Jacquie Langham qualified as a teacher of Art and Craft at Bretton Hall. Alongside her teaching career here and in Germany, she developed as a mural and portrait artist. She and her late husband held exhibitions and opened a Gallery in Germany, showing their paintings, ceramics and jewellery. They lived and worked there for 17 years and their paintings can be seen in private collections, worldwide.

Since returning to this country, Jacquie has continued to paint portraits on commission, until quite recently, when she started to work with acrylics for the first time and became excited by the medium, producing unusual and vivid images of chillis, peppers and other vegetables. She is, at present, exploring dramatic and colourful aspects of other familiar images.

Makes me really proud to be able to point to her work and I hope you'll check out the the site for more - and larger pictures!

My focus hasn't been on implementing a software project but on authoring an internal Open Source strategy whitepaper and establishing things like an Open Source policy and Open Source guidance or setting up an Open Source internal community within said BigCo.

Seeing the growing interest for Open Source within the corporation gives me some real satisfaction and in a way it shows that jumping into the - then - icy cold Open Source business "water" back in 2000 was one of the best decisions I ever made.

Another blog post - I'm sure this is just a fad.

Nyooze is a platform product we've built targeted at content providers (such as publishers, local radio and tv stations, event organizers and even weather data providers) that allows them to integrate a branded social community around eyewitness content into their existing web-offering or co-brand new offerings. It's a white-label product, built on Ruby on Rails. It integrates existing content sources and extends into the mobile, Twitter and live-streaming spaces.

So, if you're interested - then take a look at the information on the website and contact me to find out more. And now - back to the silence you've become used to here.

Yesterday, the school our children go to set off on their annual school outing. This time to Wolfsburg to the AutoStadt. Now, the original idea was to put the 1500 kids (with teachers and various parents) on a train and move them from Paderborn to Wolfsburg (about 1 1/2 hrs away). For various reasons this didn't work out and the school had to re-organize the outing and put the kids on 30 coaches. Now, finding 30 coaches in the first place was hard enough here in Paderborn, but the logistics of getting the 1500 kids onto 30 coaches at 7:30 in the morning was a feat in itself. Not to mention getting 30 coaches into a convoy on the Autobahn in some sort of orderly fashion.

By chance I was driving back up the Autobahn on the other side when the convoy of coaches was returning yesterday evening - a sight I don't think I'll forget that quickly.

Here's the TV report that aired last night.

Does Beckham even understand what it is to be jeered at by your own sons (half-German) because, once again, football is staying home?

I mean, this time it was in the bag. At least a home draw against Croatia. I didn't even follow the match, because I was already triumphant that this morning when I awoke, things would be different. I would smugly descend to the breakfast table and throw a victory smile at my sons. Ok, Germany was long since qualified - but today, today we would be joining them.

Instead, I cried. And they jeered.

Upadate: T-Mobile have issued a press release stating that the sale of iPhones will continue. They also say that will be complying with the injunction until the case is brought to court which could be in 2 weeks or so. Spiegel-Online has just stated that unlocked iPhones will be on sale in the T-Mobile shops - for 999 Euro - 600 Euro more than the locked version. That's just under $1500 for the unlocked version. Customers who bought the iPhone after the 19th of November can get it unlocked for free.

No problem I was told - we will send you an invoice - but it will take a few weeks. Weeks? I thought I'd misheard and asked. "No, sorry, it will take a few weeks and I can't do anything about that and I also can't tell you when the invoice will arrive. But it will."

We have had several customers ask us for quotes on building said portals and then seen them "blow up" when we quote a figure that is a lot higher than the amount they had been considering. Often, customers think that building a Web 2.0 social networking site will cost the same as what they paid for their 10 page corporate Internet presence (which was implemented in Photoshop by a design agency - another topic I'll get to later). Surely it can't be more complicated than that?

Their next reaction is to then go out and find someone who actually thinks they can do it for that price (often a low four figure number). I'll let you guess what then happens.

By chance, TechCrunch has a similar post this morning.

And it proved to be a good decision. To be honest sometimes I get rather sick of listening to the Web 2.0 buzzword bingo. Anyway - apart from Tom's talk I went and listened to Matt Webb talk about design and in particular a new radio they are prototyping for the BBC and I heard Mark Boulton's talk on "Better Typography". I also enjoyed the Microsoft keynote on Photosynth. It's amazing when you think about how we are now able to recreate real-world scenarios from the enormous number of photos available on the Web.

I think that's a plan for the future - and I'm sure I'm the last one to discover it - go to a conference but attend talks on subjects you know nothing about. I was actually able to shut up my laptop and just listen in awe for a change.

So, I'm pleased to see Tim O'Reilly write the following blog post as it echoes what I've been thinking over the past couple of days. And in particular this quote:

If all OpenSocial does is allow developers to port their applications more easily from one social network to another, that's a big win for the developer, as they get to shop their application to users of every participating social network. But it provides little incremental value to the user, the real target. We don't want to have the same application on multiple social networks. We want applications that can use data from multiple social networks.

And I'm wondering just how often the social network will actually want to infuse new applications from external developers into their platform. I can't really imagine a platform like Xing letting developers write applications that can be dropped into the platform - and Xing is an OpenSocial partner. The fact is that any platform like Xing wants to maintain control over what its members can do on the platform (after all it's the paying members they are after). On the other side even though it may be a sound development model to make sure your own applications inside the platform are built using a standard API - I again cannot imagine Xing wanting one of their own applications to be deployed onto another platform.

But I can see the true value in having the same contact list inside say Xing and LinkedIn with a neat icon telling me from where my contacts come from.

Ho hum for now.