I woke up on the first of my nine alarms, which was a result, and was out of bed before the second one went off, so the day got off to a good, if dark and groggy 5.30 start. The train ran to time (and was surprisingly friendly - everyone seems to know everyone else on the early trains) and I made ITN by 7.20.

Breakfast producer Rob spotted me in the LBC office and alerted News Direct who dragged me in for an interview on that and the ITN News Channel. What a confusing studio that is - screens everywhere! Out of there and straight in to LBC to do Simon (Bates) and Sandy (Warr). I’ve been doing trails in their show for about 6 months, but it was the first time we’d actually met, which was nice. They said they’d been expecting someone ‘much older, who looks like he doesn’t often come up for air’. I think that translates to ‘geek’. I finished with them just before 8, then went straight in to an IRN studio to do an interview for the national bulletins. Three interviews on four services in just under twenty minutes is a record, I reckon.

I was tempted to hang around for another cup of tea but thought I ought to head off towards the Windows XP launch in case there were any delays, particularly as the confirmation had warned it was oversubscribed and if you weren’t one of the first in you’d end up watching it in the foyer on a video screen.

So, I walked to Holborn and took a bus to Waterloo, and made the Royal Festival Hall by 8.30. Registration wasn’t supposed to open for another half hour, but there were hundreds of people already inside, so I queued up for my pass which, like almost everyone else’s, was strangely missing, as was my name on their database (again, like a lot of others). I showed them my confirmation and they printed me a pass and checked my bags, but only because I admitted nobody had done it yet - if I’d said they had I’d have been straight through.

Somehow I managed to get into the wrong briefing. While the other journalists were siphoned off into a small room with a batch of CEOs keen to talk about how Windows XP is revolutionising their businesses, I took a seat in the seventh row of a room of 2,900 people (unfortunately next to the only one with really bad breath) at the front of which the stage was made up to look like an enormous XP desktop of blue stage (aka task bar), and the green hills and blue sky of the wallpaper. Two large screens (aka windows) hung from the ceiling, showing images of human achievement converging on Earth like the rather flat craft of an invading alien force. We sat watching this to the soundtrack of American Beauty for thirty minutes when suddenly the lights dipped, the tempo picked up and the looping video of invading images switched to colour and went a little mad.

The video built to a climax, and then a spotlight shone on the podium at one end of the stage where Jon Snow (Channel 4 News) welcomed everyone along and promised to keep a ‘ruthless focus on the event’s schedule’, starting with a video piece from Steve Ballmer (CEO, Microsoft).

This was a little disappointing as since seeing Steve Ballmer’s ape-like conference entrance that is currently doing the rounds online I’d been quite looking forward to him being there. Of course, it was a “joke”. The video stuck half way through and the man himself came running down the stairs to the stage, yelling about how much he loved this product. The spinning disco lights above the stage had been dimmed down, but their sensors were still very much alive, and they span madly for the next ten minutes in time to his speech. Eventually someone spotted them and switched them off.

He was an excellent speaker, reverting to notes in his pocket because he couldn’t see his PowerPoint slides, and coming across as very natural and enthusiastic. He made some interesting comments I wrote down for the show (Windows XP is 17% easier to use; we are in the middle of a software journey etc) and then it was demos for an hour or so.

Marks out of five? Certainly worthy of a four at least. Very well organised, particularly when you think how many people they had there. It was quite impressive, really.

I found my way to the press room afterwards for drinks and nibbles with Will, and then wandered back to Soho for lunch with Gordon and Ursula in the sandwich shop around the corner from the office. We chatted about non-worky things, which was good, and then I went to the office to open my post, answer my emails and catch up on my messages until heading back to LBC at half four.

Uwa, our stand-in producer for the next two weeks, was dealing with potential guests on the phone so I read the paper until Gordon arrived and we could pre-record an interview with Match.com for next week’s show. We got to talking about the unsuitability of dating by fax and I blurted out about how it would be worse sending a dump by fax. Of course, I meant dumping someone by fax - sending a dump by fax would be something entirely different altogether.

That done, we were pretty much free until the pre-show trail with Peter, so we had dinner with Simon Williams, who was this week’s news guest, and worked out our questions for Microsoft, who arrived at quarter to seven for a quick briefing.

In all, I think the show went quite well. We went in cold - straight into an interview at the very start of the show rather than the usual 15 minute chat Gordon and I do because Microsoft had to get away, but it was fun, and I think we managed to get across both sides of the story - good and bad.

Train home: slow, but not unexpected.

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