Some people do not know when it happened to them, for me it’s easy, on the 10/06/2004; a certain person (Sanjay) introduced me to the world of blogging. Up until now I have ignored blogging as something that which other people do. I rated blogger’s alongside Oracle DBA’s and people who write XSLT. I am sure both are highly interesting just not my cup of tea.

I spend a fair amount of my day keeping up to date with websites, reading technical articles, so the whole concept of RSS has transformed the way I approach my day.

So this is it, I am going to try and blog at least once a week with something mildly interesting. Anyway back to the present…..

Right now I am sitting on a plane bound for Tokyo, we are about 2 hours outside of Narita, and I am very tired (more on that in a moment).

I left the UK at 13:40 today, leaving my poor suffering wife with my chicken pox ridden daughter and my just recovering from the pox son. You can imagine the fun time she is going to have without me for a whole week.

Anyway back to the plane, I love the business class seats on BA, you can press a multitude of buttons and try out a variety of seat combinations (even flat in bed mode), this is all very well but I can never get to sleep in an aeroplane, which is pretty frustrating on an eleven hour flight, hence the tiredness.

Talking about planes, a casual observation made today lead me to a chilling conclusion, as usual I was presented with plastic cutlery, as you probably know since Sept 11th you are not allowed any sharp objects on the plane. I was also given along with my plastic knife and fork, a set of chopsticks and a very sharp toothpick. This made me think that if I managed to collect a few toothpicks, I could with a bit of creative thinking, put together a mildly threatening weapon.

Another reason for not being able to sleep, and for those of you that know me, you can probably guess it’s the real reason, is that a package arrived for me this morning, something which I have been waiting for patiently …… A whole seven DVD’s stuffed with the latest ROM set for MAME. So I have been pushing my laptop the limit with the latest and greatest emulated games. I ordered the DVD’s for my latest project, which is building a MAME cabinet! If you don’t know what Mame is (shame on you), http://www.classicgaming.com/mame32

Your probably wondering what the heck I am going to Tokyo for anyway … I am here to test some new connection methods to Analysis Services, first stop Tokyo, next stop Singapore. I could probably do this with remote desktop, but nothing beats actually sitting down and listening to the users and their views of your software.