Not enough time before IBC, War Against Hand-Cream and Dolby goes to China

I seem to have less and less time for blogging the longer I'm here, but I'm determined to keep it up, if only to not confound your expectations of how soon this venture will see me with my foot in my mouth. Not yet, as such, but then it's only been a handful of postings so far.

The reason for the lack of time is that I'm starting the serious round of meetings with distributors and exhibitors to introduce myself and tell them about Deluxe's plans for rolling out digital cinema in Europe. Some of them we are already deep into the planning, dating from way before I joined the company. But even these now get the chance to meet me with my Deluxe hat on (actually, it's a rather fetching baseball cap). No fewer than six meetings fitted in today with another half a dozen slotted in for tomorrow.

Thanks to everyone who have been getting in touch about meeting up in IBC. So far these people have all kindly managed to find time for me, but I still need to reach out to some, such as QuVis and Kinepolis. But there's still a few days before the plane takes off for Amsterdam from London City Airport. I urge you all to avoid Heathrow as all costs if you can in these dark days of the War Against Hand-Cream:

An innocent victim of the War Against Hand-Cream, one-legged New Zealand sprinter Kate Horan was, reports the Dominion Post, a prime medal hope at this week's Paralympic World Athletics Championships in Holland. Until she was told in transit at Heathrow that her $10,000 running leg couldn't be carried as hand luggage. And then in Amsterdam that British Airways had lost it. Words, frankly, fail us.

Meanwhile in the news, Dolby has secured a deal to supply digital cinema servers to China Central Television (CCTV) for their new state-of-the-art screening rooms. So now Dolby digital cinema servers can be found everywhere from Reykjavik to Beijing. (Memo to self: must get hold of one of their boxes myself for our own state-of-the-art screening room QC facility at Deluxe London). But Dolby aren't doing half as well in China as a Canadian company, if the following press release is to be believed. The title says it all "Section Rouge Média Inc. signs an option for the development of a digital cinema multiplexes chain in the People's Republic of China in link with its strategy to develop access to the Chinese market".

In cinema events news, SmartJog are inviting to an event at Hollywood's ETC/DCL on 20 Sept and Barco will have its digitala cinema event at London's BAFTA on 6 Oct, though I don't have links for either invite, which only arrived in my inbox in the past few hours. See you there for both. Now that I finally have my BlackBerry there's apparently a way to update blogs directly by e-mail, so come and watch me blog my way into trouble in real-time.