Ireland keep the pint

I read this article today that I had no idea about until now - which is one of the straight off benefits in my change of tact...

I can't imagine not ordering by the pint. Especially when the body that enforces tries to tell me I can only drink so many "Units" of alcohol! How lazy to define a unit of measurement and just call it a "Unit"...

Change of tact

I've been using Google Reader for a good few years now, and find it very useful but also often find it overbearing. I see a blog or RSS feed that talks about an interesting topic, and I subscribe. I've changed my tact on this, instead of subscribing to the feed, I'll subscribe to the topic. So, I define a term, and subscribe to be told about anything containing this term.

This can be done on a lot of sites:

• Google News
• Google Blog Search
• Wordpress Search
• Twitter

I'm sure there are others - and I'll probably end up oversubscribing in that fashion, which will prompt another change of tact.

Of course, there are feeds that I'll keep direct - friend's blogs, blogs that are targetedly about specific subjects, etc...

Ticket Text?

Last night I went to see Frankie Boyle live in Hammersmith which., by the way, was an awful example of someone who delivers good lines moving to a full comedy show but instead of developing an act of in-depth material just delivers some kind of "best-of" lines that most people have heard before. A sorry, sorry state of affairs.

Anyway, so I booked the tickets using Ticket-Text. They sent me the ticket by email and by text, as promised. The website says:

SAVE.. no postage and packaging fees.
This is true. There are no postage and packaging fees. There were booking fees, but that's to be expected.

EASY.. no waiting no queuing no hassle
Now, ignoring the lack of punctuation in this line, we'll take this one item at a time.

• No waiting: There certainly wasn't any waiting for the tickets. They arrived practically straight away, but since there was only one scanning machine at the venue, I had to wait for it to use. It then printed out a token for me to take to the door. If I had a normal ticket, I could go straight to the door.
  
• No queuing: Not only was there only one machine, but the scanning function was briken on it. So each person had to enter the 10+ digit number for each individual ticket. making a very boring queuing and number reciting process
• No hassle: given the above, this definitely proved not to be the case.

Working around London: Finding WiFi

I consider myself a fairly flexible worker, but when I moved house recently I found myself with a lot of reasons for home working (waiting for furniture/applicance deliveries) but no capability (internet not yet installed).

I wandered the streets of Turnpike Lane and Wood Green looking for the type of leisurely café that I would easily find in Islington and the like, but to no avail. To make it worse - because I need to work from VPN, and it's mandated by my work laptop - I can't use any wifi that forces you into a walled garden at the beginning, whether it's to make you pay for credit, or to say "Welcome to <insert provider here> Wireless", it just messes things up for me.

In the end, I sat on the corner of a street thanking the lords for people who don't WPA their connection. I also went all the way to Crouch End, where the wireless is just as rare. I did find a pub (typical) called "The Queen", which was a gift. Free wifi, good food and coffee.

Anyway, what brings me back to this is the fact that Time Out have an article on central London locations that have free WiFi.

Working around London: Finding WiFi

I consider myself a fairly flecible worker, but when I moved house recently I found myself with a lot of reasons for home working (waiting for furniture/applicance deliveries) but no capability (internet not yet installed).

I wandered the streets of Turnpike Lane and Wood Green looking for the type of leisurely café that I would easily find in Islington and the like, but to no avail. To make it worse - because I need to work from VPN, and it's mandated by my work laptop - I can't use any wifi that forces you into a walled garden at the beginning, whether it's to make you pay for credit, or to say "Welcome to <insert provider here> Wireless", it just messes things up for me.

In the end, I sat on the corner of a street thanking the lords for people who don't WPA their connection. I also went all the way to Crouch End, where the wireless is just as rare. I did find a pub (typical) called "The Queen", which was a gift. Free wifi, good food and coffee.

Anyway, what brings me back to this is the fact that Time Out have an article on central London locations that have free WiFi.

Fitfest: Cycling in the cold

Bloody hell it was cold this morning. I'll have to see if I can pick up anything to keep my head warm...though my headphones help: I've recently ressurected my bluetooth headphones for my phone. They're great for hearing your phone ring when you're on your bike, and for listening to some radio - or, if you're me, the Adam & Joe podcast. I always think it needs at least 3 listens to get everything that's happening.

I also started using the Nokia Sports Tracker for my cycle journeys. It measures everything by GPS, so while maybe not entirely accurate, it's close enough. My stats for today's journey were:

Duration:43:52hrs
Distance: 12.44km
Avg Speed: 17km/h
Max Speed: 42km/h

I doubt if I get up 42km/h, but maybe I do for very short periods of time. I need to look at exporting the data to get a further analysis.

I also swam this morning, but not much since I had a 9am meeting. So I get about 10 lengths in before I had to leave.

The Key to Technology

In every house I've lived in, and I've moved around London a lot no far - not to mention my time in Dublin, there has always been a knack to using one or other of the house keys. It's always "lift it a bit" or "pull th door [towards/away from] you", "wiggle it" etc. and my new place is no different.

It's really the same in every part of life, from the simplest of solution to the most complex (attempting to make life simple) of technology, the user still needs time to get to know the quirks and personality of the technology.

You can claim a lot of devices are intuitive to use, but there are always unexpected "features" that make you think "huh, why did they make it like that". I'm finding this out more and more.