Contrary to all sense and common decency, 5:30am does actually exist. I know this for a fact because that's the time I rose this morning to join my lady wife on her commute to school. Only a hella strong mocha saved me from lapsing into a hypothermic, sleep-deprived coma while standing on the station platform. Early morning urban landscapes are picturesque, though, no? A couple more pics here.

When I were a lad, growing up in the wilds of the southern Scottish countryside, multi-day power cuts were common, and if we suffered from extreme weather, folks just damn well got on with it. Not so in London. Flurries of snow – like the one that fell last night – frequently bring the city grinding to a halt. "What's this? Snow, you say? Well... What do we do about this devil's dandruff? My wife has a big hairdryer...?"

London could today wrest the 'windy city' moniker from Chicago; a 46mph wind caused a slate from across the road to crash into the window just behind where we work. Luckily, only the outer pane was smashed. Nik tells me that Russell Square Bloomsbury Square was closed off due to a tree being blown over. The city's coming to a standstill, people!

Watch this video, then tell me we weren't all better off with slide rules...

Bleh. A ten and a half hour flight doesn't sound too bad, but in truth I feel like I have spend my entire life on that damn plane, watching a small flickery screen updating its position on a map with glacial slowness. Add to that that I was up at 4:30 this morning, and that as I write my body's telling me it's approaching midnight, but my clock tells me it's just mid-afternoon. Ah well. I need now to go and pick up my media pass, then I'll do a little wander, take a few pics, eat something then retire to the Marriott's Sky Bar.

Below a quick snap from the plane, somewhere around the Lava Beds National Monument.

As y'all may be aware, on Monday I'm off across the Pond to San Francisco to cover the expo there for MacUser. I will have Internet access all week, of course, so I hope to blog a few of my personal experiences here.

For official coverage of the event, we hope to cover the main event live. Traditionally, there's no Wi-Fi coverage in the hall during Steve Jobs' keynote, so I'll be connected via a data connection over Bluetooth to my mobile phone. It's a 3G/GPRS phone, though, so the connection should be plenty fast.

Details of this coverage are available on Digg, and we'd be most grateful if as many people as possible could Digg this story to promote it up the list; so long as the technology works, this will be the the fastest way to find out about the exciting new announcements.

iPhone? Tablet Mac? Leopard? Video iPod? You can find out first with MacUser!

Go and amuse yourself with the nicely polished monoface. Seriously, I'll never speak to you again if you don't visit the site this instant and have some fun dammit. What do I pay you for?