I was up in London catching up with friends and enjoying the Great British Beer Festival, which was good fun. Happened upon Facebook, and started chatting to a friend I’d met over the summer, while climbing Kilimanjaro. Ended up going for sushi together the next day, had a marvellous time. Funny how things turn out.

I was at a friends house party, things were still warming up, and the guy with the tunes hadn’t turned up. Instead of faffing with laptops and playlists, we just fired up the Last.fm app, picked an artist and started a radio station. Not high quality, but plenty good enough and dead easy.

As server admin at Headscape, it’s sometimes my unfortunate responsibility to tend to a poorly server out of hours, particularly if it’s a production box. Often, a system restart is all that’s required, but this means firing up a remote desktop connection. Handily, I can VPN to work and remote onto a box, even over 3G. VPN on the iPhone is surprisingly easy.

Recently while in Brighton, we decided on going to the cinema. Flixter movies does an excellent job at finding cinema times of nearby cinemas (and providing trailers – could you ask for more?). Then by hitting the map location, find route -> by bus, we had all the info at our finger tips. Google took care of making sure we got to the cinema in time, and clued us all up on the busses home again.

While at Future of Web Apps earlier this year, I joined the rest of the email-addicted crowd, inseparable from work. Handy for my boss. However, the power was in using pdaNet / Netshare to have access on my MacBook in the evenings. One must question the wisdom of replying to urgent requests at 1am after rinsing a free bar, but it all worked out.

I’m not obscessed with my iPhone, I don’t need it or cry when the battery dies. Its just a nice little gadget. I do however compulsively check the app store for the latest new toy, and am regularly impressed with what I find. It seems it’s still new enough for developers to be excited / inspired / payed generously to build for.