I need a decent night's sleep!

A summer cold and unusually hot night time temperatures in this little corner of Buckinghamshire mean that I'm hot and grumpy this Monday morning.

Oh it's nice to be able to work in shorts and a t-shirt, but the temperature's already over 80 degrees in the office and in a country where air conditioning would be a total waste for around 11 months of the year, this heat makes it really hard to get any work done.

Still, I'm off to Baltimore and DC for most of this week - so our current UK weather is probably good preparation for my US trip.

That'll be a couple of days of contrast too. On Thursday I've got a day at a bottling plant where they're piloting a new multi-million $ SAP application to automate much of the process previously done manually. A day later, I've an appointment at NASA HQ to look at the whys and wherefores of the fire which kilked three astronnauts in a ground test back in 1967. Within two and a half years of the disaster, two of their colleagues landed on the moon with around the same computing power available as I have in my pocket calculator. How much more power do the guys have to hand at the bottling plant to make sure the right product gets in the right bottles and out the door?

Fiday night should see me partake in a most un-British passion of mine - taking in a baseball game.

I spent my 40th birthday watching the Yankees beat the Devil Rays down in Florida. For my second live dose of MLB, I'm planning to head to RFK to see the Yankees once more, this time against the Nationals.

It's just coincidence that I'll be seeing the Yankees again, as I've very much a fan of sports underdogs. So, as far as I'm concerned, I've got to be up for the home team.

Anyway, sweats now dripping off my nose, onto my keyboard....not an edifying sight!