With catering being one of our specialist markets, we’ve noticed a big change in the catering press recently. The editorial’s got tighter, sparkier, more interesting.

Kudos particularly to Restaurant and Caterer & Hotelkeeper, two of my own favourites.

C&H has a really good feature this week, ‘A Day In The Life’. All the photos were taken in the UK catering industry on June 21st, the longest day of the year. This is really interesting, entertaining photojournalism.

And not just because I’m playing ’spot the TPW client’

A good media database can save a lot of legwork, and we’ve relied on Mediadisk for a few years. But the old v4 is a bit clunky and behind the times, and we’ve been looking forward to Mediadisk 2006, which I finally installed a couple of weeks back.

Unfortunately 2006 doesn’t work with hi-resolution laptops such as the ones we use, and it’s got serious problems with our firewall, and crashes with database errors. We’ve gone back to the steam-powered version (as used by Charles Dickens) while Romeike scratch their heads to work out what’s wrong.

Moreover, there doesn’t seem to be any teach-yourself tutorial program for the latest version - neither printed nor as a screencast. (There’s online help, but that’s not really any good as a tutorial) There are occasional ‘webinars’, which are basically screencasts, but only on at particular times. With a webinar I can’t stop it if a client rings, and return to the point where I left off, for example.

There are also training days, but these are chargeable, and they mean a long, full day out of the office. Mediadisk isn’t cheap, and upgrading is proving to be not only expensive but far from seamless and quite painful.