New kid on the blog (3rd February 2005)

I have this theory (which has in no way been proved with any real data) that the combined efforts of the Interweb's population of bloggers now creates more content than the remainder of the world can actually consume. If you read some blogs, and then look at the comments, and then look at the blogs they link to (and read the comments there) it appears that some communities do nothing else but read each other's blogs and post comments. Despite the growth in blog-consolidators and RSS feeds, it amazes me that they have time to do anything else that enables them to form opinions about anything else other than the blogs they read.

So, does the world need another blog? In this case I'll say "yes" because the person in question is my good friend and colleague Andy 'Ports' Porter - so we can expect wit, educated opinions, the occasional kick in the goolies for Microsoft and (unfortunately) some pro-Man Utd propaganda (well, he does come from Hull). The world welcomes Ports Thoughts.

In the top ten... and then in the top spot (26th January 2005)

As mentioned here, I like to indulge in a spot of celebrity trading in the BBC's Celebdaq competition. Up until today, my previous best was 11th place, just outside the top ten (thank you Gwyneth Paltrow). Earlier this week I managed to attain a 1,700% increase on my total when compared to the same time last week (and that's how they work out the table) - this rise was thanks to a week-long investment in Prince Harry (following the Nazi uniform incident) which yielded healthy dividends.

I then switched to the eventual Celebrity Big Brother winner, the multi-talented Bez (he could dance, he could swear, he could ... errrr... stand beside Shaun Ryder) - and when the market got tired of the uni-brained-celled enigma I switched to Welsh starlet-turned-chavette Charlotte Church. Who knows what she was up to, but I sniffed a chance of getting a high placing and veered from my usual strategy of hanging on to shares in order to get dividends and went for the quick buck.

And so I soared from 26th, to 12th, and eventually, today, to 7th. Young Miss Church has been the best-performing share for all of today, so there is a possibility of improving on this place - but Celebdaq is a strange thing and it all relates to what the week before. I could find myself lower.

I did say I was going to retire from Celebdaq when I reached £30 million (I'm up to £26 million now), but perhaps I might go for that elusive executive jet symbol.

Update: the market in Charlotte Church slowed down and I slipped to 8th place the next day. Then the Welsh warbler's price started to fall, but I hung onto the shares for the dividends. Once the dividends were paid, I dumped her (which makes a change, it's usually her that dumps blokes) and invested in Prince Harry. The next day I went up to 5th (should have been 4th because the 1st-placed person was clearly there because of an error in the calculations). The day after I was 2nd, and then finally (after a day of chasing the top-moving shares) I claimed the top spot on Sunday 30th January 2005. This will be short-lived, as I now have nearly £1.7 million in my portfolio and will therefore get wealth-capped tomorrow morning. But from now on, wherever I sit in the chart, it will record the fact that I was once the champ, if only for a day.

Return to Las Vegas (2nd week of January 2005)

Day 1 - the journey there

Avid readers of dadams.co.uk will know that there was a diary for the IBM annual world-wide sales meeting in 2004 (and a photo album). Well, it's come round again. Last year it was Vegas, this year it's... Vegas... again. It's still preferable to Berlin, but having been to Vegas once I wasn't quite so excited to be going back again. The journey is a right pain - this year I'm going via Los Angeles and coming back via Chicago. I'm typing this 34,000 feet over Baffin Island and it's -59° C outside. I'm in Economy Plus on this United Airlines flight, thanks to an unexplained upgrade which I didn't complain about (even though I'm in the middle of five seats). I've been in 'Premium Economy' on British Airways and that was better. My knees don't touch the seat in front but it's not what I'd call roomy. I pity my colleagues further back. The selection of movies is disappointing... I watched most of 'Wimbledon' and it was okay for passing 90 minutes. The iPod has been better entertainment. However, full marks to United for the food and if it was easier to get to the toilet (remember, middle of five seats) I'd take more advantage of the very frequent drinks service.

