12November1996

Tues 11 November
My dear folks,

Beethoven sonatas are tinkling away through the computer speakers. Outside, it’s wet & windy & not at all warm. Portugal looks much the same. There’s a huge low pressure area sitting over you Jones & looking set to stay a while. I braved the wind into the Beeb this a.m. by bike & braved it back again tonight, grateful to miss the showers in both directions. My prompt arrival was a proper waste of time as it took the technicians busy in the trials room at least an hour to finish connecting up the masses of equipment that were required for the trials. Even then, things couldn’t get underway as the organisers found themselves short of this item or that one of them & spent the rest of the day on the sidelines trying to sort things out.

Eight of us were divided into two groups. Mine spent two hours upstairs where the ICL programmers were putting together the Web pages, working on a mixture of huge Apple Mac monitors & smaller PCs. It’s taking them months to get the project underway & costing tens of millions. The interesting bits were listening to radio over the Internet - so-called “real-time audio”, still a haphazard process - & examining the Web pages of our rivals. The room looks like a scene from a James Bond movie, a couple of dozen programmers bent over their screens as if they were about to launch a missile into space. The project includes OnLine shopping - aiming for Xmas - with a big range of BBC video & audio cassettes among the products advertised. The advertising pages look good, featuring pictures from videos & audio clips.

The OnLine system will allow us to freeze & lift any picture from the TV screen to our Web pages & to attach audio clips to them. We spent the afternoon writing reports to get a feel of how much a team could handle. We’d barely sat down when news broke of the mid-air crash in India. World Service TV was playing in the background & I was deeply grateful not to be up in the newsroom where there was clearly a frantic scramble for information. I winced as the presenters asked desperate questions of correspondents who clearly didn’t have a clue of what might have caused the crash & said so. There were no pictures, understandably & it was a wretchedly difficult story to cover.

I arrived home to a warm welcome from Mave who’d spent the day indoors. He plonked himself down on my feet for an instant backscratch & then spread himself out generously across my lap for a mutual snooze in the TV chair. I’ve since made a few phone calls to tenants & now have the evening free to write to you, so nice. Thank you Jones for your fax. I don’t see any problem putting up your prospective Dutch guest for a month. The only question is whether he wants use of the phone/fax in which case I think we should look for a refundable deposit. I’ll make inquiries this side tomorrow about poss tickets to London. Thank you also for your hard work dry cleaning the blankets.

Big fuss here over a Catholic priest jailed for six years for sexually abusing young boys. On his computer, police found the biggest collection of paedophile material they’ve ever come across, including 9000 pictures. His parishioners were shocked, those whose sons he hadn’t got at......... It’s a horrible world!

I’m off Wed - working Thur/Fri - and off Sat.

Blessings for now
T