Snow finally in the South

After several previous warnings came to nothing and especially after this weeks mile weather I didn't really believe this weekends forecast. But this is the view out my bedroom window today. The kids are excited :-D

Conclusion on my Heathrow Terminal 5 experience

So it was Day 1 at T5 and overall it was a good experience right up to the point I got to the gate:

• Very easy quick access from new underground station to Departures
  
• Beautiful light and airy building, very spacious very modern
  
• Security was so quick you could have blinked and missed it
  
• Unexpected transfer required to Gate B and C area, but that was quick and efficient small train
  
• Gate B, again very light and airy
  
• Then this is where the problems started. A couple of flights departed on time then nothing happened, no announcements, nothing on informatiuon screens, lots of people milling about.
  
• finally after an hour of nothing - I heard "Last call for BA flight to Dusseldorf!" - no warning, no gate number, nothing, then a big rush by everybody to get on board
  

So 10 out of 10 for design, flow, ease etc.

But 0 out of 10 for information and punctuality.

I am flying back tonight, so we will see how that goes

But still late departures

You would think today of all days it would be on time. But it is 7.30 and no gates posted for any flight including mine due to leave now :-(

Very bright and airy

This is the view from Terminal 5 B gates looking over towards Terminal 4. The whole building is full of huge windows making it very sunny (and a bit difficult to read some of the information screens and TVs

Heathrow Terminal 5 view from B gates.

Wasn't aware there were separate buildings. Impressive view !

Unexpected extra journey

Via train transit for B gates at Heathrow terminal 5

Flying through Terminal 5 today.

So far an excellent experience. From tube to other side of security in just 7 minutes :-D

A sad day - Dungeons and Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax dies

I just read online that Dungeons and Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax has died, aged 69.

Love it or hate it, lots of people played Dungeons and Dragons over the years and all the spin off games that owe so much to the original. I met some of my oldest and best friends through D&D and today's modern equivalents such as MMORPGs and 1st person shooter games also owe much to the vision of this man.

Now personally after playing for a few years, it started to really annoy me with all its inconsistencies, but it was still the first real attempt to formalise a coherent methodology of role play and we can't take that away from him. Plus if we hadn't had all those issues with the games we wouldn't have had so many long involved arguments, which at the time seemed so important and now I just look back on so fondly.

For those of you who read my blog and were there, some of my favorite RPG moments:

• Bareg (aka Simon) falling off a tower so many damn times that he created a nice indentation in the ground
  
• The Paladin whose name I can't remember (aka the late Richard Bould), Bareg and a rather nasty trap
  
• Oh look there is a Catabl.................
  
• Slippery Jim, (aka me) and the chair that turned into a door
  
• The whole RPG experience that lead to Hirad Coldheart and The Raven
  

and in more modern times, I'll never forget:

• The damned Dam
  
• The tropical island with Jimi Hendrix sound effects
  
• The swamp and discovering you can't lie down in it "Too Deep!
  

...amongst many others.

RIP Gary Gygax, you gave the world something unique

Reverse Auction Nuts TV Resolved

Another call back today from helpful chap at the company running the reverse auction. He was completely up front and told me that there was a system error which meant I was not notified when I was out bid.

As a gesture of good will he offered me an iPOD or £100 of Amazon vouchers and as I am a self confessed Appleophobe and Amazonophile I took the vouchers.

Its good to see that with a little persistence you can get a fair recompense for a genuine mistake, I'm happy.

p.s. He did want me to stress that they have a fantastic system and this is the first error of its kind caused by change over onto new servers etc etc. I hope so and I think that £100 is a fair price for some development QA work :D

Update on Mobile Competition

Finally had a call back from the organisers of the mobile reverse auction for Nuts TV. They claim that I was outbid almost straight away and their system generated a message back to me - which I obviously didn't receive.

I was offered 10 free bids on the current auction running for a Plasma TV, but I pushed back and asked them to investigate further. As far as I am concerned I was notified that I was winning and never received anything to the contrary, so offering me £15 worth of free texts is poor compensation for an LCD TV worth over £300.

So they are digging some more and will get back to me soon

New Glasses

Just picked up some new glasses today and for the first time I decided to go for some rimless frames. It takes a bit of getting used too, not having a frame around and only seeing the hinges in my peripheral vision.

But I like them so far...

To Win or not to Win, that is the question, (or in this case the text message)

I was flipping around the channels late one evening the other week and strayed onto Nuts TV. Not the most intellectually challenging tv channel, but as I am a regular pub quiz goer, I stayed to watch their general knowledge quiz - (nothing to do with the contestants being scantily clad young women answering questions on a bucking bull until they get thrown off - honest).

Anyway, in the ad break, they promoted a competition to win a large LCD TV via a reverse auction by mobile phone and I reasoned that as this channel is:

• hard to find and
• rubbish

not many people would be watching and it might be worth a go.

So I sent in an entry and had a message back:

"Nuts TV: Congratulations! Your bid of 176p is currently the lowest unique bid! We will text you for free if this changes. Good luck!"

