Some time ago I promised an update. But as you all know I’m useless, so I haven’t gotten around to it until now. And everything has disappeared in some kind of caffeine fueled haze where new memories replace the old before they’re successfully archived, maybe its a kernel race condition, maybe its just broken.
Now, where did I get to? …ah, yes, last seen (unsuccessfully) car shopping in Worthing, maybe another time. After that I headed up to Cambridge for the Last Dance/Rome Burns gig, which was fantastic, and noticably one of the slickest gigs I’ve seen for a long time – theres so many times when the schedule is all over the place, the sound man forgot his hearing aid and nobody wants to dance. I didn’t make it in time for Fire and Forget, I was still wandering around outside looking confused. Someone had leant Daevid a (rotary, floor standing) fan so he was playing rock star. Then the singer from Last Dance looked like his hair had been attacked by Mattis suboptimal scaling algorithm. Rocking gig. More like that please.
Tuesday I was off to Madrid for the S60 Summit…I was standing next to Matt Miller for the horse show (but hadn’t realised it was him, its been a while and either he’s changed somewhat or thats not the Matt Miller I know). The party on day one was at a hillside villa overlooking Madrid, a fabulous venue. It kicked off with a horse show, then a band and barbeque. The horses, while being appreciated for their traditionalism were not particularly well received amongst the techies – certainly I have little interest in horses, if anything they rather intimidate me.
The next day was the serious stuff at the conference itself, with a day of talking about the future of phone development and meeting some of the people behind the exciting things going on in this world these days. I’m not really that much of a socialiser, so I tend to tire quickly at these kinds of events and run out of things to say (which is something I’ve been doing quite a lot lately).
Thursday I took part in a focus group around a new piece of user interface (potentially) in a future version of S60, I can’t say much about it here, except that it was on the journey to this event that I was rescued by the chap from NEC. At the end of the day I had a choice of catching a taxi into the town centre, rushing to find some food and heading for the airport, or a taxi straight to the airport. So I ended up waiting for hours at the airport.
I finally arrived home at 2am on friday morning. In time to get up and head north for Whitby. I thought I had left a reasonable amount of time for that journey, but I hadn’t accounted for quite so many accidents on the M1 northbound. The scariest of which was actually on the southbound carriageway and was still in progress when I first saw it – there was a very unwell looking person in the passenger seat of a car embedded in the central reservation, he looked more frightened than damaged, but clearly wasn’t in a very good state. I do hope they’re all alright.
By 7 I rolled into Ruswap where I found the Cabbages and a Matti and we agreed a plan to head to the Spa where there were some bands. I don’t remember many of them. Soho Dolls stood out as exactly the kind of riot grrrl music I’m liking at the moment, she really didn’t have to take her shirt off to get us to remember the band (though she was cute so I wasn’t complaining too much) ((no nudity thanks to carefully positioned insulation tape)).
The next night Rome Burns opened proceedings which the most stonking set I’ve ever seen them play. They had a difficult slot, but there was plenty of crowd and enthusiasm. They were followed by some other bands who didn’t seem to matter, there was so much bass I had to escape to the lobby. Cruxshadows came on later but I couldn’t take them seriously, and I had to leave again.
I was amused by the introduction of the automatic doors into the lobby which seemed to mean that the door was always open letting in the finest the north sea could throw at us. When the door was wholly manual it would remain closed unless someone was actually using it, which seems like a better solution all around.
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