General: I'm Back, Baby!

Wow, what a tough few weeks this has been. I've been involved in organising an event for over 300 doctors from 31 different countries, coming to the UK for a conference on drug abuse. If any of you have ever been involved in events organisation, it's relentless. The transport alone is tough enough, but really is the tip of the iceberg. I've been working non-stop running up to the event, and even more-so when on-site. Staying in the hotel isn't a luxury, it just means they can work you harder. lol. I feel my £240 a night hotel was somewhat wasted on me, as I spent only a few hours in it each day

The room I was staying was on the top floor overlooking London, but more importantly had a lovely LCD TV, which happened to have a D-SUB connection. I plugged in my EeePC, and it certainly improved my ability to check e-mails and watch Red Dwarf

However, for some reason my EeePC has started misbehaving. It is no longer charging, and even using just mains with the battery unplugged, it would turn off when powering the external screen. I guess I did have a 32GB flash drive, bluetooth, external keyboard, external hard drive and an LCD display plugged in. Maybe I was just taxing it too much? I'll have a look at it over the next couple of days to see what's what. I'm semi-hoping it's broken so I can purchase the new version

One of the things I was shocked at, while running the event, was the cost of internet. £17 per 24 hours in the hotel room. That's shocking considering I could get 3G via my phone for less than that. But this is an expected cost. What I didn't expect, was that in our on-site office, which was on an identical connection with the same "room number" prompt, we were expected to pay a £250 setup fee and £50 per day, per computer. It seems that adding "business" to costing schemes allows you to charge insane amounts.

As we'd already contractually agreed to do this, we took one computer and one connection. I then used a cable-ready Netgear router to share this both wired and wirelessly to all the machines we needed. Thank you, NAT. Then using Ethernet over power, I shared this connection three rooms across. Downstairs, we had 4 computers setup as booths for delegates to give feedback and other such things. I managed to persuade the network guy to adjust the patch panel so that we could patch straight through downstairs for "local network traffic only". Of course, a switch and wireless hub later, and I had the entire downstairs floor connected to the internet too.

Even with all these extra computers connected that should have cost us £50 a piece, the bill was still way too much. What's more, if I had known in advance, I could have just setup a WAP in client mode connecting to the wireless connection registered under my room number at £17 a day, and shared this instead. Still, I'm not paying the bill so it's not my problem, but it does make my blood boil a little, seeing the ridiculous costs that hotel were pushing our way, carried out by incompetent staff whom barely have a grasp on the English language.

All in all, the event was tiresome and has completely absorbed my life for the past few weeks. However, my bank manager has explained to me that it was probably for the best

Sounds like fun ?! Yes, as coyote says, I hope it was worth the trouble.