dale lane

I’m sat in the departure lounge at Heathrow, waiting for my flight. Through sheer dumb luck, I managed to blag a business class “Club World” flight. (no economy class seats available at this late notice). So I’m sat in the posh lounge bit for the wealthy types, which is all new to me, and very nice.

I’m feeling very relaxed. 🙂

I’ve been trying to figure out why, and I think the reason (and the value proposition behind the Club World experience – although I’ve not seen it marketed like this) is all about trust. The difference between this and the facilities available to economy class passengers is that they trust you…

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We’re moving to Basingstoke, so we’re now going through the joy that is house-hunting.

Since we started, it has kind of felt like my phone hasn’t stopped ringing with estate agents wanting something, but today has been a special kind of joy. 🙂

Estate agent 1 – Phoned to get feedback on what we thought of a house after a viewing. Sounds like a reasonable question, except that we haven’t been to see that house yet. (And she is the one who is going to be showing us round that house later this week.)

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Grace doesn’t watch a lot of TV, but when she does it tends to be CBeebies – BBC’s digital channel for kids. (I’m not entirely sure if there was a lot of thought behind why CBeebies – but ITV’s kids channel has only been around for a year, so I guess it was mainly that we got into a habit when it was one of the only options.)

I’m bringing this up because Grace watched Winnie the Pooh on telly in bed with me this morning. The TV in our bedroom doesn’t have Freeview, so I was limited to terrestrial channels. I happened to come across ‘The Book of Pooh’ on five just by chance – she loves Winnie the Pooh, and it bought me an extra half-hour in bed, so everyone was happy.

Anyway, this is just an observation, and I’m not trying to make a deep and meaningful point here… but the difference between watching kids TV on the BBC and five was striking. Adverts.

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I had to drive to the New Forest Children’s Services Centre in Bartley yesterday for a strategy meeting. I’d never been there before, so had to use the sat nav on my new PDA to get me there. But as I’ve only had the PDA for a week, I haven’t got round to getting a car mount that will fit it yet, and had to rely on the voice directions.

Is it very wrong that driving along with a computer telling me what to do reminded me of Knight Rider? 🙂

I got an email from a guy at Google a couple of weeks ago. He said that he had come across my CV online and asked if I’d consider opportunities at Google. I’m not really looking to leave IBM, but I was curious to hear more about Google and figured that I had nothing to lose by finding out more. It led to me having a quick chat on the phone with him and a ‘mini-interview’. So I thought people might be interested to know what this included.

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Dear Sir,
i have some valuable information about top al-qaeda leadership in Pakistan. Can u help me to give some e mail of top official to contact him and give him the information.
zaheer

This was an email sent to me at work from a Yahoo webmail address.

Huh?