Interesting new product going into limited beta from Microsoft.  Its called Live Mesh, and it is apparently going to form the basis of their new internet-based file system.

Playing with Live Mesh: First Experiences | Sarah In Tampa | Channel 10

Yesterday we were looking to book some flights to Dublin for my Dad's birthday later in the year.  There are only two carriers flying direct between Munich and Dublin; Aer Lingus and Lufthansa. Unortunately Lufthansa seem to only fly on some days of the week, and we were looking for something more precise than their schedules.  Aer Lingus fly twice a day, and at first glance appear to be cheaper. 

I have to say I find the experience of booking with them to be very irritating. The first thing is that you appear only to be booking for one person, even if you have multiple passengers selected at the front page.  I went back a couple of times to check if that was an error on my part before proceeding, but it obviously was some quirk they thought would make the process more transparent. ie: price per customer rather than total price.  I can almost see how it would make sense, if they hadn't completely fucked it all up later in the process.

The next is that their session time isn't set to be too long, so one has to go fairly quickly through the pages in order to not have the transaction time-out and avoid restarting from scratch. I only had to do this once, but the simple fact that I actually had to go back and restart my transaction again from scratch irritated me no end. By the time I had figured out which dates we were going to fly, how long we were going to go for, and what times of the day we could fly, the process had to be restarted.  Now, I don't know about you, but I rarely know in advance that I want to fly at 19:00 on a Friday.  I typically know the days I want to fly, but there are so many variables when I book flights in advance that I can change my mind significantly.Aer Lingus's web site doesn't want that.  It wants you to know before you load it exactly when you're booking for, and you have no more than a few minutes per page to process those pages.  Also note that there is a LOT of small print to be read.

I have to pay (preferably in advance) for my luggage to go on the hold.  I discovered that only after I had gone sufficiently far into the process that it was just too much hassle to quit, and I had no backup plan anyway as they fly the most regularly on our route. It is a fairly large amount too - €18 per bag for a return flight.

After entering my credit card details and getting the transaction processed, I was presented with a further page telling me that I had to pay for seats. What.The.Fuck. Seriously... think about that for a minute.  Why would they go to the hassle (and expense for them) of running two transactions against my credit card for the same flight? Never mind the fact that I had just paid €400 for flights, now I have to pay for my seats too? What if I had said "no"?  Surely there's a cause for someone suing them for bait and switch sales practices?

So, my words of advice to you are these.  Aer Lingus has gone completely mad.  They used to be an airline I liked to fly with, and would chose over others if I had the chance, but no longer. Enough is enough.  Next time we get to say a warm and fuzzy "Fuck you, Aer Lingus". Next time we're flying Lufthansa (if it actually is Lufthansa and not an Aer Lingus codeshare).

I woke up this morning after having pretty much been asleep for the previous forty hours.  All of yesterday barring an hour or so in the morning and the evening, and most of the previous day.  Its all a result of having been vaccinated against a bunch of potential killer diseases.  So, with three injections, I was vaccinated against TB, Diphtheria, Polio, and two others I can't translate; one of which is part of the standard vaccination sets given to children here, and one to counter the disease carried by tics which you can encounter in the mountains here. 

I continue to be impressed by the quality of medical practice here, and the complete absence of payment except to out medical insurance group.  Don't get me wrong, we're paying about two hundred euros per month for that medical insurance, but it seems to be very comprehensive.  For example, most of our drugs are covered, all of our medical costs (so far) and access to specialists is particularly easy. I wanted to get a follow up test done for my cancer, and instead of needing to be referred by my GP, I can simply pick up the phone and call a specialist.

I have to admit to a certain amount of cynicism about medical things when we came over here first.  In London, we paid nothing for our medical costs either, but the conditions of the hospitals and GP practices were positively Victorian.  I have seen both sides of that system too, both the beautiful (private room in Westminster hospital overlooking the houses of parliament) and the ugly (public room in the same hospital where there were eight of us in a ward), and even the best of them left a lot to be desired.  Here in Germany you have to pay for medical insurance, and its typically pretty damn expensive, but you really get what you pay for.

Oh, that reminds me of something.  There is apparently no blood test for the type of cancer I had (seminoma), but they took blood from me every time I went back for a check up.  Have to go look at my medical records and see what they were looking for...

All I can say is... holy shit! I had no idea. I grew up with this song and if you had asked me I would have told you for sure it was about Dublin. Hell, the lyrics even match. I presumed that the Gas Works wall where I met my love were down around Pearce Street area where the old Gasometer was. (Aside, did you know my grandfather used to work on it?).

So, it turns out that Dirty Old Town isn't about Dublin at all.  Thanks Dave, you just shattered a long held belief there for me.  Its about Salford, which is in Lancashire! It was written by a guy called Ewan McColl (father of Kirsty McColl) in 1949 as a filler for a scene change in his play Landscape with Chimneys. Bizarre and unexpected.  Anyway, linky below.

