These days we barely get to finish installing one version of Creative Suite before another one pops up - personally I can’t wait to see what new features are on offer.

This time it’s CS4 on the horizon and in just over a month I’ll be off to the Take the Shortcut to Brilliant Tour in Birmingham, sitting in the Odeon with my popcorn, ice cream and pop in hand,

It has taken quite some time but we now have a Windows Server 2003 infrastructure across the board, phew, time to take a rest and reap the rewards eh? Not likely, firstly we are busy on our server room regeneration and secondly I think someone may be dropping hints that perhaps it

As part of our ongoing computer room overhaul project (Computer Room Regeneration) we have spent a great deal of time with our suppliers discussing, configuring and finally ordering our new HP 42U 800W Rack so our bunch of DL380 servers no longer need to rest on two-drawer filing cabinets.

Airflow is a big issue as we have quite a small computer room with no vents other than the air conditioning units (which do like to break down from time to time much to my horror - typically at 3am in a morning). We have obtained the airflow kits, roof fans, blanking plates and other equipment to be really really sure that the airflow through the cabinet is maximised (and hopefully make our IT a little greener in the process!).

I could barely contain my excitement as the guys lumbered the cabinet up the stairs onto the first floor together with all the additional peripherals and gizmos that we have ordered following checking and double-checking with our supplier and their distributor. What a relief when it finally arrived upstairs in all its monolith looking glory - and after I opened up all the additional boxes to check everything imagine my surprise when I phoned down to the warehouse to find out when the sides of the rack would be brought upstairs.

Their response, and indeed the supplier response after a phone call:

“What sides?”

Did I mention that airflow was an important factor for us?

My old trusty laptop (I say laptop, it was anything but - it was a desktop replacement) finally bit the bullet after four years so I am typing this on my new HP Mobile Workstation 8710w. It took quite a bit of digging around looking at different specifications to

Currently, we are investigating the available options for hosting office applications on the Internet, so I read with interest the post “Google Vs. Microsoft - Office Politics” by Moshe Zeidman as this is the first time we have ever looked in a direction other than Microsoft for our office applications. I have written about some of these issues before in “Who should we rely on for our business applications: Google or Microsoft?“, Starting out with Google Apps

Here is, I am sure, a familiar story. I managed to get a day holiday on Monday but instead of resting I got a knock at the door from a next door neighbour who was experiencing computer problems, and there went four hours of my holiday.

What made this story different however is my neighbour, having only had the computer for less than three months, took the initiative of calling a well known support desk but was having difficulty, due to language differences,

Having recently joined English Heritage in an attempt to increase the number of interesting and child friendly places to take the kids I was surprised to find the effective application of technology, in particular, at the Wroxeter Roman City in Shropshire. Upon entry to the venue we were supplied with small hand-held mobile phone style units to use as we wandered around the site; these came with handy little lanyards to stop them getting in the way.

Information posts were dotted around at various points around the site, pressing the relevant number on the keypad rewarded us with our own virtual tour guide so we could learn as much, or as little, as we liked about each particular point of interest based on our personal preference. This site is great with plenty of area for the kids to run around and a picnic area to settle down, eat, drink and watch the little dynamos running around with their seemingly abundant energy.

The use of technology was interesting for two reasons, firstly because the kids loved it, wandering about looking for posts, pushing buttons and trying to converse with the tour guide and secondly because I just finished my research project at Uni that looked into the area of mobile push applications. It struck me that if these audio information devices were made location aware, perhaps based on RFID or localised Bluetooth technology, then we would pretty much have a demonstration of exactly what I have been researching for all these months.

It is always exciting to see technology being usefully applied in unexpected places and even more so for its application to so naturally add value and complement the facilities which it supports.

After three long, hardworking and sometimes gruelling,

Silly me. I have been living under the illusion that I told the computer what to do but recently the balance of power has started to shift as machines start asserting their authority and take their first tentative steps in trying to communicate with their human peripherals.

Driving along yesterday I was “told” by the car that the Navigation CD-Rom was unreadable, “NAVIGATION CD UNREADABLE” and no further driving instructions would be offered until I sorted out the problem. I was then “told” to arrange a service for my car , “ARRANGE SERVICE” - the message appeared on the dashboard (with a flashing spanner icon just in case I was having trouble understanding the concept of a service) and refused to show any other information for a while. Then, shortly afterwards the car bleeped up and told me to fill up with diesel right away, “REFILL FUEL NOW”.

I stopped off at the petrol station and decided to get a few snacks for the kids but the credit card machine was on a break and refused to accept my card, “CARD REFUSED”, the cash machine outside told me it didn’t like the look of me and would not be issuing any cash to me today, “NO CASH” - fortunately I managed to scrabble some cash together and make the purchase.

This morning when I got to work, the computer would not let me logon telling me “ACCESS DENIED” - “You must change your password immediately, you have been warned previously to do this and have refused so now buddy I am withdrawing all your computing rights until you do something about it.” - I thought I managed the technology around here but apparently there is a higher virtual authority at work. Oh, and my email box is being filled with messages telling me tersely that my email is getting full, “Mailbox FULL” -

I posted an update recently on our ongoing virtualisation project Virtualising takes time but it is worth it