It all started with a simple rule:

Back when LDC were first starting to do promotions and freebies for conferences Matt White (who is less the leader of LDC and more the person we don’t argue with) laid down just one guideline

“Each year’s promotion must be better than the year before”

This was to ensure that we never degraded our giveaways into free pens, mouse mats or any of the other dross that marketing are sure will stick in the mind of a potential client

To this end we thought of amazing tshirts (you can get them from here as wallpapers) with thanks to Ben Poole and Julian Woodward for some truly original designs, but we were producing an original design for each day of IBM connect/Lotusphere (plus some for the other LUGS and things like the caffeine shot mugs) so our creative sap failed after a few years.

Then we came up with the conference survival kit which was heralded as “the best Lotusphere give away ever”

…….and so now we are f**ked

we have tried, oh heavens we have tried

we have brainstormed

and conceptualised

and pondered

and even gave it some thought

In the end the strain started to tell, Woowar lost his hearing and sanity to an over loud playing of the Macarena, Ben Poole lost the toilet and I lost the ability to not realise coffee flavoured tequila is not a good idea, then came a faint croak from the parched lips of an LDC member “I wish I had a magic drink ticket”

We focused on each other, “What? as in Beer tokens?”, “Yes, but posher”, “so we can buy people drinks at any time, you give them to people when you are not near a bar or when people are busy, so when they see any of us later we know we owe them a drink, it means that we can catch up with them, they don’t have to find the same LDC member to get said drink, win win all round”

“sounds a great plan, what could go wrong”

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

We had all been missing the first Tuesday club by Information Security Solutions during its couple of months hiatus so were really pleased when it announced this month’s event would be going ahead.

There was a new sponsor in Arxan who did a fine job doing active tours and trying to talk to everyone without a sales pitch, particular credit goes to their tech (I have his card but am not publishing his name, it is a security meet up after all) who worked his socks off handling the huge variety of questions that were fired at him while only drinking water 🙁 , on a side note I had not even heard of Arxan before this meet up despite coming into contact with both their clients products and having mobile security issues which they could have really helped with, this was defiantly a “Ooooo” moment and exactly what the 1st Tuesday is for (I spent the trip home reading their web site)

As normal conversations varied wildly from the minutiae of users rights to privacy on a corporate network in various different countries through to Gandhi’s life and achievements (especially comparing his self sacrifice compared to modern leaders), though that makes it sound far more high brow than it was,

I had a great time as normal and this was an excellent night for learning new stuff and meeting one of the serious players in the mobile security.

(Yes I always take a picture when people are facing away)

After helping a client Project manager with a cheap long term “snapshot” style of backup involving some western digital Green Hard drives, some Rsync commands and the very nice anti static drive cases by Wiebetech I find this email in my in-box

On my desk this morning that was hardly clean,
The miraculous hard drive fairy has been,
And in the middle of the night,
Left a gift of tera bytes.
How thoughtful of the kind fairy to think,
Of the need to use the superb rsync,
To provide the back-up strategy I craved,
Means all my data will now be saved.

Sometimes even PM’s can be cool