Technology Across The Pond - Part III

In part II of my series on Technology Across the Pond I talked about my first day in the UK and technology in and around the hotel.

Today, in the last part of this series on UK Technology we talk about technology in the office and away from London.

First I want to mention the nice little power adapter I picked up right before my trip. My regular adapter mysteriously went MIA, which I noticed as I was packing up, so time for a quick run to Best Buy. I wasn't expecting much, but when I found the Targus APK01, it was more then just enough, it was actually a very nice design. Now before everyone gets too excited, it is still just a power adapter and that is all it does. The specialness is all about the way the various country adapters are nested into each other making it easy to carry and hard to lose the individual adapters (which is probably what happened to my last adapter. The adapters themselves are no bigger then they need to be, which has sometimes been an issue with other adapters I have seen. Bottom line is this little device will live in my briefcase along with the other handy devices like the Belkin mini-surge protector

The first day in the UK office is always fun. First of all getting through building security is much more of a challenge in the UK then in the US. Most offices the in the US have virtually no security outside of the big corporate offices in NY. While in the UK they take it very seriously, checking IDs, getting folks properly signed-in and making sure a credentialed employee escorted us to our companies location. A pain to be sure, but it does give you a good sense of security.

Once to our companies location, in addition to seeing people I haven't seen for a while, it is time to grab one of the open cubes and get connected. The concept of Hoteling is a fine one, but the shared cubes are seldom maintained and are often a source of spare parts for the permanent cube dwellers. We (there were 4 of us) each grabbed a cube, but only 2 of the 4 first cubes we grabbed were fully functional in terms of power and network connectivity. After playing musical cubes we were finally able to get everyone connected. Wireless networking would have made things better, but large companies are still challenged by the security issues of wireless making its adoption quite slow. Wireless power is still a pipe dream of mine, but its day will come soon. I wonder if security issues will slow its deployment as well. Check out this video on wireless power to see what the future holds.



Once everyone got connected, the day in the office, at least from a technology perspective, was fairly normal, though London's fog and rain made it so humid, it felt like my glasses were fogging up.

The rest of the trip followed similar themes of getting connectivity (never as easier or as inexpensive as the US), getting through security at our client's site and finding our way around via Taxi. Note: While the London Taxi drivers know how to get anywhere in London, when you get away from London, the Taxi drivers often don't know where anything is.

With our business finished, we headed home on our various flights to our various home cities. Now normally, international flights are seldom delayed any significant amount of time, but unfortunately, this was not a normal flight. We had two minor mechanical issues, neither of which would have kept us from taking off, but in combination, they kept us grounded. After a bit of a keystone cops act in determining which of the two issues to fix, both got fixed and we finally took off from London 4.5 hours late.

Back in the US, ready to continue my focus on the day to day technology challenges we all face.

In case you missed them here are links to the earlier posts in this series:

Part 1
Part 2