Linkage : Dirty Old Town.

Its very interesting to me how our obsessions with technology become so all encompassing.  I should probably re-phrase that: I sometimes wonder just how obsessive I need to be to keep up with things that are happening on the Internet.  I find the rate of development and change sometimes to be too much to keep up with.  Let me share with you a case in point, and the trigger for this post.

I use Twitter, which is a very popular micro-blogging service.  It allows me to write concise blog entries in a very short format (like text messaging on phones).  Twitter limits you to posting no more than 140 characters, so you sometimes have to be creative to limit ideas to such a concise format.  You also get to see the entries (tweets) of people you have chosen to follow, and these networks of followers can rapidly get pretty big.  Keeping on top of it all sometimes is harder to do than you would think. There's a lot of noise on Twitter, and not much decent signal.  However, there are some excellent sources of information on there if you search hard enough. 

Twitter has an open API which allows developers to build programs that interface with Twitter. I use a couple of those to keep track of what is going on : WittyTwitter, and Twhirl.  WittyTwitter is a program I have done some development with, and have submitted a couple of bug fixes to the code.  I'm not all that active in developing it, but I use it a lot and follow its development closely.  For the last two days I have been getting errors with Witty.  It can't log in to Twitter, probably because of a bug in the Twitter API endpoints.  I also haven't been in front of my PC as much as usual.

This means I have actually missed some information that has been disseminated over Twitter for the last couple of days.  It wasn't much, but there was one product announcement that interested me, and it is something that I need to be aware of from a development perspective.  Here's the catch.  At the end of the second paragraph I went to grab some lunch.  I have returned now and I can't even remember what the product was that prompted me to write this post.  The concept remain the same though.

The interesting thing is that tools like Twitter can exert such an unconscious draw on you (me actually). I wonder what would happen if I were to stop using Twitter for a while?  Someone I follow (a gifted and popular cartoon artist called Hugh MacLeod) decided to stop using Twitter recently, and discovered that too many of his customers actually RELY on Twitter for their business communication. It doesn't say much for the state of a business that relies on something as ephemeral as Twitter.  I'm also not sure about the wisdom either of using such a public forum for business, and certainly not one like Twitter where you have no oversight of the content nor control over its maintenance etc.  However, I could see tools like Twitter becoming more and more used by business as time goes on. After all, many businesses now have a presence in Second Life; the trendy virtual world operated by Linden Labs.

One very good reason why I used to use my own blog was that I could be fairly confident in the security of my code.  I wrote it, and I knew that I had to keep the code as safe as possible from the obvious known hacks.  It also afforded me a chance to learn a bit more about how sites are hacked and what you can do to prevent it.  So it came as a surprise to me today to learn that there was a patch released yesterday to plug a very basic vulnerability in BlogEngine.Net.  I guess we can't all be perfect.  In fairness to the guys, the patch was released the day after it was reported, but its still worrying.

I guess I have to let go of my innate distrust of other people's software and trust that they know what they're doing.  Its either that or I have to start getting serious about looking at the source code I put on my server right from the start. The problem with that is that there is actually quite a lot of code to look at, and the codebase is getting bigger.  I've been looking at the new releases as they come out, and playing with them on my dev server.  However, I have been waiting for a major update before upgrading the code on my live server.  I guess this counted as that!  Anyway, passwords are now changed everywhere... just in case ;-)  Back to our regular scheduled program.

I'm trashed tired.  We were out all day in Bad Aibling with Anna's grandparents and have only just gotten back.  So last night I was looking at the categories for this site. Previously they had been the typical categories that you would find on a blog like this, but I've started to change them.  Now, I'm using less descriptive and more generalised categories, and using tags to sub-divide them.  The categories I have decided on are as follows :

• Being.  This will cover me, Anna, us, friends, the general state of existence.
• Building.  Web sites (typically this one up to now), Hardware, sometimes Software when that's not covered under Programming.
• Generalising.  It isn't really, but the word fits.  It'll contain those posts that aren't specifically something else.
• Happening.  Current affairs, gossip, things going on at the moment in our lives.
• Learning.  Never stops, but its nice sometimes to write it down.
• Listening.  Music, people,
• Playing.  Computer games, card games, drinking games, whatever!
• Programming.  Most posts with coding stuff will be categorised here.
• Reading.  Books, web sites... its not hard to figure out.
• Technologising. Had to invent another word here for this - all things new and technology related.
• Travelling.  Planning, getting there, being there, getting back, and airports.
• Using. This will mostly be a computer thing.  I use Windows, Visual Studio etc...
• Watching.  TV, movies, people.
• Working.  The thing I do to make money.

I'll use tags to give the categories more granularity.  So, under Being, there'll be tags called "Anna" and "me" which will handle those respective ideas.  The page that shows the previous posts isn't quite up to serving the tags in the order I want, but I'll take a look at it in the near future. Changes are you're going to read it in reverse chronological order anyway.  For now, this should do.  As this blog isn't mono-topical its a little hard to figure out the best way to handle multiple topics, but it should all fall into place soon.

