Up fairly early as I have a long day today – travelling down to London for an overnighter. It is, by happy coincidence (as these things often are!) also LONAP‘s 10th Birthday Party this evening too, at The Old Bank of England on Fleet Street.

The train journey is uneventful, and I’m sure the 3G service that I use (O2) is getting worse. I manage to sustain a connection for a few minutes, but the signal is so shonky that by the time I’m at Chesterfield it’s gone. I can’t even connect up directly on my phone. Crap. So, I spend most of the journey guiding Birmingham City through the mires of a underachieving Premiership season in Football Manager 2008. I wonder how long it’ll be before the board get sick of me and give me the boot?

The afternoon meeting I have scheduled with our datacentre account manager is pushed back until tomorrow, which is both a blessing and a pain – but it gives me some time to catch up with work, before heading across the city to Temple station for this ‘do’.

Networking, in the social sense, that is, is something I’ve never ever been any good at. I think it’s a trait that most geeks share – there are comparatively few technical people who’re comfortable in these situations. Which makes the LONAP Birthday Party quite an odd event – a room full of geeks with poor social skills attempting to ‘network’! It’s largely unfounded though – after a few ESB’s people’s tongue’s loosen and even I manage to ‘mingle’ and spread the love for the behalf of my employers. It’s a good night, and I make my way back at about 11:30, somewhat inebriated.

One highlight of our time around an exceptionally busy Meadowhall was Aimee walking around the centre, holding my hand. She’s becoming more and more reluctant to idly sit in her pram, and likes to walk around holding our hands. I was as chuffed as hell walking down the busy covered ‘streets’ of Meadowhall, holding Aimee’s hand whilst she giggled madly, walking properly, like a little girl. We pick up a waking ‘harness’ for her from Mothercare, we’ll see what she’s like in it in the coming days. It’s amazing – every day that passes, she becomes more a little girl, and less a toddler. I can’t believe she’s only sixteen months old.

We get home and have a crack at Guitar Hero, Aimee’s knackered from all her walking – and it proves to be bloody good fun! I spend most of the evening thrashing out monster choons, only for Emma to have a go and completely decimate my high scores. Unbelievable. I thought I’d have a chance on a game like this – all the singing games, like Singstar, she just trounces everyone on, I thought this I might just have a chance with! Not so! Must practice.

On to the sat navs. The units themselves look very tidy, and are certainly less ‘fat’ than the TomTom devices I’ve used before. The finish on the units is remarkably good – especially for imported cheap Chinese sat navs. They come with a USB charger, fag lighter charger and window mount – everything you need, really.

The manuals are funny – written in Chinglish (“Navigator the whole World-wild”) and the software – the downright bizarrely titled ‘TurboDog’ is, well, awful. Thankfully I bought these fully in the knowledge that TomTom software would run on them.

Installing TomTom is a breeze – just copy a regular TomTom install from a Windows Mobile PDA onto the Navigo’s SD card and place a copy of your fully bought and paid for maps on the card too. It’s pretty much as easy as that. All that’s left to do is to rename the Tomtom installation folder on the SD card to ‘Mobilenavigator’, and the tomtom.exe to ‘mobilenavigator.exe’ and reboot. When you select the ‘Navigation’ option on the Navigo menu, it will fire up TomTom. The one last thing is to tell TomTom that your GPS device is an ‘Other NMEA GPS device’ on COM1/4800. No messing about with firmware or re-flashing required.

I understand that you can bugger about with these and reveal a full WindowsCE environment and install whatever you please, but I’m quite happy for mine to be a dedicated Sat Nav.

There’s no way I’d be any use at work, so I call in sick and spend the day alternating between the sofa and the loo. It looks like the illness I’ve been experiencing could well be this Norovirus thing that’s been going around recently.

Regarding the entry the other day – Bad Brother – I read with great interest that the 19 year old “entrepreneur” contestant Liam Young has actually told a few teeny-tiny little porky pies about his allegedly booming business. Namely that…well…there isn’t one. Not really. He’s hired a mailing address and bought some shared webhosting. Sure, he’s registered his company name with Companies House – and, bless, his mum is Company Secretary – but he appears to be living in cloud-cuckoo-land with respect to his claims of being an internet business magnate!

I probably earn more than this choade does hosting the few bits and bobs which I do for people. This news appears to be all over t’interweb, and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before the newspapers pounce on it. Which is probably exactly what Endemol and Channel 4 want to happen.

I’m sure that given all the previous problems with previous series’ Endemol will have gone to great lengths to double and triple check prospective entrants and any fucking idiot that can add up 2+2 can see that there’s something a bit fucking spaffy about some dickhead that claims to host “2 million websites” for “250,000 customers” whilst employing “12 staff” and yet…. has a gross turnover of £200,000pa. Doubly so, when the moron in question posts this request for advice on how to embellish one’s turnover figures in a public forum three months ago…

Do we really think that Channel 4 and Endemol are this dumb, or is this just Endemol’s attempt at a poor publicity stunt? Putting this twat in the house knowing full-well that people would pick up on his outrageous claims and ‘out’ his lies? Call me a skeptic if you like…