dadams.co.uk

Recently there was an immigration case which made me wonder about the policies of our government. The Canadian wife of a British soldier was threatened with deportation, even though the couple were legally married and had children. Eventually the couple won their case, and quite rightly in my opinion.

Today the BBC ran a story about a Filipino man, Mr Arnel Cabrera, who had lost his fight to stay in the UK. The madness here is that the unfortunate Mr Cabrera was also legally married to a British citizen… he was married until she was killed by a hospital blunder. So he’s lost his wife, and now we’re slinging him out.

This government has time and time again shown that they can’t deal with the illegal immigration problem, so they now seem to be having a crack at a few soft targets. Meanwhile some rather unsavoury characters who preach hatred against us get to sit cosy on their state benefits. Anyone fancy explaining the logic behind this? What was Gordon Brown up to today? Prime Minister Gordon Brown has been visiting the South West of England, taking in Plymouth, Exeter and the Eden Project in Cornwall. Nothing more important to do Gordon? Perhaps he stopped off for a traditional West Country cream tea. If you’re still in the area tomorrow Gordon, why not pop along to Lyme Regis and hunt for fossils? You can give some to Mr Cabrera to put on his mantelpiece back in Manila.

First the bad news… Adam Gartenberg, formerly the Offering Manager for IBM Lotus Sametime, has moved on to a new role in IBM’s Data Management business. Bad news for you because Adam was a very active blogger and kept everyone up-to-date with Sametime info. Bad news for me because he was always very responsive to crucial Sametime questions. Adam, thanks for all you did for Sametime. In 2007, more that a third of new Sametime customers were Microsoft Exchange customers (which must say something about Sametime, that they picked the Lotus solution over the more obvious choice provided by Microsoft). I reckon that Adam can take a slice of the credit there.

And now the good news - other members of the Sametime team are contributing to the Sametime blog. I note that it’s taken a whole army of bloggers to attempt to match Adam’s output, but I’m sure they’ll do fine. A notable addition to the team last year was Rob Ingram, formerly the Domino Product Manager and the engine behind the Domino blog. So the Sametime blog is in good hands, and if you’re that way inclined and understand the alphabet soup I’d suggest adding it to your RSS feed reader right now.

Earlier today I was reading through Marty Moore’s update on Activities version 2. I’ve said before that the idea of Activities was a real eureka moment, and version 2 just builds upon that great work. But that’s not what this post is about (more on Connections 2 another time). Further down Marty’s IBM-internal blog was a rather neat widget showing his iTunes content for the world to see. “How cool is this?” I thought. Mind you, I need to have a word with Marty… he has some good stuff listed, but also… Dido?

Anyway, I fancied a bit of this iTunes widget action, so I did a bit of investigation. And it seems the My iTunes widget isn’t ideal for me. Basically what it does is reads your purchase history from iTunes and displays it in the widget. Sounds good but I rarely buy anything from iTunes. This may sound a bit pre-historic but I actually purchase CDs… and then import the music into iTunes. Very quaint and old school. Also, I very recently changed my iTunes account ID as the old one was based on a soon-to-be-dead e-mail address. So my purchase history, which was fairly small anyway, amounted to very little… just ‘We Are Scientists’ floating across the widget in a lonely fashion. This reminded me I had a few tracks in the shopping cart which I went on to purchase - but there’s obviously a lag as the latest purchases haven’t hit the widget yet.

Those lovely tiles are gone, the skip is nearly full, we now have french doors (wonder why they’re called that) where a window used to be, there’s a fine layer of dust over everything, and the builders, electrician and plumber have put a big dent in the teabag / milk / sugar / biscuit supplies. But they have worked very hard.

With a couple of days off work I have been mainly responsible for getting ripped-out kitchen units and various other bits of crap in the skip. Not much of a job, eh? Actually yes, because Adams Towers is located at the top of a narrow lane which the skip lorry couldn’t reach, so the skip is down on the avenue several hundred yards away. And this being England, it’s been raining. A lot. In the picture here, Adams Towers is the house at the top-right. The skip is located where the word ‘Avenue’ is. No, that’s not our swimming pool.

My other job was sorting out the cable to feed the new television - from the splitter box in the loft, through the airing cupboard (following the route of the old analogue cable) and into the ceiling cavity. The electrician took over at this point.

Speaking of the electrician, he discovered some real horrors. He basically condemned some of the outside light fittings, and found an extension double-plug socket attached to the main electrics using lighting cable (which is apparently a no-no). Our fuse board is no longer within UK regulations and will have to be replaced. Up goes the budget again.

