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The Pink Floyd song of the same name was about freedom from tyranny and oppression - this blog entry is about nothing so dramatic or world-changing, but it’s something to celebrate. Tonight is the last night that I’m forced out of the pub scene. Tomorrow I can walk into a pub safe in the knowledge that when I walk out I won’t stink of stale rancid smoke, and won’t have to hang my clothes up in the garage because they smell too much to bring into the house. Having said that I probably won’t go to the pub tomorrow night because I need to finish painting the hall. But if I did go, it would be a joyous occasion.

I’ve always been a bit sensitive to the fact that I have friends and colleagues who smoke… it doesn’t make them bad people, but let’s just say that I think this smoking ban is utterly wonderful and should have been introduced years ago. I do try to see other peoples’ points of view (sometimes), but in this case the disgruntled smokers can whinge as much as they like. Their disgusting habit has driven us out of pubs and caused us suffering for long enough.

When I see them complaining on the news tomorrow I shall stick two fingers up at the t.v. and laugh at their pathetic whining about their freedom to smoke being denied, the nanny state, and so on. They’ve had it their way, now it’s time for us non-smokers to enjoy the freedom not to absorb their foul odours. Disagree with me if you want, NO-ONE is going to convince me that 1st July 2007 is not a great day.

Football players, like the rest of us, get older. So there comes a time when the club doesn’t want them anymore, they’re too old to keep pace, or when the club’s ambition outstrips the player’s ability. For that reason, we have to face the fact that eventually our favourite players won’t be at the club. Tony Adams, Dennis Bergkamp, Ian Wright… all have departed.

With this in mind, I knew that Thierry Henry wouldn’t be at Arsenal for ever. I also know that contracts mean very little these days, other than the fact that players can’t transfer for free. Anyone who believes it will ensure they stay at a club is a bit dopey. So with a heavy heart I have to face the fact that Thierry’s ambition seems to have outstripped the club’s ambition. £16 million seems a bit cheap, even if he is nearly 30… we’re talking about the best player in the world. He’s worth five Wayne Rooneys.

What really concerns me is not just the gap he’ll leave, but whether it might prompt some of the other players to head for the door - in particular rising star Cesc Fabregas who is said to be discontented. Man Yoo have already started their Summer spendathon, Chelsea will open their fat cheque book soon, and Liverpool have new backers. Arsenal had better spend that £16 million wisely, otherwise 4th place will be an even harder-fought position in this coming season. Failing to get into the Champions’ League could have real bad repercussions.

Thierry, thanks for all you did. Your contribution during the glory years was too great to create any bitterness now. The Premiership is poorer for your departure.

I’ve been spending a lot of time presenting Lotus’ upcoming collaborative solutions over the past few months, and the reaction has been very positive. Perhaps “very positive” doesn’t do the reaction justice - people love the new stuff… Quickr, Connections and Notes 8.

Today was no exception, I provided two stand-up routines at an open day hosted by InfoSys, a Lotus Business Partner. You know me, I love an audience, and they seemed to like my positioning of Mentos Mints and Diet Coke movies on YouTube as an example of community innovation. You had to be there, but it got a big laugh (and I think they got the point too).

I spoke to many of the attendees after my sessions and during the day, and there were three main themes. They love Quickr. They love Connections (and get the idea of social software in the enterprise). And increasingly people are becoming very receptive to the idea that there is a cheaper and viable alternative to Microsoft Office… namely the Productivity Editors embedded into Notes 8.
The premise is simple… Notes customers are already paying for Notes, and we will provide them with spreadsheet, word processor and presentation editor functionality for no extra license charge. In other words, they get the Microsoft Office functionality that they pay for today free with the Notes 8 client. That means that for large numbers of users they can save on the cost of an Office license.

For customers with mixed estates including Linux and Mac client users, the news is even better. No longer the poor cousins, they will experience the same functionality as their Window-using colleagues (Mac to be supported post-Notes 8.0). The thought of supporting the Open Document Format and freeing themselves from proprietary document formats is also very compelling.

There is one interesting perception that I always comment upon and challenge… the idea that organisations could keep Office for their power-users and provide the Notes 8 editors to the rest. That implies that they think the Notes 8 editors are a cut-down offering… they’re not, these are extremely functional editors.

I didn’t expect the battle against Office to be easy, and I’m realistic about the fact that Notes 8 is not going to make a huge impact on their market share in the next year. But I am pleasantly surprised by the number of people who are taking this proposition very seriously and thinking that they could save themselves a lot of money.

A couple of days ago my ‘frolleague’ (a term coined by Andy ‘Ports’ Porter meaning ‘friend and colleague’) Steve Cogan alerted me to an article on The Register web site which discussed the relative merits of BlackBerry versus Windows Mobile solutions. The article closed with a readers’ poll.

The results are now in, and it would seem that Microsoft have taken a bit of a pounding. One of their worst perceived aspects is that of security. Now there’s a big surprise.