When I get to L.A. there's a two hour wait before the short flight to Vegas. Hopefully I'll get to Bally's hotel by 19:00 Pacific Time, and then Matt wants to go for a Fatburger (fine by me, but he's welcome to the root beer).

So, time to mull over something else in my world not related to this trip. On the peeve list is the on-line football prediction contest 'Challenge Lawro' (see here). Over the Christmas period they made a monumental cock-up and allowed people to enter predictions after the matches had been played. Net effect: anyone who discovered this could gain maximum points for those matches. I did see the option to do this and chose not to. I didn't need to, because I had honestly gained a good score over the Christmas period that saw me go to the top of our mini-league. However, because of the cheating, the Challenge Lawro top-brass decided there was only one course of action - make those matches null and void. So the cheats lost their points, but I also lost my honestly-won points and fell back down to third. Cheats never prosper apparently, but in this case I didn't either.

Later that day... we arrived at L.A. to find the flight to Vegas was delayed by two hours. That then changed to two and a quarter, then two and a half, then three, and it was nearly four by the time the flight departed. Matt was delayed too, so no Fatburger tonight.

Day 2 - first day of training

The problem with a great time difference it that you can find yourself in bed looking at the clock, knowing it's 04:00 where you are but with something inside your brain telling you it's really midday and you shouldn't still be in bed. After 05:00 I didn't get much more sleep.

An uneventful day - the training finished at 16:20, and then Matt and I went shopping (including a visit to Houdini's magic shop, where I found that they didn't have anything to tempt me as I've already got their best tricks). We then went for a Fatburger. And that was... errr... Saturday, I think. I'm losing track of the days already.

Day 3 - the hunt for a pair of jeans

With no training until the afternoon, I spent the morning looking for a new pair of jeans. Hey, this is America, surely it must be easy to buy a pair of jeans, right? Well, no actually - there's plenty of jeans on sale but if you want a pair that's not stupidly baggy, faded, blotchy, ripped or purposely dirty (or all of the above) then you're out of luck. Abercrombie & Fitch in particular seemed to only sell jeans that looked like they'd been dragged behind a truck for several miles. There were some suitable jeans in Emporio Armani, but I don't mind telling you that I baulked at the price. I did eventually buy a pair in Kenneth Cole (which I later returned because the 'boot-leg' style made them too wide at the bottom).

After the training, and before going to the Business Partner Solution event, Rory and I went to the Apple store so that he could gaze longingly at the screens.

Day 4 - the opening event

I woke with a bad headache. The opening event, which took place in the MGM Grand Arena and was attended by over 15,000 people, was very noisy. By the time Jackie Joyner Kersey, a former Olympic athlete, had finished her motivational screeching I thought my head was going to split open. With a three hour break before the next session, I decided to walk back to my hotel. The light rain turned into a heavy downpour and I had to change clothes completely. The rest of the day was quite dull apart from another motivational speaker by the name of Geoff Burch - I'm not sure what his point was, but he was very entertaining, better than most professional comedians.

Days 5, 6 and 7 - technical training

Technical training - that's it really. The weather improved, and there was much to be joyous about in the forthcoming Lotus (okay, and IBM) software portfolios.

Day 8 - leaving Las Vegas

There was a meeting at 08:00 (hey, this was no holiday) but someone had the good sense to hold the meeting in the same room that breakfast was served. After that I finished packing and had time to take a few last-minute photos before catching a bus to the airport. The check-in took a while, but my main concern was the time gap between the flight arriving at Chicago and the flight departing for London - 35 minutes. I had already queried this with Amex Travel and United Airlines, both of whom told me it was "no problem". All the same, I told the check-in lady that I didn't want to spend my 40th birthday (yes, my 40th) stranded in Chicago. "Don't worry", she told me, "you come out one door and go in another". Hmmm...

