Concrete Cathedral

I suffered a bit of a disaster last night when I suddenly realised that my laptop was running on battery power when it should have been charging. Windows has a horrible habit of telling you that you have 10% of battery remaining (which should give you a good 15 minutes of life left) before promptly shutting down the system a couple of minutes later, thinking it's doing you a favour. And that's exactly what it did.

I tried all the obvious things before having to accept that the power supply was kaput. Fortunately, one of the delegates who works here in Rotterdam had a spare at his office so we went to collect that this morning and I was back up and running. However, in restarting the machine repeatedly last night, trying to fix the problem, my development environment (Microsoft software again) also went kaput and I've had to rebuild it all this evening. I'm now finally back where I was some 24 hours ago.

The plus side is that the meetings went well today and the scene has now been set to make some important design decisions tomorrow. It's great to be able to thrash things out with all the different kinds of user around the table like this. The communication has been excellent. And so far it seems that the overall structure we've come up with fits very well with their needs. Tomorrow is about fleshing out the detail. I'm expecting good progress.

It was a beautiful day here so I snuck out at lunchtime for a few minutes, as much to get some air and feel the sun on my face as to get a photograph. The hotel is on the edge of the main city and I wasn't hopeful of finding anything exciting to blip, but I'm discovering that you can find striking patterns everywhere you look. This is taken from underneath the railway line that passes nearby. It's a very inert and dead kind of space but the sharp autumn light seemed to transform it into a cathedral of concrete.