Since Ephox is an IBM business partner and we pulled the right strings and made friends with the right people, I get access to IBM’s offices (apparently world wide but Bedfont Lakes is closest and best set up). They’ve got quite a nice business partner suite on the first floor looking up at all the real IBM employee’s offices but before today it’s always been a major pain.

Firstly, without a car it takes about 2 hours to get here which is never fun, but today I have a car so that was ok.

Then you need to have your IBM badge to get in the front door which on previous occasions I’ve either not had yet, forgotten or in one case walked in the front door and lost, gone back out cancelled it and got a temporary replacement, walked back in a found my last card on the floor. Today I remembered my badge and at least so far it’s managed to not fall out of it’s little holder so it’s still with me.

Once you’re in the business partner suite you find that it’s very difficult to plug a MacBook power adapter into the power points here if you only have the short plug – you need to have the actual cord which until recently I only had an Australian version of.

Then you find that you need a login for the wireless internet which is easy enough to sort out but until today, somewhat inexplicably, HTTP POST didn’t work (GET worked perfectly, but not any HTTP operation that sent a request body), so I was left using my mobile internet. It seems that while I was back in Australia they’ve managed to fix that so I’m up and running again.

Even better, there’s now a beasty Dell server sitting in my utilities cupboard at home running the IWWCM VMs I need to work with and demo and I’ve actually got the firewall configured right so I can SSH in and set up tunnelling to access it from here.

Who knows, I might actually be settling in over here!