The Great IDG Cake Sale

I knew I'd be leaving PC Advisor in the early part of the year and, looking at dates, a payday a week after my final press day seemed ideal. So the date was set. Aside from clearing up the chaos of my desk drawers and cupboards and tying up loose ends so my successor wasn't left in limbo, I worked out that I ought to be able to squeeze in something we'd not managed to do for some time: an IDG cake sale. 


We've held them annually for the past three years and colleagues had been asking me for months about when we could have another. Christmas deadlines loomed large at the time, but a sale a few weeks after the January detox made sense. 


This year, Macmillan Cancer Nurses were our beneficiaries. Many of us have had reason to call on their services or know friends and family members who have depended on their support in the final months of a loved one's life. 


I canvassed a few colleagues who had baked on previous occasions and found some new recruits in the lead generation telemarketing team. The first day or two went well - and then things snowballed. 


We made £70 the first day from a choice of five cakes - an excellent start. After a glitch on Wednesday when I thought we wouldn't have enough cake to satisfy demand, Thursday saw colleague after colleague come along and produce cakes, brownies, biscuits, cheesecake and more. 


Our cake sale encompassed everything from beetroot and chocolate brownies to chilli chocolate biscuits shaped like Tom Selleck's moustache. There was a spectacular jewel-topped lemon drizzle cake, a beautiful buttercream-topped chocolate cake and a pink confection complete with handmade roses. 


With cakes sold twice a day, you might think demand would tail off, but a steady stream of customers helped push sales through the roof. By 4pm on Friday we'd made an impressive £370. 


I can only applaud the baking prowess of all at IDG UK. An amazing bunch of people it's been my pleasure to work - and party - with for the past 14 years. And wow, do they like cake! 

Sleep well, darling cat

Our beloved cat has died. We got a call on Tuesday morning to say Amber had been found by someone at the local Lewisham Council depot. He was kind enough to find out who she was (she'd recently managed to lose her collar) via her microchip, where she lived and to get in touch. He even laid her in a box lined with a protective blanket a bit like a lined cat basket. 

We couldn't be more grateful to George for his persistence and kindness. We're lucky that we know what became of her and to have had the chance to bring her home and place her gently in one of her favourite sunny spots in the garden surrounded by her favourite playthings. 

We miss her madly, of course. We shared photos and tales and text messages about 'that cat' daily. Without her, life feels very empty. Amber made us a family. She was clever, bright, affectionate, playful and seemed to have a sense of humour. We miss her massively. Who else could we play peg football - the game of passing a plastic clothes peg under the closed internal doors - with? Bathtimes and mealtimes were frequently enlivened by this game, invented by Amber. 

Who else will leap delightedly into the air with a toy mouse or bauble? Who else will delicately step along the drawer top and take her pick from among the assembled trinkets to gently push onto the floor and flick around. 

Laps are going left unwarmed; laptop keyboards can be used without interruption; 'presents' are no longer brought in from the garden and toes are not being bitten. One of Amber's recent endearances was to bite on Mark's toes in order as he made the tea of a morning. 

A sense of perspective says we shouldn't be so upset by something as trivial as the loss of a pet, but home is where the heart is and Amber was very much the heart of our home life. She brightened up our lives in incalculable ways. 

At less than two years old and in our lives for just over 18 months, she had cruelly little time on this earth. We were the luckiest couple there is that she shared that time with us. 

Gadget girl at large

I write about tech all day long, which is why it rarely makes an appearance on my personal blog. That's likely to change in about a month, though. I'm striking out on my own as a freelance writer and will need to do all the self-promotion I can in order to spread the word.

The changeover from staff member to self-employed has been a long time coming: by now I half expected to be a remote worker contracted by my employer and able to enjoy flexi-working. In fact, for most of us, flexi-working has ended up making us more tied to our day jobs, rather than less so. 

Email alerts, Twitter replies, the need to keep your website ticking over all weekend as well as Monday to Friday - connectedness has made us more married to the job, not less so. 

The consequences of not responding or not posting stories and updates - especially in the world of tech journalism - mean you lose out to competitors in terms of web traffic and ad impressions and are likely to find readers slipping away. The toll on those that set themselves these goals is a stressed out means of existence in which the battles you choose to win online rarely turn out to be those that the beancounter that monitors web traffic decides it values. 

In order to counter this, 'easy' stories based on press releases, opinion pieces in the form of half-baked theories and reactions to other people's witticisms end up being the sort of posts that fill the chasm on far too many websites. The web is never sated and Google is our fickle master. 

Such is the 21st century vogue for constantly updated information and feedback. It's certainly not limited to writing about tech, as the major websites such as the BBC and ITV compete for eyeballs and blatantly request readers get in touch if they're there at the scene or otherwise affected by the latest protest/terrorism incident/other scene of multiple deaths. 

