dadams.co.uk

What do you buy the woman who has everything? A box to put it all in? The wife bought her main Christmas present at the airport on the way to Chicago, and it’s been tucked away ever since. It’s a handbag… can’t remember what make… Gucci or something like that. I’m about as interested in handbags as she is in catadioptric telescopes. Anyway, being a generous sort of guy, I recognise the need to purchase some Christmas surprises for the current Mrs Adams. But what…?

Okay, I have a small list. Then I saw the Technika Viewbox. Excellent, the wife loves her iPod and likes to download music videos from iTunes. And it was reduced to 75 quid. Perfect. So I decided to get down to Tesco to have a look at the technology close-up.

One thing you should be aware of is that we’re only 7 minutes away from the nearest branch of Tesco (which is located right next to one of the UK’s largest branches of Marks & Spencer). Yes, 7 minutes… if you drive there at 03:00. On a Saturday afternoon a few weeks before Christmas it’s a marathon trek. Anyway, I arrived, I parked in the nearest possible parking space to the entrance of Tesco (about half a mile away), bumped into my frolleague Jon Adams (no relation, but we have an amusing story about both walking through the door of 10 Downing Street), and found the Viewboxes. And then it struck me… maybe I should have bought an iPod with me.

After returning home and seeing to a couple of errands (including the usual father-chauffuer weekend job) I made some excuses and returned to Tesco. I parked half a mile from the entrance and walked through the rain, got to the Viewboxes, and stuck in Lauren’s iPod nano (because she has more movies than I do). After 5 minutes of fiddling about I worked out that there’s a setting on the iPod to tell it to output a video signal, and this successfully displayed a movie on the Viewbox’s screen. Pretty good… not Sony / Panasonic quality, but we’re talking 75 quid. At this point I started to over-analyse whether this would be something the wife would use, so decided to return home and do some subtle investigations.

Later - during a commercial break in Get Me A Celebrity, I’m Out Of Here - they showed an ad for the Viewbox. “Terrific” said the wife, “I’ve always wanted something like that”. Excellent. “Darren, pop down to Tesco tomorrow and get one”. Oh great.

So by 10:30 this morning I was back down at Tesco. As there’s fewer places for people to go on Sunday, the traffic was worse (even with my local-boy knowledge short-cut). I parked half a mile away from the door, and made my way to the Viewboxes. Hmmm, less in stock than yesterday, but still quite a few. I tried the wife’s iPod touch on the display model… slightly different procedure for getting it working, but fine nevertheless. I queued, I paid, I walked back to the car, and drove home.

Back in the kitchen the wife removed the Viewbox from the packaging, plugged it in and docked her iPod. She selected ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ by the now botox-ridden Mariah Carey. There was Mariah’s dulcet tones but no image… just some jumping lines. I ensured the iPod was docked properly. I tried my iPod. I tried the wife’s again. Nope… out of all the Viewboxes piled around the display model I’d picked the one that was kanckered.

Back in the car, back down to Tesco, parked slightly more than half a mile away from the door (everyone in Surrey was there now), walked back through the rain, through the door and to customers services. There was a small queue, which got longer as an elderly woman went through the process of a new mobile phone being activated. I was a hair’s breadth away from shouting “blimey love, go home and read the effin’ manual” when her transaction ended. After two more people it was my turn. They swapped it without an argument (that concerns me, I wonder how many more had been returned) and I asked if I could test the new one rather than be subjected to a fifth visit in one weekend. I got it out and plugged it in, and then docked my own iPod. At this point it’s worth noting that I only have one movie on my iPod - the DVD of ‘Incubus Live At Red Rocks’. And thus at full volume, the first song ripped out across the store with the delightful lyrics “Hey mega-lo-maniac, you’re no Jesus, yeah, you’re no f***ing Elvis”. Thankfully this was accompanied by live footage of California’s finest, so I repacked the Viewbox, walked back into the rain and returned home.

The Viewbox is now installed in the kitchen, the wife is extremely happy, she’s downloaded lots of music videos for Christmas songs… but I still need to get her something for Christmas.

I was thinking about writing this blog entry this afternoon, and then by an amazing coincidence Ed Brill penned 30 days with the BlackBerry Bold. However, whereas Ed’s love affair continues, mine is coming to an end. Sadly, following our joint customer event, I have to give the Bold back to RIM. They’re not the villains, I have to tell you… the Bold is in such demand that RIM themselves are experiencing supply problems internally. Judging by the number of people I’ve seen carrying Bolds on the train and around London, I can understand why. And I can understand why people want them… this is a gorgeous device. A crisp, clear screen, an easy-to-use keyboard and an excellent user interface.