Upon boarding the first flight the captain informed us that due to favourable tail winds, the flight would take 20 minutes less than usual. Hooray. He then informed us that due to air traffic control constrictions we couldn't arrive at Chicago too early, so we'd have to wait 30 minutes before taking off. A trifle worrying. We actually arrived at Chicago dead on-time, but arrived at gate B20. The flight to Heathrow departed from C16 - that's in another terminal. So, yes, "out one door, in another" was true, the two doors just happened to be a mile apart. Fortunately there was no immigration or baggage collection required, so it was just a matter of walking / jogging to gate C16. I arrived (along with several other people doing the same two-stage route) with seconds to spare, although the whole plane then had to wait for our baggage to be loaded. So I needn't have worried.

The flight was very bumpy and I watched 'The Village', which was okay but I worked out the twist in the tale long before it happened. Happy 40th birthday to me.

Was it over the line? (5th January 2005)

It's been a bit quiet on the football front over here at the dadams.co.uk headquarters - I had considered writing a piece on Alex Ferguson's hypocrisy after he complained about Wayne Rooney's ban and the play-acting of Bolton's Tal Ben Haim, but thought better of it when I found that a link to my site had been posted on a Man Utd fan site (gulp). I haven't exactly been kind to Mr Ferguson or his team over the years, but it's all just a bit of fun.

On this occasion I find myself not taking a poke at Ferguson or his team, and not even the dedicated fans who drove hundreds of miles to see their team play (you make up your mind which fans I'm referring to)... no, this time the finger of blame points fairly and squarely at the referee and the rest of the officials. Of course, the referee and officials won't see the finger of blame pointed at them as they are clearly bereft of sight. Mind you, in these days of equal opportunities it's nice to see that people who are registered blind will be employed by the Football Association.

Over the line or not? Oooh, too close to call.

Even Alex Ferguson admitted that the shot by Tottenham's Pedro Mendes should have been awarded as a goal. It's not often that Mr Ferguson gives the other team some credit, so mark this day. Of course he balanced it up by moaning that Utd should have had a penalty, but he usually does so we'll ignore that. My brother Steve theorised that "if it had happened the other way round, Alex Ferguson would have been on the pitch, punching the ref". I disagree - Ferguson is a pillar of the footballing community and would never resort to violence. But he would have banged on about the injustice of the incident for the rest of eternity and then a bit longer.

Anyway, on the right is a picture of the incident. You decide, was it over the goal line or not? I've a suspicion that it may just have sneaked over. Shame that the assistant referee's guide dog was licking it's genitals at the wrong moment.

Christmas 2004 - gone in a flash (1st January 2005)

I think I say this every year... didn't Christmas go quickly this year? It only seems like ten minutes ago that we were waiting for the Christmas Eve childrens' carol service to begin at West End church, and now that's over a week ago.

Christmas 2004 was the time when the far-flung Adams family became fully equipped with webcams, and frequent video conferences now occur between Florida, Michigan and Camberley. I bought a cheap webcam thinking "you can't go wrong for £25". Well I can reliably inform you can you can go wrong for £25, especially if your aim is people seeing you through a webcam in anything but a muddy brown hue. So returned it and bought a more expensive one, a Logitech QuickCam Pro 4000 (which gives excellent picture quality but suffers from a bad base design). They do say you get what you pay for... certainly true in this case.

Unfortunately Christmas 2004 will also be remembered for the terrible natural disaster in Southern Asia. I'm sad to say that the over-commercialised "I want" nature of Christmas in the Western World has never seemed more vulgar. At the best of times the people of Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand scratch for a meager existence - I pray that aid reaches them in time to prevent even greater suffering. We should be thoughtful of them as we survey the spoils of our own Christmas.

Speaking of surveying the spoils of Christmas, later on today I shall be surveying the wreckage of my post-Christmas bank account. I can hardly wait. But in typing this I'm reminded how lucky we are, even if the family fortune has taken a battering.

Happy New Year everyone, and here's to Liverpool beating Chelsea today.

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery... (17th December 2004)

... but don't you think this is a little bizarre? I will have to keep my eye on this. After all, there is a copyright thingy at the bottom of the page (which this gentleman has also incorporated into his site).

