Mark Dalton

Well somewhat of a different start to the holiday season this year when I decided last minute to join a bunch of online friends in Liverpool for what is affectionally known as a TweetUp. I have been chatting to most of these people for a while now and when the chance came up to meet them face to face I thought it was a great idea and a brilliant way to start of the festive season.

I worked from home on the Friday as I didn””t fancy doing the commute in and out of London to then drive up to Liverpool and it was a good job I did as I woke Friday morning to a dusting of snow. I set off late afternoon and made good time only stopping a couple of quick comfort break””s and was checked in, unpacked, and in the bar by 19:30.

The weekend was spent chatting over beer, food, and the odd cup of coffee, about a variety of subjects from emerging technologies to Christmas plans. We did manage to get out and about a little bit and see a few of Liverpool””s landmarks but it was very cold and we did tend to break the touring up with beer breaks on a regular basis, so didn””t cover quite as much as we could of, but we did make it to the Apple store.

I also managed to meet up with Don McAllister the host of ScreenCastsOnline and The Mac ScreenCast Guy. Don was just as nice in the flesh as he is online and had some great insights and views on upcoming technologies. I also manage to meet up with three of my oversea””s contacts, Jane from Australia who was visiting family in the UK for Christmas, Paul Shadwell who flew in especially from Zurich who is very knowledgeable on Virtualisation and hosted services, and David Allen who also flew in especially from Barcelona, who run””s amongst other things the Mac 20 Questions website.

A great time was had by all and I think its fair to say that some good friendships were cemented in the process. Not to mention we all got a ScreenCastsOnline cap Most people left Sunday morning but I had arranged to stay another night, which in hindsight wasn””t such a good idea, although it did allow me to do a little extra Christmas shopping and see a little more of the city.

Monday morning I checked out and headed for home and made good time until I hit Newbury where it had been snowing and snowing pretty hard. As I came down the A339 it was bumper to bumper traffic and nothing was moving. It took me 7.5 hours to get from Newbury to my home in Basingstoke, 5.5 hours of that was spent crossing Basingstoke itself. I have personally never seen anything like it, and Basingstoke made the national news with 2000-3000 people affected. It took 3-4 to clear completely but luckily I didn””t have to go further than my parents around the corner, which was safer to reach on foot. I was lucky however as poor Paul Shadwell got to Manchester airport on Sunday to find it shut down, and finally made it back to Zurich on Wednesday after travelling down to London””s Heathrow airport.

Wow its cold in the mornings now! Standing on the train platform is never a nice experience, but this last week with the rain, winds, and generally low temperatures it has been just horrible, and don’t even get me started on defrosting the car.

So I had one main job this weekend, and that was to buy a pair of gloves, a hat, a scarf, and a new umbrella. Of course now I have I will find the set that I brought last year, well except the umbrella as I left that on site at Microsoft a couple of weeks ago, so will never see that again.

After a nice lay in on Saturday I headed into Basingstoke town centre, what a mistake in hindsight. Apparently there is an event coming up called “Christmas” and it requires every single person to buy anything with a christmas tree or snow scene on it. Well, I persevered and secured myself a very stylish matching hat and glove set. However trying to find a scarf was a little harder, I mean what the smurf it a neck nook? Whatever it is it isn’t a scarf so I headed for old faithful, M&S. Now they had a wide range of scarf’s but the regular ones usually cause my eczema to flair up so I paid a little extra for one of their premium ones. No kidding its like stroking a golden labrador puppy.

After fighting the crowds I was in need of a sit down but in the interests of productivity decided to get a hair cut. I have a hat now, so I can embrace the thinning on top, and save myself those valuable minutes in the morning. I have been going to same place for years but noticed a couple of weeks ago a new shop which just looked a lot better. I checked out the prices and they were a couple of pounds more than my regular place, but I must say I will be going back. A much better cut, far more friendly, and an all round better experience. It had absolutely nothing to do with the really cute Slovakian lady that cut my hair.

Now there was one more task, and it was one I really didn’t want to do until after Christmas, but I blame the haircut and my good mood, and my new stance of doing things when they need to be done (when it suit me). During the week my first generation TimeCapsule died. I think, given the smell, the power supply gave up, but bearing in mind this is the one I used in India I am surprised it lasted so long (40 degrees and dust). So I picked up one of the new 1TB Dual band versions. The need to do this was exacerbated by the fact that my MacBook Air suddenly experienced a corrupted disk the day after the TimeCapsule died. Now I was able to format the drive and restore from a SuperDuper backup but it was a couple of weeks old, and meant that I had to go through a bunch of updates again. Not a major problem, just annoying and time consuming.

One benefit that has become apparent and made it worth while is that I quite often work on my iMac and listen to PodCasts, or watch TV via SlingPlayer. Using the previous version of the TimeCapsule whenever my MacBook Air decided to backup everything would become a little jittery. The new Dual Band version seems to prevent that.

While I was there I also picked up the new Apple Magic Mouse. I have been using the Logitech VX Nano with my MacBook Air up until now but it requires a USB dongle. MacBook Air owners will know that the MacBook Air only has a single USB slot and when mobile I use a 3G dongle, which means no external mouse. The Magic Mouse gets me around this by working via Bluetooth and the fact it has the basic multitouch functions is a great bonus. Now I am still playing, but so far it fits my needs.

So safe and sound at home where it’s warm today I set about upgrading Mum’s laptop from Microsoft Vista to Windows 7. I must say I was surprised. I used the Backup and Restore feature in Vista to backup the machine to an external USB drive and then formatted and loaded Windows 7, it was completed in about 25 minutes. The Windows Updates however probably added another 30 minutes to the process, but was very smooth. I downloaded and installed Microsoft Security Essentials to provide anti-virus protection and then restored the data. I was I will admit amazed that it all worked very well. I installed Microsoft Office 2007, Picasa, and Skype all without any issues. I think Microsoft might actually be “Getting it” at last. Of course there was another round of Windows Updates for Office, but once again it was a smooth process.

My next task is to try and restore the email setup, that is a task for tomorrow however.