Out of the way

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Posts tagged with "service"

Trusting telcos to provide a service

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I use a telephone, like many people, and it is a pretty important tool so what I pay for it is reasonable. But I expect certain basic behaviour from the provider, and it is frustrating when it doesn't happen. This is about those times...

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Air France good, CDG still sucks

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Air France, Oslo-Madrid via Paris. Airline is good, but their hub is the worst I know.

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Oslo, and reading

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More reviews...

KLM Oslo-Amsterdam-Madrid

  • Must the War Spread - D.N.Pritt (a Penguin Special from 1940)
  • Oryx and Crake - Margaret Atwood (it reminds me of work)
  • His Illegal Self - Peter Carey (it reminds me of bliss)

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An extra country...

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In the last episode I was hoping to get on a plane to Alamty. It didn't work out quite like that, but it is OK...

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Visas and nerves...

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I have a ticket to Kazakhstan. I will have a visa waiting on arrival... but I won't have it when I depart. I hope this is going to be OK and that I will get to BarCamp, but it is a new level of nervous...

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Travelling grumbles

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On my way home, slooowwwlllyyyy. Sometimes in a long trip, I get down.

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жарко дома? да, sure is...

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I'm in Madrid and it's in the high 30's (about 100º in the old money - or for Americans and Englishmen), so I am glad I have a fan. I am trying to teach myself Russian, because I am going to Kyrgyzstan for ...

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New passport

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I changed one of the most important documents I have...

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Whee! Dragonflies and other fun

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In Madrid playing with new toys...

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The joy of Jetlag...

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I am suppoesd to be asleep. I have to be up early tomorrow. But I was at two great conferences recently, and squeezed in some travel...

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Ah, Paris. Air France. Aarrgh sad

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I am in Paris airport, on my first Air France trip - and I have been for a bit over eight hours. So far I am extremely unimpressed. With Air France, with the airport, with the whole deal. Maybe on the way back it will seem that this was an aberration, but if I didn't have a return ticket with them already, I would be reluctant to be on another flight with them. Ever. (This doesn't mean I wouldn't. Just that I would pay money and go out of my way to avoid it).

I would have filled out their complaint form directly but it wasn't big enough. I'll send them a pointer to this, so they can read it.

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Two ways...

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While waiting on the phone for British Airways ...

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Baggage handling...

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What is wrong with airline baggage services? Maybe I am just frustrated by a week of washing my clothes in the shower before I go to bed, and not having time to get proper clothes again...

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Shaken up

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I have been flying, been in an earthquake, and of course British Airways lost my baggage again...

I had some fun. I caught up with friends, and I had a hard time too.

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It's a code... jag...

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I have been playing with programming again.

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Paris - very far out

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I spent a few days in Paris. Lovely place, of course. Hung out with friends - lovely people. Went to Xtech - lovely conference. But why was there no internet??

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Yes! Power!

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Spending a lot of time travelling means that little things I take for granted at home can become big hassles. So I thought I would write about some of them...

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Joy in Japan (and beyond)

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A few good things happened in Japan. A few more in Australia...

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The right stuff...

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Skype++ # opening the perspective of the web a bit


Apart from providing a tool that I use a lot, I found something else to like about Skype. I am living on a series of temporary machines because my old one died and I am still waiting for Apple to deliver the new one (yep, I'm a Mac fan. They're not really physically robust laptops, so I am also a fan of their extended care warranty wink ).

I wanted to install Skype on a windows computer I have. So how impressed was I that their installation instructions actually showed me the relevant screenshots from Opera? Well, I am curious about what other browsers they have on the list, but it seemed pretty cool to me.

Rich Romero++ # being helpful and easy going


When my Apple did die, I was in a bit of a pickle. I was travelling too fast to leave it anywhere for repairs, and I needed to get the data from it to give a talk. (I had just written it, so no backup, and didn't want to have to do it again...)

He set me up with a sensible backup system on the genius bar at the Florida Mall Apple Store, helped me grab the data to CD and get quickly back to working with as good a setup as I could hope for.

Gitta Mejer++ # for going way above and beyond the call...


