Last week the session that Matt White and I submitted for Connect 2014 was announced as one of the first wave of approved sessions.

This will be the first session that Matt and I have ever presented together, mainly due to our massively disparate methods of both preparing and presenting (he is the ultimate professional with proper preparation, practice and finishes everything well in time to step back and take an objective view of the session, as for me….I do all that as well but compact it into the two hours before I’m due to present 🙂 )

However given the opportunity of doing a f**king awesome session around a certain idea that seemed to have merit (which we thought of during a shared curry) we decided to work together (the decision might have been aided by the beers that went with the curry).

Well thank goodness the session got approved, and got approved EARLY as we now have s**t loads to get ready before we can even get to doing the 200+ slides for a “Show ‘n’ Tell”, Matt has to write a fully featured Notes app that will serve as a suitable base, not a noddy app either, one that you could see working in real life, while I build us a Domino and Connections demo environment, populate it with data and write the native connections app to go with the Notes db, this has got to be done to perfect standards as we have used the word ‘proper’ in the title and in our green and pleasant land that MEANS something, only then can we settle down and actually code and write the presentation, then Matt is going to make us practice it again and again till it’s perfect …. Wailll

Matt can’t we just go back to the curry house and do it later?

Two of the things you discover when you set out on a change of career, is how many friends you have got and how much real use you are after your years of effort.

Well I’m still working my way though the discovery of the latter (although initial work loads are looking good) but as far as the former goes it turns out that I am a very rich man,

Along that line a shout out goes to Mike Smith of the Turtle Partnership who took the time out when I was on site at their offices to pass on some tips that he has from his years of experience in running a consultancy / business.

With the tips came a book called The Perfect Consultant which made for interesting if slightly eye popping reading, a short book (barely more than a pamphlet), every page contained stuff I should not only know but act upon, think of it as an expanded and professional version of Working from Home by the Oatmeal, From finding Work and clients to behaviour and dealing with harsh decisions, this book seem to deal with it all.

This book looks like it will live up to is boast of “All you need to get it right first time” so thanks again Mike