Update: the plagiarising Mr Basetta or whatever his name is has now given me a credit for the design. Unfortunately he's ruined the aesthetics of my design with a comic strip backdrop and his quite-frankly shitty text logo. So rather he took off the credit really. And he also had the cheek to complain that the pages are table-based. Well, if he'd bothered to look, tables are only used for the main constructions - all of the items within use CSS (and the tables have styles applied too). If tables are a problem, f*** off and nick someone's CSS-only design.

If anyone else wants to use the dadams.co.uk design... you can if you ask nicely. I'm changing it early in 2005 anyway.

iPod for Christmas (8th December 2004)

In a previous entry I mentioned the wife's iPod Mini. After some deliberation I too have joined the ranks of the iPod owners. I say "deliberation" because I took a while to decide whether it was something I'd use... but after seeing that the wife has got a lot of use out of hers, and having wished I had one every time I traveled on a train or plane, I did decide this was what I wanted for Christmas. The next dilemma was the model to choose - the Mini version provides 4 gb of storage (well, 3.7 gb actually) and is marketed with the ability to hold 1,000 songs. The next up holds 20 gb of music, then 40 gb, and then if you're feeling particularly flush (which I'm not) the new iPod Photo with 40 or a massive 60 gb is available (the £429 price tag took it out of contention fairly quickly).

I like the Minis, although I'd prefer blue, green or silver to the wife's choice of pink. The question in my mind was "is 4 gb enough?". To answer this, I started doing some sums based on the number of bytes in 3.7 gb, the average size of a music track in iPod format, and the average number of tracks on a CD. So, with an average track size of 4.5 mb and 15 tracks per CD, you could fit 56 full CDs on a Mini. That figure goes up to 281 CDs on the 20 gb iPod (which has a capacity of 18.5 gb).

Based on this I decided on the 20 gb model... it was only £40 more for all that extra storage, and the battery life in this bigger device is better. The downside, of course, is that it's not as compact as the Mini. I'm not supposed to have it yet, but I've already started loading music onto it. So far I have 606 tracks, which equals 2.24 gb. According to iTunes it would take me 1.7 days to listen to everything. So perhaps the Mini would have provided enough storage, but I can also use the 20 gb device as a spare hard disk. And if it's good enough for Ed Brill...

I bought it from the Apple shop in London's Regent Street - I can recommend a visit there if you're into computers and gadgets, I really like the way they've got their range of goodies mounted onto tables and allow customers to freely play about with them without any pressure to buy. And there's loads of staff on hand to help and advise. Based on the queues and the volume of people leaving the shops with iPods, Apple are in for a bumper Christmas. That's a well-timed statement with all the current rumours about IBM acquiring Apple - those rumours may be rubbish (don't ask me), but it's also strange that IBM have just sold off their PC business, which means an Apple acquisition wouldn't be subject to monopoly scrutiny. Well, that's one theory, time will tell.

Finally, I noticed something amusing on the iPod Mini page on the Apple web site... "lets you bring along enough music for a three-day weekend getaway". That may be true, but on a three-day getaway you wouldn't listen to music continually for three days... unless you were a music-obsessed insomniac with no partner.

Mozilla Thunderbird 1.0 (7th December 2004)

Just a month after Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was released, it's e-mail counterpart has now also reached 1.0 status (even though I've been using it for the best part of a year without a single issue). I won't go into too much detail here because I already have a Thunderbird page (not to be confused with the Gerry Anderson puppet show which was far superior to the travesty of a live-action remake that blighted cinemas and DVD players this year).

Earlier today on a work internal forum I made the bold claim that "no-one has any reason to use Outlook Express now". Shortly after someone pointed out that Outlook Express integrates with Hotmail and Thunderbird doesn't (a long thread then ensued about free and paid-for Hotmail). So, unless you want that Hotmail integration, no-one has any reason to use Outlook Express now (it'll automatically convert all your existing Outlook Express acounts). Grab Thunderbird from the Mozilla site - say no to Spam and stop sending viruses to your mates.

