I took Abby to Wallington yesterday, to do the 'Back to School' stationery run. And we dropped in to Wallington library, which was a regular feature of my growing-up, earliest years. This gave me a chance to pontificate to Abby, along the lines of '..and not only is Britain the greatest Olympic Host in history and the home of the finest Test Cricket team in the world, it's also the envy of the globe when it comes to its Public Library Service'. I loved visiting the library back when I could count my age on my fingers and I'm delighted that the girls feel the same way.

But I remember the library being somewhere I could lose myself in an imaginary, perfect world, populated by proper goodies and baddies conceived to assist my moral development. The doorside display yesterday, by contrast, seemed designed to encourage children to believe the world full of peril around every corner, consigned, as they would be, to a friendless, persecuted existence. And I don't remember every child in my world having headlice either.

On the plus side, this has given me some great pictures to deploy tactically on other people's Facebook pages.

I've been a big fan of Logitech's Harmony remote controls for a long time, having sought a solution to controlling an ever-expanding range of audio-visual equipment since back in the eighties when I first combined a TV with a video-recorder and a satellite box.  Today I also have a DVD player, an AV amp, an Apple TV and an Xbox under the TV, each with their own remote controls, each bringing further difficulty to answering the question 'How the £$%* do I turn the TV on and watch this?'

The TV manufacturers all offer their own variant of the 'one remote to rule them all' approach, almost all of which fail dismally, generally because they're predicated on buying all your equipment from the same manufacturer. The 'One-4-all' range - of which I've had a couple - didn't help much either: Their approach was to replicate all the functions of multiple remotes, which still required you to understand that the DVD player was plugged into HDMI2 on the amp, with an optical output to the amp on Op1 and an output to the TV on HDMI1, changing the volume required you to select the virtual amp remote rather than the virtual TV remote etc etc.  Since most people don't have a clue about how the boxes are connected up, let alone the subtleties of AV delivery, the approach is almost useless.

Then I stumbled over Harmony devices, which take a completely different tack. You use Logitech's software to record the particular devices you have, answer some questions about how they're connected together and then define activities you typically want to do - Watch TV, Watch DVD, Listen to Radio etc - and how you want the remote to behave in those activites (should the Volume button control the amp or the TV, for example). It needs someone who understands AV to a reasonable extent to do the configuration but, once done, it just works. The software is a bit clunky, you may need to get some help with odder devices (although Logitech's support is superb) but it's by miles the best approach I've come across.  If a babysitter can turn up and confidently manage your AV equipment after 30 seconds of explanation, you know they've got something right.

So I have two of these devices in the house:

But ever since the appearance of iDevices - and, particularly, the iPad - I've thought 'Wouldn't it be fantastic to produce an app that replicates the functionality of the configured Harmony remote, but communicates with an infrared device to send signals to the equipment? Then you could control it all with gestures on a big touchscreen, which would be a) massively more functional and b) just downright cool. A few months ago, Logitech produced exactly that, when they released the Harmony Link. Which is still not on sale in the UK, dammit. I've only been checking just about every day...

But now I'm not so sure I care. Most of our AV consumption is watching some variant of Sky - live TV, recorded programmes, Sky Anytime. And, last night, I picked up an update to the Sky+ app on the iPad, which has introduced control of the Sky HD box from the iPad.

Fired it up, it picked up the Sky box and it just worked. Utterly fantastic. It's not often I find myself praising Sky or Murdoch... but you have to love this!

But the girls think we should do camping. So, in a small way, we now do do camping. Just a trial like.

Post initial, immediate squeals of excitement:

'Dad, there are bugs in here'
'Yes. I expect there are'
'What should we do?!'
'Say hello to the raw and real world of camping'
'Will they get on our skin?'
'I expect so. Shut the door, then they can't get in'
But then the ones in here CAN'T GET OUT!'

Still, a bargain for £15. I expect you have to pay a lot more for a bug-repellent tent.

I've been to the 'lympics. Guiltily, I've actually found myself at three different events in the last six days, although I did actually pay for the tickets twice - which is not entirely the point: I have friends and colleagues who would happily have thrown untold sums in a Stratford direction if only someone would let them in.  'Vaguely fortunate' was about the limit of my views on it, until last night, when I was first confronted with the inside of the Olympic Stadium and a commentator excitedly shrieking 'You guys have got the golden ticket!'. Last session of the athletics, the disappointment of a GBR 4x100 team that had managed to fail to qualify through cack-handed fumbling - again - and the fevered desperation of 80,000 people for a Mo Farah medal in the 5,000.  Which was never going to happen - the guy's knackered after a gold in the 10,000, most of the field have run faster than him this season and the British have a long history of climbing peaks from which to tumble in crushing disappointment.

And then, of course, he ONLY BLOODY WON AGAIN!

I've been to more than a few major sporting events. I've always said that nothing could ever top a last minute England try at Twickenham against France/Wales/any team from South of the Equator. Well this did. And it felt different too: Sit in the stand at Twickers and everyone's a rugby fan, everyone knows what that special moment is meant to feel like. Last night, it felt like the crowd was experiencing it for the first time, which they probably were in many cases. Al commented that women just don't have the same tribal experience of sport as many men do and I suspect that's much why it felt so special.

So. Inevitably. I took some pictures. Because personal snaps of this event will be like gold-dust in the future, mark my words.

The Olympic Park is all rather grey and incoherent and functional. Or it would be, were it not for the fantastic tidal waves of flowers doing their best to make it feel rather less so. Since my company had a lot to do with this, I feel rather proud. And functional is good, because functional at this scale is an incomprehensible achievement: The logistics associated with putting on a two week shindig to which the whole world is invited are staggering.  Everyone expected cock-ups. How could there not be cock-ups? There were no cock-ups. That makes me immensely proud too, just like all but the very most cynical of this little island nation.  Big, big comedown tomorrow, a Monday morning to beat them all. 

Let's hope the closing ceremony is somewhere in the region of almost as good as Danny Boyle's triumph of a kick-off. I am slightly worried about the Spice Girls. I've always been slightly worried about the Spice Girls.

The transport all worked. The volunteers were fantastic, in a very British way, with a totally brilliant mix of ageing white pensioners, formal and deferential Asians and hilarious young black guys cracking the crowds up. (On the walk home last night: 'Keep smiling people - West Ham is less than two hours away'. Made even funnier by the Americans who took them seriously.) If nothing else, it might all have helped dispel the teabag and bowler hat shaped lens through which much of the world still views us. Quietly competent, properly multi-cultural and a sense of humour so refined that only we get it. What's not to like about the Britain the world has peered into for the last two weeks?

...and, when I tell them: 18% will ask for dietary advice, 78% will look blank and 4% will nod approvingly.  The latter will then tell me they either a) live in Epsom or b) are engineers by profession. In response to the 96% then seeking to understand what we do, I generally struggle: It's easier to describe what we don't do, eg advise people to eat nothing but burgers.

Atkins are consulting engineers.  We design and advise on roads, railways, buildings... and then a much longer list of other stuff that spans the engineering profession. But this seems pertinent at the time of writing:

There's barely an aspect of London 2012 that we haven't been involved in. And I wish our name was more prominent on the Olympic Park... but you need Coca-Cola money to get top billing.