s feet but until now there has not been a compelling argument to switch.

However, the advent of the open source office suites (Open Office being the most well known) is beginning to gather some momentum. And now there is another player entering the market.

NeoOffice is an off-shoot of the OpenOffice effort aimed at moving to a pure Java solution for OS X. While only a prototype at the moment I think it is another demonstration that the productivity suite market is going to fragment over the coming years. Already, I can see little reason for the home user to fork out for Office unless they are already tied in a big way to it.

Things are pretty quiet at the moment, we are between development rounds of our systems, the party season is in flux between end of the Summer and beginning of the Christmas rounds (already several booked for late November and early December).

I did manage to sell my old laptop on eBay at the weekend for a so-so price. It got shipped off on Saturday morning and apparently arrived in Devon this morning. All was well until I got a panicked call from the buyer saying that he couldn’t turn it on. Luckily after making a few suggestions he got it working. The solution – hold down the power button for 5 seconds. Pretty challenging stuff I think you’ll agree ;o)

I stayed down in London last night to catch up with some old colleagues. We all used to work together at Willis and all but one have since moved on. Dom is now living and working in Saudi so chances to meet up are all too few. It’s always good to catch up on news and reminisce.

It also gave a chance to try out a new hotel which has opened about 5 minutes walk from the office. As a bed for the night you can’t get better (or at least I can’t as I could see the office from my room window). Not somewhere you would go for a holiday but I think I might switch allegiances for my infrequent stays down in the City.

Some sad news in the paper today. Pete McCarthy has died after a battle with cancer.

Although not a ground breaking writer he will be missed simply for his ability to make people laugh out loud on the train. You can always tell when someone is reading one of his books (of which McCarthy’s Bar is the best) because they just can’t help themselves smiling.

It’s been a rather busy few days, hence the lack of posts here. Although, thinking about it I am not sure what I have been doing there just never seem to be enough hours in the day.

One of the jobs I have finally got round to is to put my old laptop onto eBay, so if you want a very reasonably priced Windows laptop then you know where to go ;o)

According to Steve Ballmer (the CEO of Microsoft) the majority of music in iPods is stolen.

Cheers Steve, perhaps you’d like to throw some other insults my way!

Got a new toy yesterday which I have been playing with for a bit now and can say it is a great improvement. It’s the size of a large mobile phone and has better functionality than my old StreetPilot III.

Most surprising of all is that after selling the StreetPilot and it’s maps on eBay the move has been cost neutral. I had expected to end up paying a bit extra for the latest kit but I think my purchaser must have got a bit carried away.

Boris Johnson the bumbling MP, magazine editor and TV personality has now started a blog.

It’s well worth a read if, like me, you like him or, indeed, if he winds you up like a lot of other people seem to be.