Amazingly, during my time off the web site late last year and early this year, some people told me they missed my CD reviews. It amazes me that anyone would miss anything about the site, but a couple of people (who I’d never met before) told me at the Irish Lotus User Group that they enjoyed reading the reviews. So, I might put this stuff into it’s own page, but for now it goes into the blog. Let’s start with…

‘Light Grenades’ by Inbubus - in the midst of the black-out period this CD nearly prompted me to post something. It was released in November 2006, but I’m still playing it now more than anything else. As has been the way of the more recent Incubus offerings it’s a mixture of styles - perhaps less consistent than ‘A Crow Left Of The Murder’, and with a couple of weaker tracks, but the high points on the whole exceed anything they’ve done before (with their all-time best ‘Here In My Room’ as a notable exception). Those high points are the blasting ‘A Kiss To Send Us Off’ (I love the way the first track ‘QuickSand’ melts into it), ‘Dig’ and ‘Oil And Water’. Probably the best £9 I’ve spent in the past two years.

One small annoyance - the Japenese edition has two extra tracks. Why don’t we get them? So, if anyone is going to Japan, let me know.

Next up we have ‘Send Away The Tigers’ by the Manic Street Preachers. Personally I loved their previous offering ‘Lifeblood’ (many didn’t) and I like this too, but I don’t love it. It’s a very solid album, no duff tracks, but equally there’s nothing outstanding. As usual James Dean Bradfield’s vocals soar (especially on the best track ‘The Second Great Depression’) and his guitar playing is mesmerising. Perhaps the once-angry young men are now playing it a bit safe. However, the equation is simple - if you like the Manic Street Preachers then you’ll like this, and remember I’m basing this on their own extremely high standards.

Finally for now ‘Yours Truly, Angry Mob’ by the Kaiser Chiefs. One word - outstanding. Their first album ‘Employment’ was very shaky with some great tracks and some real dross. ‘Yours Truly’ is much much better - better songs, better music, better production, no weak tracks and some real classics such as ‘I Can Do It Without You’ and ‘The Angry Mob’.

At times they sound like an early-80’s post-punk band, at other times they sound like The Beatles. The more mellow tracks like ‘Love’s Not A Competition’ sit nicely alongside the more high-enegry ‘Highroyds’ and ‘Heat Dies Down’. The added bonus is the great lyrics, for example “Raise a glass or two, You raise a fist or two, Get a shopping basket wrapped round your head”.

Next month sees the return of the Smashing Pumpkins with ‘Zeitgeist’ and if you know me you’ll know I’m looking forward to that. Counting the days in fact… 23 to go.

You gotta love Apple. Macs are cool, iPods are cool, iTunes is cool (despite it’s ‘proprietary’ nature), the Mac OS is stylish and innovative… and Apple provide cyber-cafe services for loafing foreign students. Okay, it’s actually the Apple Store, but it’s always full of loafing foreign students checking their e-mail. So if you wanted to actually look at a Mac notebook before buying one, you’d have to shove a loafing foreign student out of the way.

Mark this day, for it heralds the announcement of Apple’s Safari web browser being made available for Microsoft Windows. Which leads us to the important question…

Why?

Apple are good at what they’re good at - making stylish technology that people want. Success comes in various shapes and degrees for Apple. Take the Mac in it’s various guises… it’s market share compared to Windows is small, but it is growing (both in the home and enterprise markets). Apple are in a good place with the Mac. Some people who use Windows at work are choosing Macs for home. They’re stylish but also very usable and functional (I mean the Apple Macs, not the people… although some may be).

Take the iPod. Millions have. Compared to the iPod, Microsoft’s Zune has been an abject failure. Let me paraphrase a section of an entry I made on my internal blog in December last year. At the point where Central Park meets New York’s 5th Avenue, Apple have opened a new store. It’s about the size of the ground floor of the London store, but they’ve made better use of the space. Let’s just say the place was packed with people, the iPods were flying off the shelves, and the volume of third-party offerings to go with the iPods has never been more evident to me. As if to emphasise that fact, our hotel room boasted a clock-radio with an integrated iPod dock.

And then there’s the Zune, Microsoft’s iPod killer…

I saw two stores selling the Zune. One was the Virgin store at Times Square. Again, this store was packed to the rafters with shoppers, but the Zune wasn’t gathering much attention. In fact if it hadn’t been for me having a fiddle with the pseudo-click-wheel, the Zune display would have been a very lonely place. I also read somewhere that in the run-up to Christmas 2006 Apple sold ten times more spare chargers for iPods than Microsoft sold Zunes. So, we’ll allow Apple to chalk the points up on that front.

iPhone? The jury has to be out until they ship it. Granted it looks very nice, and for some people that will be a good enough reason to stand in a queue.