It’s now that I realise that the kitchen really is the hub of family life. Although we’re managing okay with cooking in the dining room we feel a bit like refugees in our own house. And I can only start to imagine what it’s like for people who were forced out of their homes by flooding last year. At least this temporary ordeal was our choice.

Once again CES are hosting LCTY in Scotland, this time on Thursday 29th May at the Menzies Belford Hotel in Edinburgh. The format is some keynote speeches followed by two tracks in the afternoon. I would say “see you there” but on this occasion I won’t due to a prior engagement. However there are some great speakers lined up so no-one will miss me that much. The agenda and registration details can be found at CES’ web site.

Having painted nearly every square inch of wall in this house, and having had to carry out some fairly serious remedial work to a number of rooms, all that’s left to do is the kitchen. It’s really rather grim (despite being re-fitted about six years ago) and needs ripping out and starting over entirely. If you are in any doubt about the grim-ness, check out the picture - these tiles adorn the wall behind the hob and pretty much sum up the tone of the kitchen (if anyone does have some tiles like this in their kitchen, I’m sorry, I’m not being rude, they’re just not to our taste).

So, starting tomorrow, we face a number of weeks of washing dishes in the bathroom and cooking with a camping stove in the dining room. The fridge-freezer, which didn’t look so big in the kitchen, looks huge in it’s temporary location (in the hallway). Why six weeks? Well, there’s a bit of a gap between the building work (including a new door to the garden) and the kitchen re-fit, basically because of the availability of the parties concerned. Then there’s a week in-between the kitchen fitters and the granite worktop fitters completing their work, and then finally the floor people finish once everything else is done.

But I look at it this way… six weeks of microwave meals and the wife fussing about the building dust will be worth it to get rid of the bloody grim kitchen.

One last thing - I’m removing those tiles carefully and they’ll be on eBay by the end of the week, and if anyone wants a bigger version of that picture to have as their Windows / Mac / Linux desktop wallpaper just let me know.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m a terrible mobile phone user. I have hardly any numbers at all stored in my address book and therefore always struggle to ring my colleagues if I’m out and about. So, even before I’ve really tried out any of the other aspects of IBM Lotus Connections on the BlackBerry, the Profiles feature is an absolute revelation. All I have to do is go to the Profiles search page, type in the name, search, and then I can call their number or e-mail that person directly from the results.

This being Connections you can also look up a person’s about-me information and background. And as well as looking them up purely by name you can also perform a search on their information and tags.

Dogear (not pictured here) is also worth a mention - you can search for bookmarks, add new bookmarks, view the most popular, view your own, and view the bookmarks of your watchlist (those people you think are interesting).

I have to confess I don’t when this is scheduled to ship, but you can get some more info at the BlackBerry web site. By the way, the features of future products may be subject to change, etc etc.

BlackBerry screenshots made possible by the Rove Mobile Viewer for BlackBerry.

While I was away, ‘Mario Kart’ for the Wii arrived. I’ve always been grateful that no-one except our neighbours could possibly see into our games room - the sight of a man holding a white plastic thing as someone would hold a baseball bat, or waving it around like a tennis racquet, must look a bit strange. We don’t get passers-by in our remote corner of Camberley, but if we did they now might see a man holding a white plastic steering wheel… and a small blonde girl telling him it’s only a game. That’s easy for her to say, she won’t be suffering peer-pressure from her brother-in-law.

Unlike ‘Wii Sports’ and ‘Mario & Sonic at the Olympics’, ‘Mario Kart’ doesn’t demand that you get off the sofa… so I’ve felt a bit of a couch potato today. But that aside, this is a great game. The steering wheel approach (the Wii controller just snaps in) works really well and is very responsive. The sore thumb comes from having to hold down the ‘2′ button in order to accelerate and keep the speed going. The button on the back of the controller is used for braking, but let’s face it, slowing down is for pansies.

The really nice feature about this new version (compared to the GameCube version) is the on-line competitive driving - I had a few goes today (the wife would say that’s an understatement), racing against opponents from France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Italy, Switzerland and Germany (obviously the people of Denmark and Norway have better things to do). It’s very easy to set up, assuming your Wii is connected to the Interweb. You can also do a world-wide game, but I bet there’s thousands of American kids who are already experts and will wipe the floor with me - I have been holding my own against my European rivals I’ll have you know.

