Newcastle - Monday 19th May

Hello again!

Well, that's the first one down, and no disasters :) The day itself (certainly from our point of view) went better than it had on the first of the round for many a year, so I hope those of you who attended found the same. A few little mishaps behind the scenes, but we're pretty practiced at hiding those and doing the 'swan impression' Mike talked about in his guest post the other week. Certainly it was an interesting experience having some very posh portaloos out the back of the hotel as they were having work done on the regular ones, but the floor lighting up the steps to them certainly won me over. (Then again, I'm easily impressed by these kinds of things).

The photo at the top of this entry shows everyone in the main room at the end of the day - hopefully you'll be able to spot yourself in it, and be able to put up with Tebs waving his arms around at the back - I suppose we should be relieved he didn't do 'bunny ears' behind someone's head... If nothing else, we're warming up well for our attempt on the "Most people saying 'Cheese' at the same time" world record *grin*

"Tip of the day"

We all had some interesting chats with those attending, and we had a nice tip passed on in the Network Ninja session for an additional useful tool to make the work of running a network a little easier. If you go and have a nose over at http://www.spiceworks.com/, you can get a free download of their software which performs extremely useful tasks like software inventory, asset management and a help desk. None of us have had a chance to try it out, but it comes well recommended. Thank you very much to Richard Easton for the tip!

We're keen to hear any of your tips, tricks and other Ninja-like skills, so let us know when you are at your local seminar, and we'll put all the best ones up here.

Right, I'd better go - it's getting late (we've just finished setting up at Runcorn ready for tomorrow) and I need my beauty sleep more than most...