“…you have to say that this is no longer a music contest” – Sir Terry Wogan

Did you know, we’ve won the Eurovision Song Content five time? That’s an honour we share with France and Luxembourg, but we’re still two wins behind our Irish friends.

However, I doubt if we’ll ever win it again, and I doubt if Ireland, France, Luxembourg or any Western European countries will either. It’s not gone unnoticed that the contest has been more about the political vote in the past few years, and this year that voting pattern seemed to crank up several notches. The Scandinavian countries voted for each other, but even more noticeable was the ex-Russian countries voting for Russia and the Baltic countries voting for their neighbours (which I find bizarre considering that fifteen years ago they split up Yugoslavia as they all seemed intent on murdering each other).

As we watched the voting, it became all too easy to predict where the 8, 10 and 12 points would go where the ex-Russian and Baltic countries were concerned. I’d have put my house on Montenegro’s top marks going to Bosnia & Herzegovina and Serbia, and it was one of many occasions I got it spot on. The break up of the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia has forever changed the face of the competition.

Back over to Sir Terry – he always provides a cheery and enthusiastic tongue-in-cheek commentary that suits the cheesy nature of the content, but after the voting tonight he sounded totally deflated and questioned whether the UK should drop out of future competitions. Interestingly for a short time tonight, the Wikipedia page for Eurovision stated that the ‘big four’ (UK, France, Germany and Spain) who provide most of the funding had indeed pulled out, although that statement has now disappeared. The highest placing this year for any of the big four was 16th (Spain), and the UK and Germany came joint-last. There was a time when we could have at least counted on Malta for a few points, but this time it was just Ireland and San Marino.

It would be a shame if we did pull out – perhaps we can form a Western Europe pact and start getting our own back. But then it would further remove the ideal on which the contest was based… a song for Europe, and not who wants to suck up to their neighbours.

Those of you arriving in Dublin on Tuesday 3rd June for the Irish Lotus User Group might like to take advantage of another innovative event being put together by my pals over at the Lotus Connections Blog (Neil Burston and Stuart McIntyre). They’ve organised another Lotus Connections Special Interest Group, aka Connectr, session at IBM’s Dublin Labs featuring some top people from the world of Lotus Connections and a number of interesting perspectives on Social Networking, Web 2.0 and other related topics. Speakers include a member of the Lotus Connections team in the US (which person precisely is to be confirmed) and our very own Ian McNairn, a wonderful evangelist on this and other subjects, and someone with whom I share a certain connection. Answers on a postcard please.

The session is timed to start late morning to give people flying in to Ireland a chance of making it along – so it would be a great opportunity to find out more about this area, avoid being bored and meet up with some new people.

There are also some spot prizes up for grabs for the best story about getting to the event – so come and participate, share, and win those prizes. See the Connections Blog for more info… or there are a couple of Facebook groups to allow you to find out more.

I’ve been trying out betas of Firefox 3 for a while, but yesterday I noted that Release Candidate 1 was available. That’s near-enough the final version, so it’s now installed and acting as my main browser.

Mozilla tells us that this new version provides more robust security, improved password management, better bookmark management, and improved reliability and performance. Personally I would highlight the following features:

• An address bar which not only fills in URL information but also finds words in web page titles that you’ve recently accessed – very useful if you can’t remember the URL but can remember the subject of the page
• Quick access to most-recently and most-frequently-used bookmarks
• Quick bookmarking and tagging – just click the star in the address bar

A couple of niggles though – the first will be sorted out in time… very few of my favourite plug-ins work at the moment, but I’d expect them all to support Firefox 3 very shortly. My favourite RSS reader NewsFox works so it’s no big deal.

The second is the new download manager. While it boasts some nice new features such as resumable downloads, the user interface is horrible – it looks like shareware and is a step backwards. However, this is a small gripe, and whether you go for RC1 or wait until the final 3.0 release I’d definately recommend Firefox 3 (especially if Internet Explorer is still your browser of choice).

Now there’s a bizarre blog post title, but it’s all to do with my family tree (of course). It’s a strange process – I’ve had success getting back to an ancestor born in 1791 but still no luck with someone born 90 years later. My great-grandmother, Alice West, still continues to elude me. I recently acquired her death certificate (this is jolly, isn’t it?) but it confirmed nothing of any importance. It did confirm that my mum and uncle were right in that she died on Shrove Tuesday (my mum carried on making pancakes while my grandmother went to Alice Senior’s bedside), and it also showed that she died two streets away from where she lived (a bit odd, but I’m sure there was a reason).