There's a certain excitement, I suppose, in being first on the scene, first with photos and details of a groundbreaking new gadget and first to post a review. But in the bigger scheme of things, it's not as important war, famine, education or the impact we're having on the planet. It's certainly not as important as eating and sleeping properly, having the time to catch up with friends or to pursue areas of interest beyond the day job. 

Besides, far too many of those 'firsts' have been deliberately seeded, just as many anticipated gadgets 'break cover' just when it suits the maker to have them accidentally do so. 

For all that I've just said, I'm not looking to stop writing about tech. Good gadgets are rightly prized - they make communications an awful lot easier and can quite literally be your mobile office. Give me a BlackBerry Bold, an iPhone 4 or an HTC almost anything, and I'm pretty much set. Email, web, phone, search, maps, access to endless information and data and the ability to call up whatever I need from my own work archive in return for a password. 

Now that mobile flexi-working is here - and works - I'm ready to embrace it in a whole new way - one that works for me. 

Broadband Britain

In all good newsagents from 1st March

I rarely use this blog as a place to show off my work at PC Advisor - if you want to read what I write in my day job, it's all there at pcadvisor.co.uk - but the broadband survey I produce each year is a different matter. 


It's a large-scale project based around an indepth questionnaire asking readers about their internet service provider and how well they are performing. We've just completed our seventh such survey. The report can be read here: http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/features/broadband/3338346/pc-advisor-home-broadband-survey-2012/. 

It gives readers the chance to sound off about problems they've encountered, to log the connection speed they can achieve and to talk about what they most value in an ISP. With around 6000 entries each year, we are able to build up a detailed picture of UK household web use and to give readers an idea of whether a particular broadband provider will suit their needs.

It's not a perfect means of establishing which ISPs are good and which are under-performing - the survey is open for several months, so reliability and achievable access speeds will change over that time. Even so, customer service feedback, promises delivered on or not, and actual customers stating whether or not they would recommend -or intend to stick with - their ISP helps others decide which to use themselves.

We've come to depend on the web  - it's one of the biggest aspects of our leisure hours as well as information, yet vast inequalities of access remain. It would be great if price and customer service rather than actual connectivity were the big issues, but we're not there yet.

Atomic Testing Museum, Nevada

The Atomic Testing Museum showcases merchandise and toys highlighting interest in the Nevada tests 

The Atomic Testing Museum is part of the Smithsonian Institute. A sober-looking brick building with discreet lettering announcing its role, the unprepossessing museum contrasts vastly with its location: it's just a few blocks away from the Las Vegas Strip. 
I heard about The Atomic Testing Museum when I first visited Sin City for CES three years ago. Free time was in short supply and when we did escape the city, it was on a mini road trip to the Hoover Dam, Grand Canyon and up into Utah. 
I was lucky enough to be asked back to Vegas to cover the launch of HP's Z1 all-in-one workstation PC this month. They were good enough to ensure the four UK journalists got to arrive in good time and have a few hours jetlag-recovery. I knew exactly where I wanted to go. 
My dad worked as a nuclear inspector until his retirement last year, so there was an element of curiosity about his work, as well as the mythical status of nearby Area 51, as an attraction. I didn't know before I visited that the museum was a Smithsonian Institute affiliate, so my preconceptions were of alien conspiracy theories focused around Area 51, rather than the nitty gritty of what was tested and how results were measured. There is a nod to these conspiracies in the foyer - a purple blow-up lifesize alien - but I didn't spot any further references in the museum itself. 

Mostly, the museum charts the history of the Nevada Test Site - the US' principal domestic atomic testing location from 1951 until 1992. The site has since been mothballed, but remains in a state of readiness for future testing and analysis. 
Photos of testing equipment and several artefacts from the test sites feature along with audio recordings from scientists, video footage of tests at Bikini Atoll and other overseas sites, and a timeline of developments. As a non-US citizen, it was fascinating to see what did and didn't make it on to the global timeline (but also good to get a non-British perspective).
The visit starts off with some background on nuclear fission, the implications of splitting the atom and copies of Albert Einstein's letters to the US president explaining the possibilities of nuclear. 
Of almost as much interest were the items of merchandise that took atomic testing and mushroom clouds as their theme. Toys, playing cards, DIY nuclear fallout kits and kids' science labs were on display. Las Vegas' population exploded in the space of a decade, with interest in the atomic tests cited as one of the reasons. Atomic cocktails, bars and foodstuffs all traded on the unique selling point, while tourists came specifically to witness the pre-dawn atomic clouds that appeared. 
The Atomic Testing Museum has few fripperies and there's little in the way of interactivity, but it's a fascinating place to visit and a welcome diversion from Vegas' more prurient distractions.