I am treating myself to a dead swanky hotel this year in Brighton, not anything I think I shall be able to afford again any time soon.

One of the reasons was to make sure I had proper internet access from my room, cutting out the necessity to haul my laptop into the conference centre, through endless security bag checks, to use the free wireless connection in the bar.

Unfortunately, this afternoon when I sat down to use it I found things weren’t quite so straightforward.  An hour later, it transpires that the room was recarpeted immediately before it was my room, and the hotel’s technical guy suspects the carpeters have nailed through the wire connecting the laptop cable.

Ho hum, it works now, thanks to some sort of weird cludge plugging the laptop into the back of the telly, and moving the desk around a bit.  That does mean that now if I lift my eyes from the screen just a little bit, I have the gorgeous view over the sea instead.  Which might not be all that conducive to doing the work I have to get through whilst I’m down here to supplement conference.

Now, all I need is some batteries for my voice recorder, and I might be ready to make some podcasts.  But my keen colleagues on Lib Dem Voice have gone one better this year and have been making video vox pops – all available at www.libdemvoice.org.  Editing videos and adding titles is something I must add to my skill set – the last time I did that sort of thing it was on a broadcast-quality CCTV rig at the Three Choirs.  So, I know how to do vision mixing live and with no sound, but have no idea how to use a computer to edit VT with sound.