Now the compeition ended last Thursday and before that date, I had absolutely no more texts, so my reasonable expectation is I've actually won something. However, neither have I had any contact confirming I have won.

So, I found the competition T&Cs and managed to obtain a telephone number.

So far after three calls, I am none the wiser, but at least i now have a contact phone number and name of a person who seems to carer and has promised to get back to me. So watch this space...

mumbles to himself...."Now where is that number for Ofcom complaints..."

The First Project I Ever Worked on Online

A long time ago, in what feels like a far far away place and time, I left my job as Promotions manager for Dillons Bookstores and set up my own business as a freelance marketing consultant.

This was end of 1994 and I have strong memories of spending three days trying to configure this strange thing called Internet access and having to edit .ini files to make my 9600 baud modem work with my new Dell 25Mhz 486 PC.

Anyway, I started working on quite a few different book related projects and one of my clients was Jamie Hodder-Williams who was Marketing manager for Hodder & Stoughton. They were publishing a book called "Being Digital" by Nicholas Negroponte and I was helping to organise an event that the author would speak at. Jamie thought that since the whole book is about the Digital Revolution, we should put some pages on the Internet promoting the book and the event.

So I wrote some copy and I found a woman whose name I can't recall, Kim maybe, who put the pages live on the Internet for me.

I remember looking at these pages years later and thinking how basic they were, sadly I can't find them anymore and never took any screen shots.

So why this long ramble about my past, well Negroponte's name came up on the BBC news site today, talking about CES in Las Vegas and his "One Laptop Per Child Project"

Incidentally, in his speech, I remember him talking about two online projects that he thought were useful and interesting, one was "Yahoo", the first time I ever heard that name and the other one was Ringo a music recommendation service - you send an email with 10 albums and what you thought of each one. Sometime later you'd receive a list of things you might like along with a prediction of how much they think you'd like each one. Sadly that seems to have also died a death over the years, vaguely remember it changing into something called Firefly but lost track after that. the idea of course lived on and lots of systems out there now for recommendations, including StoryCode and BlogCode

Bloggers in Staines

By pure chance I found that in Blogger today if you go into a Bloggers profile and then click on location it shows you all the other Bloggers with the same location.

So I can see that on Blogspot, there are 77 other bloggers in Staines.

Here's the link if you want to see them. Can't see any logical order, so I wonder if it is in order of number of posts, in which case I am in the top 10 :)

Liverpool Capital of Culture, 2008

Just remembered that my home town of Liverpool is this year's European Capital of Culture.

So if you want to find out what that menas and what sort of events are going on, check out Liverpool08.com

Happy New Year

Just a quick post on New Year's Day to mention that one of my resolutions this year is to post more often to this blog.

I've just been checking my analytics for the blog and can see that I am still attracting a lot of traffic out there for my posts about poor customer service, I hope I have been of some help publishing my experiences and will continue to add more throughout the year.

Other resolutions include:

• Improve my French
  
• Lose some weight
  
• Write more fiction/short stories
  
• errr, that's it so far
  

A bientot

p.s. Added one more link to my blogroll - Filippo Loretoni a work colleague from StepStone

Fantastic Christmas Present

So Christmas is almost over for another year and I just thought I would mention the favourite toy received this year (by my son, not me) Those clever people at the BBC and Marks and Spencer created a fantastic toy:

Radio Controlled Car Football

Much fun was had by all and this is definitely a toy suitable for childrens of all ages if they have any interest in football. Ideally played on a smooth hard surface like laminate floor or lino, so you can get creative with sliding tackles etc.

Enjoy!

Poor design in a potentially dangerous situation

I was travelling back from Paris this week when just as the Eurostar train pulled out of Paris we were hit by a power failure affecting the whole area. All the trains in and out of Gare Du Nord were stranded for over 2 hours whilst we waited for the problem to be fixed.

The Eurostar staff were very helpful and friendly, but one comment really struck me as bizarre and unhelpful - but also quite funny.

The train had emergency power, presumably some sort of battery and the announcer said: "In the event that we are stuck here for a long time, it is possible the battery power will run out and the train will be in complete darkness. In this case none of the doors between carriages will operate (you pull a lever and they open automatically), but you can open them manually by pushing the black button above each door"

So that must have been a bad day in the carriage design team - "If we lose power and the train is in darkness, lets allow people to open doors by looking for a small black button black button above their heads - tee hee"

Amazon Can't Spell!

I received an email last week from Amazon.co.uk and was amused to see that they can't spell Trilogy.

One mistake possibly, but three times in one email - come on guys this is basic stuff!

More Stupid Things

Last year I wrote about few stupid things I had seen - article is here, one specifically was about blocking fire doors. Well last weekend I was out shopping with Theresa in Bristol and we were going through large automatically revolving door out of a shopping centre. On the door it had a sign, "In case of Fire Alarm sounding this door may stop and reverse direction"

I should have taken a picture and will add one later, but obviously not the place to be if there is real fire and you are trying to escape...

Update 1/1/08 - picture added