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A very strange morning. I had a press meet at half nine. Inevitably it didn’t start until 10.20 to allow for latecomers. That wouldn’t have been a problem if they’d laid on a nibbly breakfast, and had I not arrived in London at half eight, leaving me over an hour to sit around drinking coffee before even thinking about finding the venue.

I’ve often believed that in the aftermath of a nuclear war it would be only cockroaches and journalists that would be able to survive. The former, because it’s already been proved that they’re pretty much impervious to the effects of radiation, and the latter because of all the practice we’ve had scavenging for food at press parties.

Even in this place, though, I could find nothing more substantial than a mug of tea and some threatening looking green juice that I wisely avoided, neither of which would sustain you for long in the dark nuclear winter. It turned out, later, that they were ginseng shots.

Then again, taking one wouldn’t necessarily have been a bad idea, as I found it very difficult to stay awake through the presentation, which was done in the worst English outside of Basildon and revealed far more than was particularly necessary, including the loophole that helps company X get its products into the EU without paying any tax and the fact that one of the slides was only up on the screen because the presenter liked the look of the woman in the top right-hand corner.

Hmmm…

All in all, a bit of a waste of time, although I didn’t admit it when they asked if it had been helpful. Turns out there was only three journalists there in total anyway, with the rest of them being distributors, which explains why they didn’t talk about anything of any interest to even the most geekish reader, thinking instead that sales margins and market positioning were more pertinent. Which, I suppose, they were.

Much network fiddling tonight, the upshot of which is I now have two networks running through the house - one at 11Mb/s and the other at 54Mb/s, so we can connect to either, depending on what speed network card we’re using without slowing down the fastest network. iTunes did get itself in a bit of a flap about the Airport Express base station, but after some manual tweaking it’s happy enough and one network is feeding off the other. Why the automatic setup couldn’t do it, though, I don’t know.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 12th, 2004 at 10:23 pm and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.