The process of going through this blog and re-tagging / categorising every post is a long and relatively boring one.  However, some interesting posts have come back to me.  One of them refers to a post I made on May 21st 2002 about blogging at work. Another is about being demoted the same week, and a bunch of others all grouped in the same month.  That period in my professional life was a time of great change and stress.

My entire team had been transitioned into another department and we were very fucking annoyed about it for many reasons.  We felt that we were coming from a different culture into something more stifling than we had previously experienced, and we didn't like it.  I was ostensibly the team manager, although I think there wasn't much management needed with the guys I had working with me.  We were a very hard-working bunch of guys, and all seriously good at what we did.  Consequently we liked to play hard as well as working hard.  It was our way of letting off steam.  Our work culture was very stressful, and conducive to burning people out, and we really needed an outlet valve.

The department we moved into wasn't like that.  They weren't typically under the kind of pressure we experienced in our team.  Part of the reason for this is that we were working to schedules made by our parent company in the US, and they had the luxury(?) of making their own.  So, while there was a general bad feeling on our new floor, we felt particularly abused because of the change in circumstances forced upon us.  I know I thought some pretty awful things about my manager at that point.  With hindsight, I regret those and am glad I never actually said anything to him.  It would have spoiled what eventually became a pleasant relationship with a very interesting guy.  Anyway, at the time I got seriously disillusioned about my job, and the company I was working for. I stage-managed the creation of a new position for myself in May 2003 and deserted my team.

I just wanted to say I'm sorry.  I suspect at the time you all thought I was maybe a bit fucking selfish to leave you all in the position you were, and I wholeheartedly apologise for that.  We have all moved on to better things (except you Sparky, get your arse in gear!) and have all kept in touch over the years, so I don't think any permanent damage was done. However I don't ever remember asking you all how my leaving affected you.  I hope that you don't think I wasn't thinking of you all, for it simply isn't true.  I hope you can understand why I had to leave.  I had to get out of Technology before I ended up coming in one day and going postal.  That wouldn't have done any of us any good.

One more thing... you absolutely should take the photos Dave.  The reason the Killing Fields are still around and have not been built on is that we need to remember just how fucked up mankind can get.  We need to remember so we won't allow it to ever happen again.  Take the photos, make them good ones, and never forget.

According to a recent post on ReadWriteWeb, a couple of Gartner analysts have pronounced the death of Windows.  Its an interesting read, but not anything I think of relevance to us in the real world. I believe this is the fourth or fifth or millionth time that the desktop has been pronounced dead, and yet it still lives on.  There's an awful lot to be said for being in an office where your connection speeds are high enough that you would predict the death of the desktop in favour of internet apps (or cloud computing as we call it these days). The thing is, outside of our cosy existence with fast broadband links, there's a lot of reason why it just doesn't work. 

When I work on entries for my blog, I do them offline.  I used use notepad, and while that served me well for many years, I have started to use Windows Live Writer more and more.  It allows me to write a post for this blog offline and do it in a WYSIWYG manner.  I'm sure we have a more fashionable name for that too.  Anyway, there's no reason why I couldn't do this online with the exception for my fear of a lost connection.  While I was using the online editing page of my blog for posting, if my network went down then I would have lost this post.  However, now I don't worry about it anymore.  Actually there's a three hour gap between the second last and last sentences.  Try that with an online service. Sure, some of them could handle it, but not all.

Next other reason is the interface. If I should accidentally close this window, it will prompt me to save my work before exiting.  My browser won't do that.  It also won't present me with the slick experience I get with this offline app.  Its not that it can't, its just that it doesn't.  Most of the web apps I have seen where there is a "user input" type area tend to suffer a little from lack of love.  They tend to be functional rather than beautiful.  Me, I like the beauty.  I have a PC that is powerful enough to be able to present me with beautiful things, so why the hell shouldn't I use it to do just that?  To hell with web-apps and their inherent minimalist approach to doing things.  I want the fat client experience!

Surprisingly enough, AOL seem to have stepped up and put some numbers on the table to try and merge with Yahoo!  Supposedly AOL (or Time Warner) have valued themselves at $10 billion which is way down from the last estimate of their worth. Under the deal, the AOL folks would all switch to being Yahooligans (or would that be YahAOLigans?) with the exception for the dial up business. 

I'm not sure what that means in the US, where the dial-up and connectivity business has been in tatters for years, but there would be no impact on Europe as those businesses were sold off to Carphone Warehouse, Neuf Cegatel and Telecom Italia.  I think if anything, the new company should seek to leverage both brands in Europe to a stronger entity.

We'll just have to see what happens.  This certainly makes the fight interesting though.  Is the final outcome going to be Microhoo, YAhoLoo or a bunch of unhappy companies?