Scargill

I can’t believe it’s that time again… this year the annual conference for the Federation of Small Businesses was held at the Celtic Manor resort in Wales. It started on Thursday 19th March and ran through Saturday night.

The product of a year’s planning and several trips back and forth, this was for me the best venue so far with 600+ delegates present. Weather was great and this was a wonderful location in the middle of a golfing resort. Even with poor weather the main building is modern, massive and houses a gym, several restaurants and a really first class reception area.

I got off to a flying start, a bust Vodafone dongle, then the phone packed in (whatever I said about the HTC Diamond Touch earlier – I apologise – it’s a heap of rubbish – there is some audio fault that they simply cannot fathom resulting in this being my THIRD phone this year). One more time and they’re getting it back and I want something else. Then on Saturday my working PC packed in – and I mean PACKED IN -dead. I have a habit of keeping everything on the D: drive so that if I have to reformat, I simply reformat C: and at least my data is intact. Of course I’d forgotten that I’d renamed the disks – so guess which one I formatted. Yup, the data disk!

Oh, the photo above – the sunset.. took that at Bristol airport last night.

The two big changes this year: I discovered BLIP.TV and Google’s Picasa – not that special on it’s own except that it is REMARKABLY quick at tarting up lots of photos – but then add that to Google’s Web album software which lets you store up to a GIG of photos for free on their servers….. and you have a pretty good package – look to see this being used advantageously on the FSB’s conference site… www.fsb.org.uk/conference2009