It's the 1st of December (1st December 2004)

...and I've already spotted the first house in the neighbourhood to be decked out ready for Christmas. Now, you might think that it's a bit early for the full Christmas regalia... well, perhaps, but they have done it very tastefully with white draped lights (not the plastic illuminated Santas which have adorned other nearby houses in the past). Good for them I say - Christmas is over before you know it so why not cheer up the place early? Can't help thinking their Christmas tree will be bald by the 25th though.

In pursuit of the perfect Christmas CD (29th November 2004)

We love Christmas in our house, and we love to play our Christmas CD. Christmas is a time when the cheesy and the corny are tolerated (well, within reason... more on that later). For a few years the stalwart of our Christmas listening has been a double CD entitled 'The Best Christmas... Ever'. Over the years I've decided that, while I'm very fond of most of the songs, the "best" statement stretches the truth a bit too far. So do other CDs which also claim to be the 'best Christmas album ever'. For starters, how can any compilation which doesn't contain Greg Lake's 'I Believe In Father Christmas' or John and Yoko's 'Happy Christmas (War is Over)' or Nat 'King' Cole's version of 'The Christmas Song' be the best? Shame really, because it does have many of the Christmas classics - Slade, Paul McCartney, Mike Oldfield, Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Doris Day's dreamy rendition of 'Winter Wonderland' (seriously, I love it) and, best of all, 'Happy Holiday' by Andy Williams. Shame about 'Last Christmas' by Wham (it's horrible).

There is a crime worse than excluding Wizzard's 'I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday' - that's the inclusion of what I call "imposters"... songs which aren't Christmas songs but appear on Christmas compilations. For example, on our CD, 'Only You' by the Flying Pickets. NOT a Christmas song, it just happened to a hit at Christmas. Looking at some of the other available compilations we see similar crimes against Yuletide... 'Mad World' by Michael Andrews & Gary Jules, 'Angels' by Robbie Williams, and 'Over The Rainbow' by Eva Cassidy. And some are just plain awful... 'Mary Had A Little Boy' by Snap and 'Blue Christmas' by Mile Davis.

There's an easy solution to this courtesy of today's technology. We bought another CD (a triple CD compilation actually), pulled a few tracks from iTunes to get the full quota of the songs we wanted and made our own compilation running to three CDs. There were still a couple of disagreements... I really like Bert Jansch's version of 'In the Bleak Midwinter' - the wife hates it. The wife likes the aforementioned Wham atrocity and you know how I feel about that. I wanted the Bo Selecta offering 'Proper Crimbo' and the wife wanted 'Wombling Merry Christmas'. Ah well, nearly the best Christmas CD(s) ever and we agreed on forty-nine out of the fifty-three. At least it gave me the opportunity to mix things up a bit and see how well The Darkness follow on from Mario Lanza.

Why I'm glad I'm a Lotus Notes user (24th November 2004)

I'm in the middle of the week from hell - I'm on a training course in London all week which means catching the train early every morning and returning fairly late in the evening. When catching the train I have two choices - drive a fair distance to Woking and catch a train that only takes 32 minutes to get to Waterloo (and probably spend the journey standing up) or drive a short distance to Sunningdale and catch a train that takes 50 minutes (and get a seat). Sunningdale wins.

As you can imagine, when you're out of the office the e-mail stacks up. And being someone who likes to keep a clean inbox this is not good (currently I have 18 mails in my inbox, and that's way too many). Thankfully I use Lotus Notes and have a GPRS card.

GPRS is good, but has two problems. Firstly, it's not really that fast, although it's better than a dial-up 'land-line' and much better than using your mobile phone as a makeshift modem (and I'll tell you this, lining up the infrared ports on a crowded train can be a challenge). Secondly, with GPRS you pay by the amount of data transferred, not by the connection time. Okay, in some ways that's a good thing - you can keep an open connection and if all you're doing is having a Lotus Sametime conversation then only a tiny amount of the precious data allowance is being used.

