After travelling from Portugal, and a great two-and-a-half days in Manchester, I finally arrived the night before last at my Grandfather's house in Hertfordshire (an English county bordering with London). Manchester was really great, I got to have some very interesting one-to-one conversations with various influential people: Charles Geiger (WSIS Executive Secretariat Executive Director), the Tunisian ICT Minister & the UK's Ambassador to Geneva amongst others. It was my second time in the city, but the last time I was there was for just two hours so I didn't get to see it at all; it's an odd place, as much as I came to like it in the end. It's always a bizarre experience travelling around the country which I grew up in (particularly outside of London/South-East England).

So I arrived in the countryside, and it is really weird. Firstly, it was hard to sleep with such a deafening silence. Then, the next day I opened my iBook to discover that I had free wireless internet access in the middle of nowhere (although the wifi connection is still there, it no longer lets me access the internet (ARGH!)). Six cars parked outside the house I'm staying at (neighbours' cars and my Grandfather's) had been temporarily disabled by some crazy electronic waves (perhaps some super wifi experiment gone wrong), although this morning my Grandfather's car is working again. The nearest Starbucks is an odd bus ride through countryside and semi-motorway, and the sides of the roads are full of rabbits jumping around! And Starbucks closes at 6pm!!!

Well, it's nice to be here, as long as it's kept to a minimum. Today's the funeral of my Great Uncle, so that should be interesting. And back to Porto on Tuesday. It was great so see everyone in London (Alex, Alberto, Alicia etc., hopefully Nick on Sunday).

Luke

I just caught this on O'Reilly Net's Radar:

"Microsoft UK has launched a "Thought Thieves" film competition to solicit user-contributed short films "on the theme of 'How intellectual property theft affects both individuals and society'." Seems to me a good opportunity to send them in some short films on the importance of the creative commons, and how too much intellectual property protection harms innovation and otherwise negatively affects both individuals and society." - Tim O'Reilly.

Funny.

I used to be at the bleeding edge of technology development, at least in certain areas. A few years ago I was up-to-date with most of the important web development & database technologies; I was a professional web developer and I knew my tools. Since then, I have been more and more involved in project management, strategy development, marketing & communications and the like. Today, I thought I'd experiment with a new-ish technology (XMLHttpRequest components in web browsers - for those who have a clue) which is now being used in some cool web projects. XMLHttpRequest allows web pages to communicate back-and-forth with the server without having the browser submit a whole request to the server, thus forcing the page to refresh and making your site unelegant and often slow. From what I've read about the technology, it seems wonderful - a web developer's dream for modernising web applications. I struggled to get to grips with it, and I'm still not sure I've mastered it or even have a decent clue as to what I'm doing with it!

Am I losing the technological edge in favour of the opportunity to lead projects and lead my organisation?

I still have a technology role in some of the projects I am involved in, but I more often than not use technologies I was comfortable with three to four years ago. I find it hard and inconvenient to push the envelope and learn new skills, I also find new technologies (such as Microsoft .NET) ugly, complicated and un-necessary. Am I getting old before my time?

Anybody else experienced something similar?