I feel like i have wandered in to a club for big game hunters, its more fanatical than a star trek convention, I’m sure if a tattooist opened up in the product showcase floor, he would make a killing.

today has consisted of discovering the following

1) Mind blown with all the new stuff, had to take a quiet hour to get all i wanted to do in order in my mind (and on paper)
2) Cognos are actually here in person so I’m going hunting them this week
3) Selling Ideajam is not going to be hard as it is not only amazing but now award wining (its notes porn)
4) Got contact names for the foundation stuff i want
5) There is tons of sessions i want to go to, having to be VERY picky

Please forgive me for leaving you now as there are free drinks and a beach with my name on it. (hmmm must sort out the parties for the rest of the week)

I’ve just had the most amazing bit of news, I have been asked to go an booth babe at LotusSphere, i cant believe it!!!, as there was no way i could have afforded it otherwise, now is just have to give the impression that i know what I’m doing (grin), the plus side for this blog is that i have to keep up a steady stream of useful entries so its/I’m not an embarrassment, ahhh well, roll on Jan the 17th, (happy dance)

Even more good news comes in the form of the London Developer Co-op, which im doing with Matt White, Ben Poole, Rob Wills, and a few others (who have not got round to giving me their profiles the lazy sods), strange as it may seem i reckon the credit crunch is the right time to do something like this, to give big consultancy quality of service but built up of small consultancy parts to give a small consultancy price.

As a half admin/half dev i always like to take the other persons point of view (which is even a good view for life), but this bloke takes the biscuit and in fact has made my and a number of other peoples life hell, this gentle man is the head of the http://www.five-ten-sg.com, and his view of spam is draconian by even the most deranged point of view, if he catches a spammer on a ISP network, he blacklists all IP address on that network, ALL IP’S!!!, WTF!!,
It turns out that someone who is hosted by fasthosts.com, has performed a “misc” offence against his spamming rules, and now all my domains have been black listed because i have the affrontory to share the same hosting provider as them, to add to this you cant request your ip address to be removed like other blacklists (there is rumours that you can with cash but i don’t have anything other than forum notes to substantiate this), and there are no contact details on the site (have to get them from whois), thankfully not many Spam agencies use his company, but enough for me to get complaints,

I thought i must be going daft but a quick goggling shows that i am by no means alone, so if you are an admin, please stop using this loonies black list (quite a lot of the black list monitors don’t even list his sites as they are classed and “unreliable and unreasonable”, but as a crowning example i give this in which he has used his position as a black list controller to black list the whole ip range of a magazine company (all associated and innocent companies included {some 127 publications}) who have phoned him up twice in 6 months to sell him their magazine.

There are levels in the fight against Spam, people, you don’t nuke a town to get one killer, you don’t ban an ISP to get one spammer.

Well UKlug has finished and i really enjoyed it, learnt a lot and took home some great things, but to put it all in bullet points

Good:
1) Some real big guns there and some fantastic speakers
2) Very well organised and venue was perfect.
3) Very good vendor turn out and we went away with a couple of them we will use.
4) Cutting edge (well as far as notes can be).

Bad:
1) I completely screwed up my session (very poor proof reading, under ran, projector was max 640×480, which was to low for my content but i had not thought to check before, overly nervy), though got more people coming up to me afterwards for thanks, questions and requests than the last one (perhaps it was out of pity)
2) I think that keeping a big gun talk for last session, would stop people like me slopping of to the pub and staying there on a warm Friday afternoon.

Neutral:
1) Faced the double edge sword of London being the venue, on the plus side its very easy for a lot of people to get too and so the official
attendance is high, but on the down side, people don’t commit to it and so drop out as work finds it easy to cancel/call back people, but what can you do about that

Exhibiting a set of suicidal tendency’s totally unlike them, members of the UKLUG organising committee asked me to do an interview with lotususergroup.org, the result can be found Here, i present this instead of anything useful i can put in a blog (i have tons of half finished articles, and stuff i should have done, but instead i have been ignoring my out of main client work, bad bad man, and instead have been swimming in a river in Yorkshire, yes it was flippin cold, i have spared you the horror of inserting an image here)