A new CD gave me the courage to get out of bed early, even though I knew that the pleasure would be short lived. I only managed to listen to two 4 minutes songs till I arrived to work (and that's including traffic). Today I had an Asset Management product presentation for Microsoft’s SMS. They could have at least bothered to change the name.

There are 4 key tasks that this product can perform:-

• Inventory Management
• Software Distribution
• Software Metering
• Remote Administration

All the features are very useful to us especially considering the fact that we haven’t got any solution whatsoever in any one of these areas. Throughout the whole presentation the emphasis was that the system needs very careful planning and design. In line with the usual Microsoft culture the whole presentation was demonstrated using Microsoft Examples. I wonder how the system will perform when we try to push or audit our Java and non-MS products. When I asked the question the lecturer gave me that strange ‘you shouldn’t have said that’ look.

Life with a PC at home is returning to normal. After work the first thing I did, after checking messages on my cell phone left at home, was turn on the PC. I made a conscious effort not to spend all evening installing stuff so I went to read on the roof with the best companion available at the moment - my cat.

I got some news from Zurich and I’m getting the impression that fish are extremely abundant. Apparently there is a fishy smell in the town center and most of the dishes are fish plates. This isn't the best of news since my dearest loathes fish.