Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

A literally flying visit home - less than (count 'em) three days in Blighty before I head back to the left coast and sunny Silicon Valley. We were on the flight out of LA after flyingsauce's on Thursday - but delays meant we couldn't bump into him at the airport.

Back in London, and today and a chunk of yesterday have been taken up with dealing with the results of a mouse or two taking up residence in the dried food cupboard while we were away. Our mogs are failing in their duties and need discipline (or possibly less food). Still, that cupboard has never been so clean...

All checked in on Virgin for my trip back to SF tomorrow for BEA World. I'm looking forward to Tuesday's keynote speech by Burt Rutan. I may even go all fanboy and get his autograph.

(In other news it appears that autopope and karentraviss are now bona fide airport novelists. I spotted books by both at SFO on Thursday as we transited to LAX for our flight home.)

My friend and fellow IT writer David Mery was recently arrested under the Terrorism Act for reading SMS messages and carrying a rucksack at a tube station.

It turns out that one of the reasons why he was detained was that some of his work colleagues had recently had a training exercise where they had been taking photographs with camera phones (not surprising considering the business they're in):

Also that some staff had been seen photographing tube stations with a camera phone. (Most of my colleagues do have camera phones – also on 2nd June, as part of a team building exercise, new graduates were supposed to photograph landmarks and try to get a picture of themselves with a policeman.)

I wonder what the police would make of my other blog, "Watching the Watchers", if that happened to me? After all, I spend some of my time taking photographs of security cameras and publishing them on the internet...