You can also set up races against your registered friends (assuming you have any) - Choddo also has the game, and has set me up as a friend to race against. If anyone else I know wants to do the same, let me know.

First, just a quick re-cap on O R Tambo airport in Johannesburg. Last year I witnessed the new lavish, spacious departure lounge for the first time. It’s very nice and a vast improvement on the cramped and disorganised departure lounge of the past. Unfortunately check-in, security and passport control are still an utter nightmare.

Speaking of nightmares, let’s move on to Heathrow’s Terminal 5. Yesterday I noticed that BAA’s Chief Executive Colin Matthews had stated “BAA fully recognises that the inauguration of Terminal 5 has not been as smooth as we and BA would have wished”. No, really?

So, here’s my guided tour of the T5 arrival experience:

• Disembark the plane - delayed three minutes because of something
• Walk a fair distance (although some of it is covered by moving walk-ways)
• Go down three flights of stairs
• Wait for a little shuttle train which isn’t big enough for a 747-size load of passengers
• Get off the little train and go up double escalators (which aren’t big enough to comfortably handle a 747-size load of passengers)
• Go up another set of escalators, past the unfinished walls - anyone over six foot should duck to avoid the sharp metal frame hanging down over said escalators
• Go through passport control
• Go down the escalators to baggage reclaim
• Hunt for the right baggage carousel because the announcement board wasn’t working

At this point, after many changes in altitude (down, up, down again), I was ready to pick up my suitcase and be on my way. I arrived at this point at 06:50, about half an hour after the airplane had landed. At about 07:00 an announcement stated that they apologised for the late arrival of baggage from Joburg and they were doing everything possible to get it to the carousel quickly. At 07:25 (over an hour after landing) some suitcases appeared. And after a while a few more arrived. I picked mine up at 07:40 - after fifty minutes of waiting.

Now here comes my ‘favourite’ bit. I had to go upstairs to departures to meet the minicab (that’s their arrangement, and it is less busy up there so a good idea really). So how do you get upstairs? Easy, take an escalator. Which is what I did… I went up the first one, did a u-turn to go up the next one… and found that it was coming down. Yep, the first up escalator was met by a down escalator. A member of staff was standing nearby, and I asked about the logic of this and how I was supposed to get upstairs. He pointed to a nearby lift. It’s a shame ‘One Foot In The Grave’ has finished, because they could do a one-hour special with Victor Meldrew arriving back at T5 from holiday. The scary thing is that the script would write itself.

‘Brain Thrust Mastery’ by We Are Scientists - I am a big fan of their first album ‘With Love And Squalor’, but this is much better. Since that album they’ve lost their drummer (the aptly-named Michael Tapper) and continued as a duo. Where ‘With Love And Squalor’ was a fairly straightforward vocals / guitar / bass / drums in-your-face offering, ‘Brain Thrust Mastery’ is more intricate, varied, catchy and ultimately more interesting.

Tracks like ‘Let’s See It’ and ‘Impatience’ are lively echoes their first album but are just better all round. ‘Lethal Enforcer’ is a clever mix of all the hallmarks of an ’80s pop tune, ‘Spoken For’ is nearly their first ballad (not quite, but it’s slow by their standards), and ‘Dinosaurs’ is the album’s grand epic offering. Best track is a toss-up between the next single ‘Chick Lit’ and the jazzy melodic ‘That’s What Counts’.

Listen to the two albums back-to-back and you could be forgiven for thinking you’d missed a few and they were ten years apart. ‘Brain Thrust Mastery’ is a giant leap forward… and it’s so damn catchy, it’s been in my head all week.

‘Diamond Hoo Ha’ by Supergrass - I think Supergrass are one of the most under-rated yet consistently great British bands… ever. Especially when you compare them to the current crop of British bands I hear on the radio (Scouting For Girls I find particularly irritating).

After their previous rather short offering ‘Road To Rouen’ (eight proper tracks plus one throwaway instrumental) it’s nice to see them serve up eleven full very strong tracks. And thus the equation is simple - if you like Supergrass you’ll love this because it’s probably their best album. ‘Road To Rouen’ was fairly mellow, but with ‘Diamond Hoo Ha’ the guys return to what they do best - lively pop / rock. Occasionally they sound like the Rolling Stones, on ‘Ghost Of A Friend’ you can hear echoes of Mott the Hoople, and the final track ‘Butterfly’ reminds me of Bowie’s ‘Heroes’.

At the risk of a bad pun ‘Diamond Hoo Ha’ is an absolute gem.