Lotusblog

It’s a cold, windy day today. The afternoon was lovely- well, as lovely as a sunny, cold and windy winter’s afternoon can be, I guess. The geek in me decided about an hour ago to put my Casio Pro-Trek outside to measure the temperature. I can say with confidence that the air temperature on my balcony is now 3.4 degrees Celsius. The temperature inside my apartment is 25 degrees.

I am on a train again- this time heading back to London. Just finished my meetings in Cardiff. Cardiff was a curious place. I would like to get back and check it out a bit more.

I am looking out my window now at a massive sprawling housing estate. The suburbs always upset me for some reason. I don’t know it is about them, but they just seem so oppressive. Actually, they are oppressive. I guess I don’t like being oppressed.

My new phone is going well. I bought a Sony Ericsson T68i a couple of months ago (through eBay) expressly for the purpose of this trip (and all subsequent trips). The main reason I chose it was the design and the Bluetooth support (it was a vanguard phone when it was released a couple of years ago) and so far it has been great. Syncing it with my Mac- and getting all my contacts onto it- was a cinch. And the great thing is that when I go to Thailand, or when I go to Australia, I will be able to use it there too. I haven’t had a chance to test out the GPRS, and to be honest I don’t even know if O2 offers GPRS or not, but it’s nice to know that I can dial up to the net using this phone as a Bluetooth modem on either GSM or GPRS. At the moment that isn’t necessary as some fool called Dan has set up an open wireless network near my office- so I use that to connect to the net. I sort of feel sorry for him- he is running all the Windows services like file and printer sharing. If I were malevolent (or perhaps just if I had more time) I could really have fun there.

I leave for London tomorrow. Will be away for about 10 days. (notice to thieves: there is a vicious dog in my house, so, err, don’t break in while I am gone. Or you’ll regret it)

Anyway, the pre-trip preparation doesn’t consist of making sure I have 6 pairs each of socks and undies, clean T-shirts etc, this time my pre-trip preparation is more like this:

Have I synced my Bluetooth phone with my address book? Do I have my iBook data mirrored on my Desktop? Is iBlog set to work from my iBook? Is my Clie up to date and ready to go? Do I have all my relevant sim cards, Bluetooth adapters, rechargers, power-cables? Is my London number working properly? Is it diverting calls to voice-mail? Do I have my firewire cable ready in case our office doesn’t have a router and I have to do IP over firewire?

When did all this happen? Travel didn’t used to be like this.

For no good reason I made a semacode. Now you can hold your Java-enabled semacode-literate mobile phone or PDA up to the screen, point the lens at this:

Get a bit closer

… and you will be magically whisked away to my website. First person to try it gets a free lunch.

What if I put the CSS files and templates that I want to use into the appropriate iBlog folder, then do a “get info” on them and lock them. Then they won’t be able to be overwritten. Would this preserve my styles? Will anyone answer me?