Anyway, I digress, back to Safari for Windows. Many Mac users tell me that Firefox for the Mac is a better browser than Safari, so why do Apple think that Safari for Windows is a great idea? I look at Safari for Windows and it lacks the toolbar I use every minute in Firefox. They’ve tried to make it look like a Mac application, but it runs on Windows… so why is making it look like a Mac application a good idea? That’s just going to confuse people. Perhaps Apple are thinking “all those people who use Macs at home, they have to use Windows at work so let’s give them a familiar browser”. Nice idea, but the problem is that the companies employing these people don’t want another browser on the desktop.

The Apple web site lists “12 reasons you’ll love Safari”. #1 is “Blazing Performance” - yes, actually it does perform well, but when pages load in under two seconds it’s hard to tell whether it is actually 1.6 times faster than Firefox. It feels like it’s fast, so I’m fine with that claim. Just about all of the other reasons are things I already have in Firefox (apart from the rather nifty “Resizable Text Fields”).

I’m sure Apple have other motives. It’s surely not a coincidence that the iPhone hits the shops soon and uses - guess what - Safari as it’s native browser. More Safari users equals more reasons for developers to do their thing.

As much as I’d love to see Apple trounce Microsoft, I think that Firefox has a far better chance of doing that in the browser stakes. Apple, stick to what you do best - Macs, iPods, cool stuff… don’t try to fight Microsoft in their own back yard.

I’ve just checked my bank account and found that Sky have charged me extra money this month. I phoned to find out why, and the customer service representative told me that they hadn’t been getting a call-back signal from both boxes. Regular readers of dadams.co.uk (I know there aren’t many) may remember that this was an issue that was supposedly sorted out a month ago.

I informed the representative that I hoped the call was being recorded for training purposes, because then new staff could get an idea of what an absolute shambles this company is. Their equipment isn’t doing what’s it’s supposed to, so they charge me money… and I have to battle to prove I’m in the right and get a refund. She said that the viewing cards had been swapped between the two boxes, and suggested that the engineer had been into my daughter’s bedroom and done just that. Yeah, and while he was there he went through her chest of drawers and tried on her gymnastics leotard. Of course he bloody didn’t. What is the matter with these people?

I also asked about the terms of my contract and the implications of me cancelling everything. She said she was sorry I felt like this (and she also asked me to stop shouting). Being their customer is such hard work, and I pay them for my misfortune. If Sky really want to prove they’re sorry, they should sort themselves out. James Murdoch, you should be reading this and you should be ashamed.

Choddo and G have both suggested I convert to Sky HD. Pay Sky more money? My next transaction with them is more likely to be along the lines of standing in their foyer, ripping up the contracts, and then inviting the customer service staff to watch me ram both Sky boxes up the customer service manager’s backside.

Thank you, I feel better now, but tomorrow I have to call them back to resolve the issue (which will no doubt involve some more shouting).

Oh, one other thing… I e-mailed James Murdoch. It would be nice to believe that he’ll read the e-mail and take an action to improve things. But I also believe that one day I’ll win the lottery.

Update: I called Sky again. They said that the charge had been levied on April 27th just before the engineer’s visit, and they could now confirm that they could provide a refund as both boxes are accepting a call back. So (a) why didn’t they tell me that last night, and (b) did they intend to refund the money (based on the fact that I was in the right), or do they only provide a refund when you notice a mistake and kick up a fuss?

The lady on the end of the phone said “all I can do is apologise”. Never a truer word spoken, because they do little else.

When we were looking for a new house last year we saw one property which was not in a great road, was okay house-wise, but had a fantastic garden. One of the things that the estate agent pointed out was the wild strawberries growing there. Well, we didn’t go for that property and ended up in a different part of Camberley.

Almost a year later, while trimming the edge of one of the lawns at Castle Adams, I noticed… you’ve guessed it… a small crop of wild strawberries. Further inspection of the flower beds revealed more strawberry plants. It looks like we won’t be opening a ‘pick your own’ farm in the near future, and don’t expect a huge bowl to be presented should you ever come round for dinner (especially not if the slugs tuck in first).

This is not my first encounter with wild strawberries. A few years ago I was having dinner in Paris with some colleagues, including my good friend and dotted-line manager Uffe ‘the Danes have an answer’ Sorensen (who had steak I seem to remember, but I think he always does). When it came to dessert I recognised strawberries as an option and thought it a safe bet. I was presented with a bowl of the stringiest, weediest-looking strawberries I’d ever seen. The waiter must have caught the look on my face and said something that I translated as “strawberries of the wood” and followed it up with a gesture made by kissing his pinched finger and thumb. That gesture summed up that bowl of strawberries well - looks can be deceiving. They were even better than those plump berries you buy in supermarkets or four for £5 at Wimbledon.

You never know, if I can keep the slugs away I might get a full bowl (a small bowl though). Just don’t expect me to share them.

So there you have it, a blog entry about a BlackBerry followed an entry about strawberries. Next week, something about loganberries (or possibly not).