My last day at MSRC and a leaving lunch has been organised for Marc and me at Chez Gerard. It's a beautiful day and I walk from the lab through the ancient colleges to the centre of town. A large crowd is already there when I reach the restaurant and I sit down with Tim, Youssef and Miguel. Unexpectedly I'm given an Apple iSight as a leaving gift - Marc and myself have long been trying to to bring some light to the heart of the Empire.

3 hours and several bottles of wine later I fuzzily walk back through the ancient and out-of-focus colleges to the lab to pick up the last of my stuff and send some leaving emails. In one last talk with Marc he kicks around the idea of me starting my own company based on the Joyce stuff, subject to IP issues with MS. It's an idea I've thought about before but can't really focus on now, maybe not just from the wine. Anyhow, Dinan's just back from spending all afternoon at the pub with his prospective line-manager, one last coffee then I'm going to take a holiday.

The Wrestlers is the fulcrum of every Cambridge computer company. From the outside it looks like a regular British pub in the not-so-picturesque part of Cambridge. Inside, it serves some of the best Thai food in a city not under-burdened with Thai restaurants. Dinan and I go there for a last lunch today; there's a special leaving meal tomorrow so today is our last chance. I'm documenting the project and Dinan volunteers to take charge of the codebase. At this point I'm just trying to prevent the project fading away.

During lunch we compare EuroPARC to MSRC. I wonder if the kind of research Xerox PARC did is just impossible in the kind of corporate set-up that Microsoft has. Sure, PARC invented pretty much all of modern computing but maybe they could only do that -because- they were being ignored by Xerox the corporation. That ignorance killed them in the end but maybe it also gave them life for a brief, brilliant moment.

Marc and I double-team to have one last go at Mitch but the project is as good as dead.

Each Wednesday at MSRC we have something called a 'serious talk' that is an hour long lunch-time lecture explaining some area of research in the lab. Today was Marc's turn and he was doing a talk on his theory work in one of the brand new lecture rooms. It's a long and very thin room, barely wide enough for a conference table with people sitting either side. It does have a very good projector though, I can see it being co-opted for Halo sessions before too long.

MSR Cambridge has a deal with an upscale taxi company ('executive cars' is the phrase they prefer) to take employees to and from Heathrow but there's trouble afoot. My driver tells me that a rival taxi company that happens to employ the sister-in-law of the poster-complaining admin has been picking up all their contracts.

I tell the driver to take me back to the lab rather than home and I arrive back around 2:30 in the afternoon, dump my luggage in my office and head to the kitchen. They've been refurbishing the lab for the last few months and the kitchen looks like a high street coffee-shop; one of the plucky English ones fated to be bought-out by Starbucks. I drag Dinan with me and savour some real coffee at last.

Dinan is worried about a re-org that is going to happen because Marc is leaving. He's going to be shuffled to a new manager so all the review points he's been building so far are going to go to waste. However, by some devious reverse-engineering of the to: and cc: fields of the email announcing this he's figured out what scale everyone is at and is going to use that to game the system instead. Sophisticated stuff. I suggested he write a paper.

I drop in on Mitch's new corner office before I go home and he says he's going to try and extend the project but he doesn't say it with much conviction.

My flight isn't until 6:30 in the evening so I get up late and go down to Pioneer Square for coffee at Starbucks. There's been some kind of St Patrick's Day run in the morning and a celebration afterward and two girls in the coffee shop are trying to look sober to counterbalance a third friend who's not trying so hard. In the New York Times there's a great feature article about Enron. In a previous life I spent 9 days in Houston around the corner from the palatial headquarters of the organisation but I never managed to follow the story of its collapse until this article. I try to remember the last time I read a piece so informative in a British paper.

I leave the coffee shop and walk along the water-front taking a long loop back to the Alexis and a town-car that takes me to the airport which, on a Sunday afternoon, is almost deserted. Another security shake-down and I catch the underground train to the tiny terminal 4 to wait an hour and a half for my BA flight back to Heathrow. I have a sense of ending and anti-climax; with the Groove news, support for the project seems pretty unlikely from either the lab or the corporation.

I'm walking the streets of Seattle listening to my iPod in silent commune with my fellow iBorg. It seems the protocol, whenever you pass someone wearing headphones, to figure out if they're One Of Us by checking the colour of the wires. Usually they are. I fly back to London tomorrow and I'm wandering directionless today aware, as always in foreign cities, that there's something a lot more positive I would be doing if only I'd organised myself. Instead I just wander around downtown. I go to the Elliot Bay Bookstore again but there's no sign of Italy's bestselling author.

Later I go to the stretch of grass beside Pike Place market, get a chai tea and drink it watching the sun set over Elliot Bay. Maybe I think that if I create a suitably cinematic scene some inspiration will come to me. But it still hasn't by the time the sun has gone so instead I go back to the Bookstore Bar and have a drink.

I'm joining the iBorg. I'm taking the day off and I'm going to stay at the Alexis in Seattle for the weekend but I can't check in until 2:00 so I'm going to the mall to buy myself a photo iPod. I was on a tube train a few weeks ago and literally 1 in 5 people (I counted) had those white wires dangling from their ears. I could make a stand but instead decide to buy differently coloured earphones. Besides, colour iPods are cool.

I check my bags with the doorman who notices my last name and says that he's Irish too, though I suspect he's never been east of Portland. I doubt it would be a good idea to tell him I'm actually English. I have a last coffee at Starbucks and wander round to the Apple Store to take the plunge and buy my iPod.

My driver from the Hyatt is a cheerful Muscovite who moved across six years ago and tells me that an honest man can't make it in Moscow any more. Bad government. No fairness. He thought we were going to the airport and doesn't really know where the Alexis is but he knows downtown Seattle and we eventually make it.

For some reason the Alexis have put me in a suite; separate bedroom and a dining area. I'm sure it's a mistake but I'm damned if I'm going to tell them. Instead I plonk myself on my new sofa and unpack my iPod, starting to relax in the busier, more compact city. I install iTunes on the Microsoft Asset laptop and charge up the iPod. I don't have any music so I wander to Barnes & Noble to buy some CD's. The guy on the check-out hears my accent and decides to talk English music. He says The Libertines are like Oasis 'but more punk'. I smile and agree with the moron before heading back to the Alexis.

-

Later I'm in the Bookstore Bar having a Guinness when Italy's best selling author walks in. That's what he says he is but I don't think this is the first bar he's been to tonight. I don't catch his name but he says he's here on a book tour and he's going to do a reading in the Elliot Bay Bookstore. The bar tender smiles and feigns that he's impressed but avoids any more conversation.