I was in Copenhagen. The benefit of a lot of travel is that even flying on unchangeable non-refundable back-of-the-bus tickets I have enough frequent flyer mojo to go into a business lounge. So I can get work done, have a shower, skip the main queue for check-in and ticketing, and a few other useful things. And at the desk there I was served by Gitta Mejer.

She helped me out of a huge airline ticketing pickle, by staying back a couple of extra *hours* at work and figuring out how to make the supposedly impossible happen. I have been a regular customer of the same travel agent for 7 years, because she does that for me (and gets good flights, prices, and knows what she is doing), and I have colleagues and ex-colleagues who do that as a matter of course (hello Doug, Gorm, Koalie, Michelle, Tatsuki, Vibeke, and too many others to list). But I thought that was rare in someone who could have handed the problem to a colleague, or just decided that it wasn't worth waiting 45 minutes on hold to see if she could improve on what she had already done.

And when I went in again to say thank you, she claimed that all that was part of her job. It isn't, but I was extremely grateful that she did it.

I've had a few things go really wrong in the last month (banking is my personal nightmare at the best of times and I didn't appreciate the guys I met outside Biddy Mulligan's nrealy as much as I appreciated the staff there), but these have been good things that random people have done, and I'm feeling pleased about the world today.

How do you give the extra holidays to the people who deserve them because they work so much extra time? And how can you ask that person to always be there, when you know that they deserve to take more time off than they ever will anyway?

The right way?

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The nice thing about a blog is that I get to control exactly what is in it. I also take the blame for anything stupid I say, which makes sense. I resisted writing a blog for a long time. I tried it briefly a couple of times in the late 90's, when there were no real tools, but then spent so much of my time writing for work that I stopped doing it for pleasure. But it's nice to write things when I feel like it. Sadly, I often don't for a lack of time (too many oother things to do) or because I am far away from the computer. I guess that means that people aren't overburdened by reading it.

I'm trying to write some articles. It takes time, which is why I am still doing it late on Saturday night. They're fun, but hard work. And then I hand them in and they get edited. On rare occasions something I write gets published where other people read it. Most recently an article on the mobile web was published by .Net, an english magazine that the general public can actually read.

I got a copy from a friend who had seen it. Naturally, it had been edited a little by the magazine. It may have contained a spelling error, or some tortured sentece they wanted to simplify. Mostly they did a good job, actually improving the way things were said. But a couple of the changes rankled a bit with me. One of them was a question of style - I had written about a scruffy guy looking for a cheap bed on his mobile, which they left alone, and then

the girl with the heavy make-up and the cute little phone could actually be cursing the Web site that won't let her change her river cruise ticket for a Trabant hire-car in Budapest.



It came through the editing process as a girl looking at celebrity gossip in some magazine. It might be true that English readers weren't going to know what a Trabant is, or that the example seemed crazy. But the net effect was to drive a stereotype that I actively tried to avoid. My writing is not free of stereotypes, But I try to avoid some of them for one reason or another.

The other was more serious, and the sense of the edited version was almost directly opposite to what I had written, and something I was very unhappy to see. I immediately asked for a correction, and was told that they would indeed provide one in issue 150, for which I am grateful.

But they could have shown me the text before publishing it. As I said when I submitted the article, I would have liked to review any changes - precisely for this reason. Instead, some number of people will see my name (and picture) next to something that I regard as a stupid thing for anyone to say, and of those people I suspect a good number won't actualy read the correction. If I didn't know that there is quite a lot of confusing or even sloppy journalism around, and people are used to it happening, I would be more upset. But there is not a lot I can do about it.

In theory I can take legal action, pointing out that associating some statement with me is detrimental to my reputation. Since they published text that made it seem like I think Internet Explorer is a good browser, it is probably an easy enough case to make. But it probably isn't that important, and a published correction given rapidly and in good grace is probably better than arguing about it. And arguing about things in court that don't have some clear material importance is only good for lawyers.

So, back to writing some more pieces. One is on the mobile web, again. But they ask for camera-ready copy, in other words presumably all errors are my fault, and they aren't planning to sub-edit it. The other one will probably get sub-edited - I hope that if they make changes I get to see them this time.