Friday dawned with a whole new challenge!

Several of our helium filled balloons had escaped and risen to the top of the arched glass roof of the exhibition hall. We’ll be in the organisers’ bad books if they’re still up there when the show closes on Saturday afternoon. So this was where the challenge began. Quickly dismissing suggestions involving any form of projectile – the roof is glass and there’s a lot of people in the hall – the solutions became ever more inventive! One involved putting double sided sticky tape on the upper surface of a balloon and launching it up wards on a long string. So the teams got to work, and what happened next could have come from Stephel Heppell’s stable:

• adding tape to the top of the balloon shifted the centre of gravity – the top wasn’t the top any more;
• adding more tape in order to compensate resulted in the balloon being heavier than air and it didn’t get off the ground;
• a trial with no tape resulted in the balloon only rising 10 metres or so off the ground as the weight of the string grew with height;
• four balloons meant the roof could be reached but with a total lack of control;
• perhaps eight balloons will mean that two strings can be used;
• perhaps ten would mean that the sticky tape can be replaced so the lost balloons could be recovered?

www.clusterballoon.org

Quite an iterative process and perhaps by Saturday afternoon the balloons may be recovered. There was the ‘we don’t need to do anything, they’ll come down on their own accord’ approach with corresponding theories:

• “The envelope’s permeable, the gas is slowly escaping.”
• ”When the air up there gets cold, as it will do when the loading doors are opened at the end of the show, they’ll come down of their own accord.”
• ”When there’s more people in the exhibition the hot air they create will rise, the balloons will be heavier than the air around them and they’ll come back down.”

Take your suggestions and theories to the stand (K10) – perhaps they’ll rustle up a prize for the best solution / suggestion – after all it’s got to be better (cheaper) than upsetting the show’s organisers!

After this burst of problem solving it was back to the real business of the show – demonstrating OPENHIVE. I was amazed at the number of requests for translated versions – something we can look at once we’ve upgraded to SharePoint 2010 later in the year, it’ll be much easier then.

A shorter day for me, they’ve cancelled half of the trains that’ll take me back ‘up north’ – apparently the inclement weather has meant that engineering works have overrun – so I’m leaving a little early

Hope you’ve enjoyed the show as much as I have.

Patrick Kirk