Showtime!

Something different this week. A trade show. Not for Macs but for my side job, wallpaper murals (see www.mywonderwall.co.uk). The show was the Baby Show at London's ExCel centre and lasted three days. Outside of the show, I ended up staying at a friends apartment in Woolich. Not the most upmarket part of London at the moment but given the amount of development going on, it soon will be. 10,000 new luxury apartments!

My journey into the show each day involved trips on the train and the Docklands Light Railway. The trip through canary Wharf was particularly edifying. An elevated train with no pilot, gliding through steel, chrome and glass canyons. If you want to know what the future feels like, then outside of Tokyo, I guess this comes pretty close.

When it's working.



Unfortunately scheduled engineering works resulted in many of the central stations being closed. The replacement, good old fashioned buses. Using the buses was most definitely a trip back down to earth. Literally. Certainly, it's obvious that investment in the area is not evenly spread. Let's hope that eventually those on the ground floor get to catch up with those above.

The future seems to have two versions. At the moment it could go either way.

Coincidentally, on the journey down to London, discussions turned to the current version of Land Rovers Discovery and Range Rover models. far too many years ago, as part of a previous job, I ended up seeing the Land Rover supplied vehicle props for the upcoming Judge Dredd movie. These vehicles were used as taxi's and other vehicles and were designed and built by Land Rover to reflect life in a post Apocalyptic society. They certainly looked very, very hard and now, twenty years later the design cues in these vehicles are readily apparent in the Discovery and RR. Now, only an idiot would describe society today as post-apocalyptic, but I'm not sure it's healthy to be building cars that reflect this level of dystopia. It can only strengthen the divisions between social classes.