dadams.co.uk

That’s mostly a crappy pun really - the worst-kept secret of the year was the BlackBerry 9000, with images hitting the Interweb over a month ago. Yesterday - and coinciding with WES - the 9000 emerged as the BlackBerry Bold. The BBC covered the Bold’s release stating that it’s a “move away from business” and an effort to “attract more casual users”. Certainly the second point may be true, but the spec of the Bold still makes it very suitable for the business user. A higher-resolution screen, Wi-Fi, GPS, and support for 3G - but also better facilities for playing music and a 2 megapixel camera.

It looks very tasty, not a million miles away from the Palm Treo 500. It certainly makes my 8800 look a little dated, in fact it makes the Curve (8300) look a little dated. Mind you, I’m sitting next to a colleague with a 8700 and that baby looks positively prehistoric (the 8700, not my colleague).

And about time too, the old one had got quite dirty. Having had a BMW 3 series four times in a row (the navy one, the black one, the sort-of-bluey one, the grey diesel Coupe) I thought it was time for a change… time to go for something radically different. So today I took delivery of a BMW 5 series.

As I was at the IBM office at North Harbour today, the car’s maiden voyage was back up the M3. And being a nice warm Spring day, the front is now plastered with assorted dead insects who weren’t watching where they were going.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not particularly interested in cars, so the thing I was most excited about was the built-in iPod connectivity, allowing you to play your iPod through the car’s system and navigate your music via the built-in display. Ports got his new jam-jar a couple of months ago and has blogged on this nifty capability.

As for the rest of the car… hmmm, very nice. Inflatable tyres, see-through windows, go-faster foot pedal, the usual. To be honest it’s wasted on me. Note the choice of wheels - much easier to clean.

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.