I envy Mark his easy grap of Cubase in terms of getting everything to appear where its meant to so quickly.

A day of mixed fortunes at work. A new member of staff arrived - Sue - quite a refreshing change from the standard DTI template. She has two young daughters and a husband who looks after them full time. In the new world I hope to be a major client of hers - but that looks as if it should be quite a tractable assignment.

Dave from the Sector Skills Agency mailed Graham saying how useful he found the meeting in Birmingham and Graham passed the e-mail onto me with thanks. All very encouraging. I think Graham and I agree that we can grow this stakeholder relationship - we both got a good feeling from bouncing our plans off Dave.

There were some useful comments from another new member of the team Phil who is switching to automotive from aerospace bringing some serious analytical skills with him. He said that the take on the German aerospace industry confirmed the relative ineffectiveness of their sizeable R&D spend on automotive.

We met the Japanese this afternoon at the Department of Transport. The Minister we were dealing with is obviously pretty interested in the subject and fortunately I knew slightly more than he did about it the technical details. The Japanese visitor was just the right kind of person - global responsibility for an important new technology where his firm have a commanding lead but not so high up the organisation that he wasnt a complete master of his field. I had the sense of a really good area of potential mutual benefit emerging.

I have Japanese on one side of my business cards and its always nice to surprise them at the initial exchange of credentials. I can see two or three good moves we can make on the back of this meeting.

A particular new technology powertrain cluster in Wales which will include some important new German investment as well. The material the Japanese visitor presented showed clearly how the two technologies fit together.If the UK can be an upstream R&D and product development feeder to this then this will be excellent global positionning.

The bad experience was seeing my old boss again - not that he is a bad person or anything. But he and I are pretty much the opposite in terms of attitudes to work. I get off on the vision and making linkages whereas he is very procedural and not especially output oriented. I can honestly say that since I returned to the Department at the start of 1995 I have been fundamentally underwhelmed by all my senior officers. Doubtless this says as much about me as it does about them. But it hasn't made for a very constructive set of relationships.

I told my old boss that I thought the new project would really make a big impact - one of those ideas where once it had been set in motion people would scratch their heads wondering why no one had thought of it before. Stephen from Cranfield who has been doing some of the detailed work on the accreditation feels very much the same way I know.

Vita is keen that we upgrade our TV and I bought her a brochure from Dixons to look at the package deals. I see from the brochure that the latest generation of portable Minidisc players have a USB-in port - a potentially very useful bit of digital connectivity. Unfortunately this very second I don't need a new machine. Given my system is heavily MD oriented its nice to see the technology taking new steps.

I read some more reviews of interface boxes and I can't see a better solution at the moment than the one recommended by the local music shop. This has a range of analogue and digital ins and outs which is better value for money than all the equivalents I have looked at.

I got out HipHop Ee-jay this evening - a piece of software that is incredibly captivating despite its infantile simplicity. It seems to need the disk in to run which makes it a less frequent pick than some of the other bits of software I use. I began to build a groove which might go somewhere - maze music perhaps. Today I mailed a copy of Plundafonix to Nick Brown with a letter.

I looked up a few articles on Habermas on google. He studied with Adorno and is now regarded as the most important social philosopher in Germany since the Second World War. His ideals are more modern than post-modern and he has a faith that there is condition of freedom and co-operation over and above how things are these days. In that sense he is like the older Enlightement philosophers. If communication weren't mostly distorted by power relations and there were a genuine exchange of points of view - life could be genuinely better - this might be a radical step-change. I read a collection of extracts from his writings about the way that "representation" has served different power interests since the Renaissance. I have a lingering intuition about the high density of Tudor high prestige display houses in this locality. In one way such a viewpoint is utterly relativising - most objectivity is a self-serving sham and is really manipulation of the audience. But Habermas holds onto an ideal of purer communication and is able to flesh out to some degree what they might be like. This kind of utopianism is rare I think - especially backed by a worldclass reputation and achievement. Tonight I am going to the Confederation of British Industry dinner as the guest of a French company - black tie unfortunately. I am not sure what I make of this. I certainly couldn't say know when I was asked - its whats called schmoozing and its the kind of thing which comes in waves. More up my street is an invite for me and guest to a private view of the RA Summer Exhibition by a US automotive consultancy. I hope I can persuade Vita to come along. I mentioned a couple of days ago that the advertising world were the classic practitioners. Sporting events are always a bad idea though - in terms of propriety. Yvonne and I once went to Henley with an IT company and sure enough the accounting software associated with this bit of "fun" was pretty unpleasant.