Unfortunately this was in 1953, before changes to the death certificate format were introduced… so useful stuff like her date of birth are missing. It provides her age (72) but I know from experience that there’s often a year or two’s margin of error. So a best estimate says she was born in 1880. That fact however doesn’t nail down her identity and leaves three possible Alice Wests to choose from. I have a prime suspect but no confirmation so the search goes on.

One factor you can hope for in genealogical research is unusual surnames. Alice West became part of the Clinch family, and Clinch is a fairly unusual surname. There was a few knocking around the Brentford and Chiswick area (there probably still is) but they have been quite easy to trace and follow. What you don’t want to find in your family are Smiths or Browns because, quite frankly, there’s hundreds of them in a square mile. So, imagine the mild tinge of despair when it was revealed that my great great grandfather James Clinch had married Mary Ann Brown in 1875. Mary Ann… very common (or should I say “frequently-occurring”?) given names, and Brown… well, you get the picture.

However, this is all about getting the right clues, and on James’ and Mary’s marriage certificate was the killer clue. Mary’s father was James Brown (yes, ha ha, James Brown). James, a frequently-occurring given name, Brown. Great. But there was James’ profession… fisherman. Fisherman? This was 19th century Chiswick, not Grimsby. A fisherman in West London (Middlesex to be precise). Was there a big trade in hauling gudgeon out of the Thames? Hmmm, tasty. However, this one piece of information made it possible to trace James in the censuses, and pin-pointed him and his family. I knew his name, his trade and that he had a daughter Mary Ann born around 1850.

The term ‘fisherman’ as his occupation was, I think, a bit of a generalisation, as a few of the census documents state his occupation as ‘fishmonger’ – which is a lot more credible. The bonus was that I was able to trace James’ parents – his mother Mary Ann (see, I told you) and his father Russell. This was great, as Russell was a fairly unusual name at the time, and while you could take your pick from hundreds of Charles Smiths there was only three Russell Browns… one was my great great great great grandfather, born in 1791, and another was his son (James’ brother). In 1841 Russell and the family lived at Fisherman’s Place in Chiswick, and James had obviously entered the family trade as Russell was also a fisherman / fishmonger.

Also living at Fisherman’s Place in 1841 was a Mr George Brown and his family (including the other Russell). George’s occupation? You’ve guessed it, fisherman. So a good shout that he was probably my great great great great great uncle.

Now it starts getting difficult. 1841 saw the first complete census, so beyond this point you have to research parish records. In genealogical terms Russell Brown’s parents lived in the Dark Ages. They may have been alive in 1841 but there were 10,122 people with the surname Brown included in the 1841 census in Middlesex.

Finally, just for fun, I’ve included a little map of an area of Chiswick just to prove the wife was right, that a part of my family didn’t move more than a mile in 150 years. Actually this isn’t true because Henry Clinch Senior was born in the Reading area in 1819, moved to the Ealing area and is off this map in Brentford. However, these pins do cover over 100 years… the blue pin (bottom-right) was the location of Fisherman’s Place, home of Russell Brown in 1841.

The cyan pin (top-right) was where my grandparents lived until the 1980′s. The sort-of dark pink pins are James Brown, the red pins are James Clinch (James Brown’s son-in-law), green is Henry Clinch Junior (my great grandfather), and purple is where his wife Alice died. Yellow is the unconfirmed location of John Cotton, father of Sarah Cotton who married James Brown.

Who said this…?

“There are many things you can be sure of in this life. Death is one, but if you want to discuss something less morbid let’s talk about technology – the fact that if you purchase any item, as sure as night follows day, at some point in the not-to-distant future you will be disgruntled when the new / improved model is launched.”

It was me, in August 2007. At the time I was trying to decide whether to buy an Archos 605 or wait to see what Apple announced. The iPod touch, nice as it is, didn’t meet my required specs – so Santa bought me the Archos. Apart from unit #1 dying after thirteen days, I haven’t regretted the decision (no, not even when the 32 gb iPod touch was announced). Right this moment the Archos is downstairs recording episodes of ‘Heroes’.

“…as sure as night follows day, at some point in the not-to-distant future you will be disgruntled when the new / improved model is launched.”

Go to Google, do a search on ‘Archos 606′ and have a look at some of the resulting pages. I’m sure the picture is a mock-up, but I reckon there’s a fair shout that Archos will be updating the look and feel and adding a few more desirable specifications. The iPhone and iPod touch are driving other companies to focus on the ‘I want one of those’ factor – rumours of the touch-screen BlackBerry and the already-released BlackBerry Bold surely confirm that.

The alternative to being disappointed by your choice of technology getting outdated is to not make a purchase in the first place… and where’s the fun in that?

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.