Another coincidence was that today I received a BlackBerry Curve (8310 for model number freaks) - this was my choice to replace the 8800 as part of the network switch-over at work. A Bold wasn’t one of the options (huh, typical), it was a Curve, an 8800 or a Pearl. Having used an 8800 for 18 months, I selected the Curve.

I’m setting it up now, it’s SIM-less at the moment but it’ll go live some time tomorrow. First impressions… very light, smaller than the Bold and 8800, a good keyboard, a nice screen, but overall not a patch on the Bold. I’ve just upgraded the Curve to OS 4.5, and deselected the horrible Vodafone theme, which makes it several times better than it was out of the box.

If I’d never seen a Bold I’d be very happy with the Curve… but I have, so…

I’ve just got back from a trip to Dublin, and before I left I considered that I haven’t travelled many domestic business miles this year. A quick check on the bmi Diamond Club web site confirmed my worst fears… I’ve been downgraded from Silver membership to Blue Plus. Okay, to put this into perspective, it’s not actually my first fear… I can think of several things that are far worse. Anyway, I digress… this means that I will still be able to get a complimentary cup of tea and sandwich on a bmi flight, but I’ll no longer be entitled to use the business class lounge (unless my ticket qualifies).

So, now I’m going to have to make sure I travel the miles again to re-qualify for Silver membership. This means gathering 16,000 membership status miles. By coincidence (and as if to rub it in) my shiny new Blue Plus membership card arrived today, ready to take over from the Silver card at the end of this month. The enclosed letter explained about the 16,000 miles to re-qualify… or I could just pay £150 now. Do I want to pay £150 for the occasional pleasure of sitting in an uncrowded area and having a free cup of tea and biscuits? Errr… no.

On the subject of travel, a couple of observations…

1. Hotels charge too much for breakfast… €19 this morning for a cuppa, some scrambled egg, bacon, mushrooms and toast. When paying that much I feel obliged to eat as much as possible to get my money’s worth, but I can’t.
2. Airlines have gone soft on people again over “hand luggage”. Can something really be described as “hand luggage” if it requires wheels to move it? And this rule about one item… one is less than two. Half to be precise. One is not two. Surely that’s not hard to understand. And surely it’s not hard to enforce.

Something we almost take for granted within IBM is Sametime’s location awareness (also plugged into Notes 8.x of course). In IBM we have access to the extended functionality which ships with IBM Lotus Sametime Advanced (adhering to brand guidelines there, thankyou) - this not only keeps a record of locations you’ve been to yourself but will also present those locations to other users who arrive there.

Location awareness is tremendously useful for a number of reasons, especially in a highly-mobile organisation such as our own. Being aware of where someone is provides some simple benefits like knowing the best phone number to contact them on, or knowing whether it’s worth getting up from your office chair to walk round to where they normally sit. If someone is travelling, they may be in a different time zone and therefore may not be in ‘work mode’ when you are. They may even be in bed when they wouldn’t normally be. In short it gives you important information about how you can collaborate with them.

In the last thirty or so hours I’ve switched location several times and Sametime has got them all right. Yesterday I arrived at our Portsmouth office and the location switched to ‘North Harbour’. Back home, it switched to ‘Camberley’. When I arrived in Staines this morning it switched to ‘Lotus Park’. I then headed for the airport, and once seated in the bmi business lounge I connected to BT Openzone… the location automatically (no intervention from me) switched to ‘Heathrow T1′.

This evening I arrived at the rather nice Park Plaza Tyrrelstown hotel in Dublin. Clearly someone from IBM has already been here (no big surprise, it’s very near our Ballycoolin and Mulhuddart offices) because the location automatically switched to ‘Tyrrelstown’ when I plugged into the free broadband. Take note, English hotels… “free broadband”.

Remember when people used to let fireworks off on Guy Fawkes Night and on that night alone? I do… vaguely. These days it’s like living in Baghdad for a two-week period while one set of neighbours tries to out-do another with aerial incendiary devices that endanger commercial aircraft. As much as I miss my late pooch Molly, it wasn’t fun enduring a fortnight of barking every time there was a bang.

On a different note, and just because I happen to have the blog editor open, the race for the White House is really hotting up. The world’s media have only been banging on about it for eleven months. History will be made… either the first black president or the first female vice-president, and in either situation the most famous loser. The BBC news site have a scoreboard tracking the number of states won so far, and it’s exciting stuff.