Sleepy Suffolk

In a couple days, I will be lucky enough to jet off to - arguably - the capital of the Midwest, Chicago. The original intention of going there is to attend a conference, IFIPTM 2009, at Purdue University 2 hours South of Chicago.
But before the conference is due to kick-start, Theo and I will unwind in the Windy City to the rhythm of Blues music as Grant Park is hosting the city’s yearly Blues festival.
I hope to update my blog during the week. Look out for life musings and technical notes from the conference.

Chicago’s Grant Park on the shores of Lake Michigan

On this glorious sunny (by Scottish standards) day of June, I made my way to the e-Science center (centre) to attend day II of the BEinGRID review. BEinGRID is the EU’s largest IST project involving 90+ partners. Unfortunately, with a project this big, the conference only came equipped with a mere couple of electric sockets. Well yes, this is the home nation of Alexander Graham Bell, not sparky Ben Franklin or luminous Thomas Edison. No plug, no laptop. My battery was flat dead. Surely the goblins and ghouls of possibly Britain’s most haunted capital must have sucked it raw during the night leaving me desesperately stranded at the back of the conference with little solace. Comfort did come, though, in the shape of a 2 inch by 4 cellphone, BT’s version of the HTC S620. Small screen, small keyboard but functional and ever so connected. Henceforth, here I am silently keying away a few notes using blog.com for the first time ever on Windows Mobile. And it’s a pleasant surprise. While it seems their design hasn’t been optimized for mobiles, it still adapts fairly well to my small screen and the page load latency is incredibly low making blogging at blog.com from a mobile an easy task. The side effect however is the over-development of my right hand’s sinews which are strained by the keyboard and my thumb hovering over it.