Phrooah. Waking up for the past two mornings to write that damned story I’ve owed my editor since Monday isn’t what I was expecting. But, two hours each for the last two days have paid off, and I’m done! Am mighty impressed with myself, mainly because I’ve never known myself to wake to work (rather, to get up willingly at all) and because I have very, very low expectations of myself.

It’s been impossible to get any real work done over the past couple of nights, because after the three-hour dinner (starting at eight or nine o’clock) is over, you’re wiped out from the day’s events and all the wine you’ve absent-mindedly consumed.

As some of you may have noticed, I finally decided to buy a pro account on Flickr, because the thought of manually organising my pictures, especially the recent travel ones, proved too scary a thought for someone with as short an attention span as me. Also, everyone seems to have one these days, and I desperately seek approval from all you cool people.

Been having rather interesting talks with Benjamin, who writes for TechPlanet Asia, who, more than me, is mucho techie nerd, and I’m awed by his visions of a new web and the media’s evolutions with it. He’s just launched Scoop Asia, so good luck to him and it sounds like a valiant mission.

When I get the chance later, I’ll post pictures of yesterday’s event. Probably, the highlight for many of the journalists was meeting with Karl Erik Stenfors, a “zChampion”, which is essentially a new-agey term for people who, uh, champion the cause of the IBM zSeries servers. It was great meeting him, and he has such incredible passion for his mainframes—to put things in perspective, he’s been around since the first IBM 360 mainframe back in the ’60s, and he showed us one of the monsters at the IBM museum, where he was required to manually flick, up and down, the binary input switches. Screen? Keyboard? What?

He also looks a little like Christopher Lloyd’s Doc Brown in Back to the Future, which is fitting, in strange irony.

Update: Here he is!