When in Bath the other weekend, the commentary on the free audioguide at the baths suggested that “the tradition of doing business in baths has died out in the Western Europe and America”… which struck me as odd at the time, but I thought maybe I’d just seen too many mafia movies. Then today, whilst trying to maintain my exercise routine, I kept swimming into a crowd of Spaniards congregating at one end of the slow lane of the gym’s pool, who were, erm, having some kind of meeting. It was a bit bizarre, and I didn’t see the appeal…
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Orthototastic
I’ve had some orthotics produced to give me the extra bit of arch my foot seems to have lost (particularly since my injury a few months ago)… An unexpected benefit – Amanda says I am now the ‘perfect height’. Not sure how I feel about this ;-)
Fitness fan
…I’m not. I enjoy sport, but not generally exercise per se… but the recent membership of a new, non-council (and therefore slightly posh, nice and warm) gym has opened me up to the possibility that I enjoy swimming for the first time since I was a kid excited about going to Lake Club in KL (where there were also Water Slides, to be fair!).
So this was how I came to be swimming lengths and lengths of the gym the morning after Amanda’s birthday, and live to tell the tale. It’s true – the first two weeks ARE the hardest, then things start to feel more natural… let’s see if I can sustain this.
Post-birthday haze
Amanda’s birthday was huge fun. Bloomsbury Bowl is THE place to be. In addition to the bowling, karaoke and Big Buck Hunter game on tap, by the end of the evening we’d found innovative ways of deriving entertainment from balloons and a simple barrier (oh look, I’m walking down the steps… now I’m catching a lift… watch out, it’s a SHARK!)…
Wonderful fun, and Amanda liked all her gifts, so life is good. If slightly post-birthday hazy. And it wasn’t even my birthday!
Silence…
…caused by broken router in additional to the usual busy-ness. Now reconnected (on everything but my brother’s irritating MacBook, which is having Wifi issues), but normal activity will not resume for a little while as have even more busy-ness this weekend, and have started with the new gym membership, so life is more than usually hectic… Sorry. Be back soon.
What’s the best free anti-virus software – Ask Armand
André asked what the best free AV software was.
Well, I’ve used two.
1) AVG Free – v7 was very good, but I’ve found v8 to be a little clunky; it slows down my machine and recently corrupted itself on Amanda’s, so we’ve moved over to…
2) Avast, on Chris‘ recommendation. As well as its awesome piratical name, it has a smaller footprint (so runs faster), and seems to work well. You do need to register, which is slightly tedious, but has been worth it so far.
You may need a firewall as well, to keep properly secure, but you’ll have to research those yourself for now…
Satnav is wonderful
The TomTom One XL warped us through Bristol, Bath and Basing countryside, helping us when it was dark, raining, trafficky and generally too much hassle for maps. We didn’t encounter any significant issues despite using it for journeys large and small, intricate and simple. It is definitely weaker when you have to encounter private roads (e.g. going to shopping centres etc), but you should definitely be doing some thinking yourself when you’re driving, so perhaps that’s for the best.
The comedy voices (Jean-Luc, Yoda etc) were, as previously blogged, invariably dropped in favour of someone more normal. I’d always want to switch back to Jean Luc for the end of the journey, though, as being told to ‘engage docking procedures’ always made me smile.
BUT: I still haven’t convinced Amanda. I think she gets satisfaction from the process and mental discipline required to plot out and follow a route in the old school way. So it may be a while before we source a SatNav device for use in this household, but again that all depends on how well the driving instruction goes…
…which is OK. But I need to practice my maneuvers. Part of me feels I need to book a test so I have a deadline to work towards; most of me feels like I really don’t have enough time to get ‘good’ enough to persuade the DVLA to give me a license. [sigh]. More work needed.
Waiting for Gmail
Got back from vacation today with a massive email overload. I wish Outlook did conversation threading — would have got through the process much quicker. I may push for Google Apps* at work soon…
(*…yes, Google is a client. But I still love Apps).
Global warming has arrived?
Yesterday, on a beautiful walk around the village of Kingsclere, Hampshire, we were hit by horizontal hail. Overnight, a blanket of snow has covered the village we’re in now. It’s only October!
I think I need to shop for some energy saving gadgets and try to save the world a bit more…
Ikea nearly embraces SaaS
I’m a believer in SaaS. It seems the natural evolution of computing and there are thousands of possibilities of awesome once any service becomes available via the Internet. But I’m aware of the anxiety of some companies in embracing these technologies – they have nervousness about putting confidential information on the web, or of losing control… I have more sympathy for some of these perspectives than others.
All the same, I was slightly impressed when I discovered that Ikea’s kitchen planner tool allows you to save your kitchen plans online for remote retrieval. After all, this company refused to have a webstore for years, so progress had been made…
What this app means is that you can pop into Ikea, design up a kitchen with the dubious help of their experts, and then check it again from home, in case you’ve changed your mind about something or the other. Or you can design it up from home, take it into the store for confirmation and order. You might even be able to place the order directly from home, but I’m not sure we’re at the point where people are buying kitchens without seeing them first.
So great on that front… but:
1) The application is clunky, slow, and not remotely intuitively
2) It’s a downloadable Windows application using the website only as a shared storage medium – are Flash / etc not up to the challenge?
3) The software doesn’t provide enough guidance in structuring your kitchen. You almost want Ikea to upsell to you — “have you considered that you might need a cultery drawer, sir,” or “have you really designed a kitchen without a sink, you dolt” would be handy. E-Commerce 101, surely…
4) The in-store ‘help’ is just rubbish. 4 bored looking people teaching you tricks with the application (…”oh no, the software doesn’t let you put a sink in a corner unit… that doesn’t mean you can’t do it. Just add it afterwards.”) I remember the days when the guys at Ikea helped you actually come to some sensible design decisions…
So, a good first step… but Ikea’s long walk into fully enabled E-Commerce has a way to go… and it does feel like they need to fix some more basic customer support issues for this hybrid experience,or people will wonder why the struggled their way through traffic, parking and crowds to actually come into the store. Unless, of course, my expectations are unreasaonbly high, and some analyst at Ikea has done the calculations and they’re happy getting the volume of trade they do by cutting prices to nothing (an entire, reasonable sized kitchen, sans appliances, costed up at a ludicrously low price…)
Oh, I’m looking at a new kitchen, btw. In case you didn’t realise. But I have had more fun than you’d expect for the first day on vacation, despite the trip to Ikea ;-)