There was a brief blogging hiatus last week (I know, I know, you didn’t notice…) as I was away at a management think tank thing. As usual with this sort of affair, there’s some kind of team building activity alongside the discussion and actions arising.

This time we were at the RNLI for a ‘sea survival experience’ which involved getting garbed up in the RNLI gear, jumping off a 3m ledge, getting into a lifeboat, having a simulated force 4 or 5 gale throw the lifeboat around, trying not to throw up and trying to ensure your colleagues didn’t throw up on you, before being winched out after 20 minutes or so. (There are photos about but George has gone on holiday so they’ll be posted later).

What did I learn from this:

• Lifejackets have varying degrees of “safety” and the best advice is buy the best quality you can if you need them.
• Getting into a lifeboat is hard.
• Organising people inside a boat is harder.
• Most things can be used to bail water and/or go to the toilet in.
• Singing is good.
• Wearing wellies at sea doesn’t necessarily mean you have to drown.

An excellent adventure at the RNLI college in Poole.

The also excellent Katie Ledger (@katieledger) was our facilitator for the rest of the time and handled our usual range of personalities with aplomb. She left me with an excellent phrase (not heard it before):

“The cracked ones let in the light.”

Very good.

Well apparently you can. But you’ve got to want it.

I’m off to MIX in March – w00t! I’m sure you’ll be there too. As always, if you can find me, I’ll buy you a drink. (Not you Clayton – don’t you owe me one?)

So whilst the likes of MikeO, Sara, and MikeT are busily planning which sessions to attend, who to talk to and so on – very sensible as there’s going to be a lot happening – I’ve taken to the movie archives for inspiration.

Following on from Ocean’s Eleven and Casino, I’ve moved on to 21. Now, that card counting malarkey looks easy. I could’ve gone to MIT if I’d applied myself (my mother says) and frankly, if Kevin Spacey can do it then so can I.

I’ve got no intention of being able to win anything. I just fancy a scrap with Laurence Fishburne in the kitchens at the Mandalay Bay.

See you there lucky people.

There are many reasons to love Wired but this month’s Russell M Davies column on spam really stood out for me. I don’t get many comments on the blog (but then I don’t get many readers…) so when I get a nice comment, I certainly empathise with:

The other area of beguiling spamminess is the stuff that gets posted as comments on blogs. These are often delicately written, flattering but vague, praising the perspicacity and charm of your blog without mentioning anything specific about it. Almost exactly the kind of comment you’d like to receive…

I loved this article. It was nice (as the comment spammers might say).

Please say hello to Sara who has just joined our team. She’s been kicking around for a couple of weeks now, but, you know, Microsoft is a complex beast and it takes a little time to get used to it.

As an evangelist, Sara will be digging around the underbelly of the beast and producing content on what we’re thinking, why, who, how much and what of it anyway?

For starters, she’s been chatting to MikeO and Andrew about what they do.

She’s also covered the community leaders day at TVP which had great turnout – probably due to DDD8 being on Saturday! It was great to catch up with the likes of @MichelleFlynn, @Plip and @apwestgarth.

Finally, you might have seen here mixing it up with Flynny et al at The Fantastic Tavern.

You get the idea.

Great article in the Sunday Times this weekend profiling our MACHs (our graduate fast-track high-fliers). Microsoft is a great place to work in any case, but these programmes have got to be great for those on them, and the business in general.

Gaby Ball (or “Ball” as the article continues to refer to her in a passive-aggressive style) is the sister of our very own @alex_ball, and @SarahMelrose is also in the team. Or as she prefers we call her now: “THE Sarah Melrose” ;)

But I’m not scared of their fast-tracked success. No sir. There’s life in the old dog yet. As soon as I’ve figured out this interweb stuff, I’ll be rocking.

I saw a tweet last week which said “Sometimes I wonder if Google’s ‘don’t be evil’ is missing ‘because we’re watching you’”. Funny (actually, no, it’s terrifying when you think hard about it). Maybe someone should ask Eric?

Another friend of mine asked whether you could really trust an organisation that had to remind itself not to be evil…

Anyway, His Jobsness is having none of it, calling out the ‘Don’t be evil’ mantra as ‘bullshit’. (There are – at this time – a couple of disputed quotes. He may have said ‘load of crap’).

He sticks a skewer in Adobe too. Lazy? Well, given their dominance over the past decade, maybe they’ve been sluggish to capitalise on that and do now face a number of threats: Silverlight, closed systems like iP* (my new mnemonic for iPhone/iPod/iPad), and maybe HTML5 (but we’ll see how that turns out).

Compare that with the rapid cadence of Silverlight.

As an aside, looks like Google circumvented the AppStore stuff with Google Voice by using HTML5 in the browser. Tsk. They also added Voice to their own Chrome browser, but there’s not much opportunity to use it in other browsers as there’s no API. That’s not very ‘open’ is it? But then, as we know, Open has some interesting definitions from Google.

Seems to me that a lot of folk made a lot of money in the last decade doing their own thing. But now they’re all trying to do the “other folks’ things” and so the drums are beating to quarters once again. A fun time to be in technology – but then when isn’t - and an interesting ride for a few years.

• MikeT: talking about RIAs and most recently building bit.ly add-ins for Live Writer. Hmm, I wonder why?
• MikeO: talking about the web although most recently ranting about the quality of TV News.
• Eric: looking after the MSDN flash, meandering through entity framework with his head in the (Azure) clouds.
• Paul: usually taking stuff to bits and then rebuilding it - just slightly better than it was before.
• James: virtualising your windows and befuddling you with genius bits of Powershell
• Andrew: knows a lot about SQL BI, quite a bit about security which sits very well with his fine art training.
• Viral: he's out there at your events, thinks about productivity and sometimes bashing Google.
• Matt: ah... the architect. Thoughtful, insightful and occasionally a bit angry.

Sometimes, everything you need to know about how to do something has been written, and sometimes there doesn’t need to be much of that.

So me, @markjo, @domgreen, @will_coleman and a couple of others – thanks Dan and Claire - went to Tesco to figure out why to do something: in the case, how useful is an IE8 accelerator to a business, and a consumer?

Big thanks to Nick at Tesco for helping us with this – including a cameo. Also, we got our hands on a Dell Adamo. Nice.