Yesterday I was London join to meet up with Dave and head to the Future of Web Apps conference – although we only had the cheap expo tickets.

Had a chat with people from a few tech companies about their products, sat in on a presentation on Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 and DeepZoom. I must say, both products got me rather excited when thinking about their potential uses – something I thought I would never say about a Microsoft app!

We also managed to sneak into one of the conference talks about business startups, but I left to go for a cigarette and Dave followed shortly afterwards upon realizing that no-one else in there was wearing a White expo-only pass!

After much walking around the expo floor, a few trips outside for coffee and a smoke and a bit of time sitting down on the waterfront we headed back in to begin the wait for Diggnation live.

A brief wait to get into the rammed ‘conference hall’ was well worth it. The pre-show music proved to make the most of the rather impressive soundsystem, much to my joy.

The mood was lifted further by the Google beers! 4 bottles if Peroni, courtesy of Google – big smiles all round!

When the show finally kicked off, Kevin & Alex were on top form – although I did get a little annoyed by the dweeby fanboys I was sitting next to.

After an awesome, laugh filled show, we headed to the Fox for the afterparty. Another experience that would have been better if we had conference passes that would have entitled us to free beer courtesy of Facebook – but sadly we had to pay for our drinks

A few tube stations away, we were back at Daves with a mountain of Chinese food.

This morning, well afternoon once Dave was ready, we headed to an art gallery in Angel. A nice ecclectic collection of artists and photographers was exhibited, some of which have websites that I plan to visit.

I am now on the last leg of my trip home and have just realized that I should have sat at the front of the train rather than the rear- the front being closer to the exit to the station. C’est la vie.

This is my first attempt at using it and it is proving to be useful in getting to grips with the iPhone keyboard.

I have been up since about 6am, eager to get to the sorting office to collect my iPhone, and now I have it!

My gorgeous new toy is currently syncing with iTunes, uploading a whole bunch of video podcasts for me to entertain myself with during the 8 hours or so that I will be spending on trains when I head to Sudbury and back again tomorrow.

Only issue so far is that my podcast library stands at about 22Gb, a little too much for the 16Gb capacity of the iPhone but hey, I’ll live with it!

My next step is to add a few applications and games to both entertain me and add to my productivity – well that’s the plan anyway! I really want to try and get as much use out of this phone as is possible, one aspect of this has been to sync it with only 1 email address (the one which shall become my main address for freelance work) to prevent being bombarded with junk emails.

I wandered into Carphone Warehouse (CW) and despite initial interesting in a non Apple phone, I was soon drawn in to the latest Apple gadget.

Needless to say I ordered the 16Gb model, doing so in the understanding that it would be instore for me to collect the following Monday. It was Tuesday before I was able to get back into the store only to find that CW had over sold the stock that they had, with myself being one of the customers left to wait.

The salesmans lanyard inforamtion cards were the only iPhone related bits that I managed to obtain despite handing over £160.

On arriving back from an interview this morning I was delighted to see a Royal Mail delivery card stating that my package had arrived, but would need to be collected from the sorting office tomorrow as a signature is required.

IT’S ALMOST HERE NOW!

Yesterday morning I recieved an email invite to try out http://beta.last.fm, their development site for the next version of last.fm. This testing has so far only been open to subscribers to last.fm so I was pretty chuffed to get the invite.

I had a quick look through each of the different pages, which in my mind have a much better organisational structure in place – making it much easier to navigate through the new, uncluttered, pages. I left a few comments about a few design issues that I noticed (i.e. adverts not aligning with content).

In browsing through the new ‘Library’ feature I noticed that when viewed in alphabetical order, a number of letters/characters did not behave as the rest of them did. I also noted that the band Portishead was categorised under the letter ‘B’ rather than ‘P’.

After finding this for one letter, I decided I should really go through each letter in turn to see which ones were also affected. Once again I reported the bug and I am keen to see it being addressed and amended in future versions.

I took a few screen grabs to allow comparison of both layouts.

This is how my profile page currently looks:

This is the current Beta version of the same page: