I think if I’ve mentioned this before but if someone can come up with a cure for jetlag I’d be their first customer. Whilst I enjoy coming to Redmond the body clock really struggles to keep up. I managed to watch three movies on the flight over. I-Robot and Collateral – which were better than I expected and Troy which was as ridiculous as I expected. Some of us had planned to get a days skiing in before the this week kicked off, unfortunately it hasn’t begun to snow yet. Bet it starts the week after I’ve gone back to blighty. Whenever I come over I’ve got into the habit of renting a car rather than depend on taxis and the non existent public transport system. Avis is the corporate rental company of choice and so it’s either a Ford or something from GM, but I can’t understand why a Ford Explorer is $140 less for the week than a Pontiac Vibe which is about half the size. As there was five of us with luggage the Vibe really wasn’t going to cut it but the Explorer, which is bigger than some houses I’ve lived in, made more sense. It is sadly drives like a house too. Speaking of silly cars I saw a Cadillac Escalade parked outside the hotel, not unusual in this country but it had 24”, yes 2 foot, chrome alloy wheels with very low profile tyres. Bling, bling to the max, but sadly no spinners. And speaking of chrome alloys they are very popular here and every other car has them on, the chromes on my old PT Cruiser don’t seem so daft now. Parked behind it was a new two tone coloured Chrysler 300 which looked interesting and yep it had chrome wheels too. But what does surprise me about cars in the US at the moment is the price, the new Ford Mustang GT which looks very smart tops out at about $26,000. So for about £14000 you can buy a 4.6 litre monster GT for which in the UK you’d be lucky to get a decent spec Ford Focus. On my last trip in the summer I saw my first baseball game and loved it. Tomorrow it’s the turn of the Seattle Supersonics to show me what’s so great about basketball; I’ll let you know if they do.

It’s not often I shed a tear regards things I’ve done in the past but now and again I think a bit of nostalgia is good for the soul. Carl Tyler has noticed that IBM have announced the untimely demise of the Lotus Discovery Server which IMHO was one of the cleverest bits of software Lotus every dreamt up. Yes that includes Notes/Domino on which ironically it was based. What drew me to LDS was that at long last here was a piece of software that tried to bridge the gap between what software developers think technology should do and what human beings would often like software to do. Namely help them find people and things inside their organisation. But like all great ideas it was by nature a very ‘disruptive’ piece of technology and had a cultural dimension many people didn’t understand. Sadly they mainly worked for IBM so resources for LDS were small, inconsistent and it never had the investment to take it past the notion of “Oh….that’s a clever idea!” It’s not often you can say this but it was really was, and still is, an idea way ahead of it’s time.

Will all those who don't drive a Rover a please take one step backwards. Rob, where do think you're going? You might well ask now that Britain’s last volume car manufacturer has 'joined' Shanghai Autos in an attempt to breathe life back into the historical firm. But should we care? After all the quality of mercy is rather strained if you remember some of the truly awful cars they've made. I think you can legitimately blame them for giving our nation a high tolerance for crap motors. Allegro, Marina, Maestro, Montego, Ital, Princess (the wedgie one which Sam Toy at Ford called a flying turd), each one reason enough to consign the designers to an eternity in purgatory.

Thought I’d give The Mummy Returns a second chance as it was the TV, but alas it’s crap as I remember. I’m still waiting for Stephen Sommers to reply to the mails demanding a refund for the cinema tickets I paid for in 2001. I suspect that after Van Helsing he’s too embarrassed

Despite being a non smoker I have mixed feeling about the forthcoming ban on smoking in many public places. Whilst the idea of arriving home after a night out at the pub not smelling like an ashtray is a big plus and it's a habit that ranks just above licking twenty year old carpet and urinating in public, I wonder if this is just the thin end of the wedge? Now I'm not normally a thin end of the wedge, if we get A then C is bound to happen kind of guy but I know that the political animal, if nothing else, can't help but interfere in public policy. Politicians regularly talk about 'thin government' and 'personal freedoms' but it's like turkeys voting for Christmas (notice how I inserted a seasonal motif). So what next after smoking and junk food? Beer, wine, coffee, Earl Grey, bungie jumping, printers (yes I remember Tommo), mobile phones, Bangle styled BMWs? I'm sure there's a warning here somewhere.

Got to play Halo 2 today. And yes this was the English version! Bye, bye social life.....

Oh dear!

It's going to be close but it looks like our American chums will not be doing the world any favours, well not for the next four years. Or maybe they are, at least for some. A Kerry victory would probably have meant a more consolatory administration and many European governments being compelled to help out in Iraq. A Bush victory on the other hands means the EU and the French in particular can further wash their hands of the situation and watch the Americans, and sadly the British, continue to get entangled in the Middle East. And as we all know there’s nothing worse than a smug Frenchman.

As the President of the United States probably has more impact on my existence than our own Prime Minister, I echo The Guardian newspaper when they suggested we in the UK should get a vote too. My guess is that John Kerry would win as on this side of the pond we like Americans but dislike their current choice of leader, well the electoral College choice anyway. One thing that has struck me about this election is the lack of actual debate, what we have had is the two sides shouting at each other and the question coming down to personalities. Similar as some have pointed out to Russian and other ex communist country elections. It is doubly ironic that due to the close nature of the race the only real winners will be the army of lawyers who may on this occasion decide the leader of the worlds remaining superpower.