But there's the real issue... data allowance. The deal we have with Vodafone allows 35 mb per month. I don't know what happens if you go over that allowance, and to be frank I don't want to get into a position where I find out. So, that allowance has to be carefully managed. One of the problems with e-mail, as I'm sure you know, is that you never can tell when some kind person is going to send you an amusing video clip, a large document, a very large spreadsheet (and let's face it, only one of the several thousand rows will be of interest to you), or an enormous presentation. That 35 mb allowance could easily be wiped out in two days if you're not in control of what arrives.



This is where Lotus Notes is a godsend. One of the improved features in 6.x is the ability to control exactly what is replicated down to your local mail box (more so than in R5 which did give a level of control but not as much granularity). I have a location profile named 'GPRS' (yes I know, very imaginative) which I've been using this week (and when I get home I switch to one named 'Broadband'). Under the replication settings for 'GPRS' I can control the size of downloaded e-mails and also file attachments. I truncate the e-mails at 30 kb, and most standard text-only e-mails easily fall within this limit. I limit the file attachment size to 15 kb - in truth this doesn't really catch many file attachments, but often it's the text within the e-mails that's important. The result is a truncated e-mail which reports how large it's eventual size will be. That gives the user (in this case, me) the ability to make an informed decision about what to do next... if it's 60 kb and looks important, the entire mail can be retrieved immediately or at the next replication. If it's a 1.5 mb video clip of a monkey scratching it's nuts I'll wait till I get onto broadband later.

The Incredibles (20th November 2004)

Well, that sorts out the argument about the best movie of 2004. Pixar's latest offering is by far their best, and is a class above even 'Shrek 2'. 'Finding Nemo' was dull by comparison. Never mind about waiting for it to arrive on DVD... who fancies a trip to the cinema next week?

'The Incredibles' has everything... action from start to finish, a well-worked plot, great character development, plenty of gags, and the type of sparkling script that the James Bond movies from the last fifteen years have cried out for. The animation sets a new high standard and the design is something else - sometimes art-deco, sometimes slightly retro, and contrasting the square dull world of the super heroes' civilian lives with the flashy modern world of villain Syndrome's secret island lair.

If the movie has any failings it's that the plot may be a bit confusing for the under-eights, and the finer points of the satire and wit may be lost on them. So may the fact that 'The Incredibles' forms an interesting juxtaposition against 'Spider-man' - just as Peter Parker struggled to come to terms with life as a super-hero, Mr Incredible (or Bob Parr to his new colleagues) struggles to come to terms with a life as an insurance clerk (cue an amusing bungled attempt to re-live the super-hero life with one of his ex-cronies, Frozone). My daughter thought it was too noisy, and my wife was still going on about some film about a tubby woman with large pants. Personally I'm glad that I'm still young enough at heart to enjoy a movie like this. If 'The Incredibles' is supposed to be for kids, I'm glad to be a big kid.

Quiz night - victory! (14th November 2004)

The wife thinks I take this far too seriously, but after an unlucky second placing at the first school quiz night (and a terrible third place the second time round) I wasn't going to let this go. To cut a long story short, the wife and I, accompanied by eight other team members, wiped the floor with the opposition. We finished on 115 points out of a possible 130, 10 points ahead of the second placed team. At the end of round four we were a few points behind - but the teams ahead of us had all played their jokers. We scored maximum points on our joker round (thus doubling the score) and from then on we led. So it didn't even matter that wrote down 'Mike Tyson', then changed the answer only to find out that Mike Tyson was the right answer. Nor did it matter that I was split between answering 'The Crazy World of Arthur Brown' and 'The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band' for a 1960's music question, and incorrectly plumped for Arthur Brown (it was the Bonzos).

The wife suggests I should let the matter rest now, but I believe I have a title to defend. I'm sure my learned team members would agree.