Last night we were in Liverpool managing the Chartered Institute of Marketing's 'Future Directions in Internet Marketing' seminar, the third event in their technology trilogy.

It was held at the University of Liverpool Management school and featured presentations from the CIM's Merseyside Regional Chair Rob Fearn, Google's UK Head of Technology Industry Mads Moller and Director of the University's e-Business Research Centre Professor Dennis Kehoe.

It was the first time we've used this venue and it was certainly popular with delegates. There are a number of bright, modern lecture rooms available for events and we used the School's cafeteria area for refreshments and networking prior to the seminar. Most importantly there is plenty of free parking from 5pm directly adjacent to the building.

We're pleased to say we're managing events for a number of the CIM's North West regions including Merseyside, Lancashire and Greater Manchester. We're especially looking forward to next month's event in the Isle of Man, our only dilemma being do we fly or sail.

What do event managers do when they're not running events? Well we seem to spend a considerable amount of our downtime printing the contents of endless delegate packs.

Maybe one day soon all conference documents will be downloadable from event specific websites (clients willing) but in the meantime we rely on our pair of trusty Brother printers.

The only problem is you've got to constantly feed them with paper and ink or else they make a dreadful electronic bleating noise.

Anyway, I wanted to tell everyone about the wonderful people at PrintCartridgeDirect who supply cheap, great quality compatible ink cartridges for all the major printer brands.

A week or so ago they alerted us to the fact that they were having a buy one get one free deal for all orders placed that weekend and so we went online and ordered a stack of cartridges for our stationery cupboard. Unfortunately they never arrived and so after leaving it a while to allow for any backlog caused by their generous offer, I called to query our order.

I didn't have to argue or plead at all and after checking that the original order had been dispatched they said they'd send it out again. Sure enough, the next day we got all our cartridges. That's great customer service and I know you all use ink so do try these people out.