Mark’s is a more complete account of the evening, and Clive took some photographs - that’s me in the grey shirt. Unfortunately, the video has some technical problems.

Hope to see you at the next one.

And why not follow me on Twitter? I’m seocopyandstrat and davidrosam.

You’ve got to admire Apple for their marketing nous.

But I can’t take part - even if I wanted to cut short my current contract. Why? Apple’s chosen network - O2 - doesn’t work where I live. I’d have liked to have seen the iPhone available from Apple stores, with a choice of network SIM.

But it isn’t. So until Apple is less restrictive with its distribution, I can’t even consider buying one.

Good luck with your queuing!

Tags: iPhone, Apple, 3G iPhone

We booked from LastMinute.com and got a double room for a mere £93 for the night. I completed the field for special requirements to advise that we cannot have feather pillows or bedding. When we arrived, with no prompting, we were told that feather pillows had been removed. What’s more we’d been upgraded to a river-view room - priced at somewhere around £350 a night, I later noticed. Result!

There was a special offer on breakfast of £25 for two that we later took up on - a good saving on the £17.50 standard price.

When we returned to the room after my friend’s 50th birthday party, we found that the pillows on the bed were all feather. Just what you need when it’s well gone midnight and all you want to do is crash.

One phone call to the desk resulted in a promise to sort things out. But no more than an empty promise.

I had to call a second time. This time, a few minutes later, a maid turned up with yet more feather pillows and had to go away again, only to return with three pillows instead of four. We gave up. We desperately needed sleep.

Next morning, breakfast proved OK, but disappointing. Not a huge amount of choice, average-at-best quality ingredients, amateurishly-cooked full-English and staff bumbling around ineffectually.

When we booked out we informed the guy behind the desk how disappointed we were at the mess-up over the pillows and were told the Customer Services Manager would be in touch with us. No offer of reducing our bill was made.

And, you’ve guessed it by, now haven’t you? We haven’t heard from the Customer Services Manager.

This hotel has pretensions. It tries to be trendy, but the service and processes aren’t up to its 4-star claims. At around £100 a night from Lastminute, it’s OK if you’re happy for your wishes to be ignored and don’t have high expectations for breakfast. At full price, it’s pitiful.

We shan’t be returning. And will be putting Park Plaza Hotels at the bottom of our shopping list when looking for somewhere to stay.

Tags: hotel, poor_customer_service, pretensions, bumbling

Please dig deep and sponsor her online. If you sponsor her there, St Barnabas Hospices (Sussex) Ltd will receive your money faster and, if you are a UK taxpayer, an extra 28% in tax will be added to your gift at no cost to you.

Tags: half-marathon, sponsor, charity, St Barnabas Hospice, walk

If you’re reading this sometime in the future, look at the early June 2008 entries here.

Tags: Tumblr, photos

Anyhow, I couldn’t survive another week with a spluttering Dell, so I scraped together the funds remaining in the bottom of my bank accounts and got Sam to drive me to Southampton to the Apple Store there.

I bought the cheapest MacBook, with a view to upgrading it to 4Gb of RAM pretty soon. In the final analysis, the others didn’t seem to warrant the extra wonga. The extra few processor cycles didn’t sway, I haven’t burned a DVD for 18 months and somehow a black MacBook didn’t look enough like a Mac for this Apple virgin.

So far, installing software has been a breeze - if more than a little foreign to a dyed-in-the-wool Windows user like me. I’ve been using MS software since way back in the DOS days. Even VMware Fusion wasn’t a challenge - I’m going to be using my Windows version of MS Office to ensure I have 100% compatibility with my clients’ documents.

However, as soon as I step outside the apps - Firefox is more-or-less the same no matter which platform you care to run it on, for example - I’m completely disorientated, like I’ve just found myself in Tokyo rather than London. It’s still an OS, but the rules are different and the ways of getting around are still confusing me.

I’m sure everything will become natural to me, but I’m not sure how quickly.

Duh! (And ouch!)

Windows Media Player sounds best, to my ears, so I use that as a default, but it doesn’t allow me to play FLAC, Ogg, Monkey’s Audio and some other formats. I have to have iTunes installed, as much as I hate it. I used to have WinAmp and one or two others installed, too.

But this time, I wanted to rationalise things. Quite a lot of Googling later, I found this page which showed me how to install some software to enable WMP to play all of the formats I want to play. And it’s not as difficult to set up as the page seems to be warning.

I am a happy bunny!

My requirements, in addition to free wifi are simple (at least, I think so):

• Wifi that works and is reasonably fast
• Good espresso
• Fresh orange juice that’s not in one of those mean hypodermic vial-sized (vile-sized?) plastic bottles
• Good pastries and/or bacon sandwiches
• Comfy chairs and a proper height table to work on
• Waitress/waiter service, so I don’t have to leave my stuff unattended while I get essential brain and body supplies

Very close to where I live is the Marine Gardens Restaurant, but that fails on coffee quality, orange juice and lack of waitress service. I do use it from time-to-time, and they’re very happy to give the router a prod if I can’t connect up.

Luna used to advertise free wifi, but it’s never been working when I’ve looked into it. I can see no mention of it on their Web site now, either.

So where else can I use wifi for free in Worthing? Please leave a comment if you know.