Posts from 2006

I dearly wish I had not opened a newspaper this weekend.

The image of John Prescott receiving sexual gratification from his secretary, while simultaneously reviewing a Whitepaper on the environment, is one I am desperately trying to expunge from my consciousness.

I didnt mind Tom Kyte copying my PhotoBlog idea but now he is using my fantastic, amusing blog entry about the loss of Interweb connectivity in a hotel as a source for inspiration without the courtesy of an attribution or a [Via] reference.

What next ? The 'death' of a domestic rodent ?

If this blatant plagiarism continues, I will be forced to take action.

British Airways are taking steps to move the queues from the conventional check-in desks on UK domestic flights to queues at the self-service kiosks and even lengthier queues at the 'Fast Bag Drop' desk which will be renamed 'Bag Drop' to comply with the Trades Description Act.

This is good news and it will be interesting to see the effects but please take care when printing your board pass.

I note Tom Kyte is shamelessly copying my exciting and innovative photoblog idea but appears to using a slightly more expensive camera.

Pity I was not able to attend Tom's 2 day seminar in London. That would have been very interesting. Maybe next time.

Yesterday I was eating lunch in an office in Copenhagen. Bizarrely, one of the project team I was working with, was attending a training course in the UK and was simultaneously sitting down to eat at my normal place of work at TVP in Reading.

I was worried that Googles integrated suite of Web 2.0 office applications would pose a threat to Zoho but another, more immediate competitor has just launched this week.

ThinkFree provides a similar service to Zoho offering free, Web-based Word, Excel and PowerPoint software. I found ThinkFree's charts matches the features in Excel (and is better than ZohoSheet and NumSum).

In fact, ThinkFree's compatibility with Microsoft Office is so awesome, at times, it is easy to forget you are not actually using Word/Excel/Powerpoint. I am surprised the use of the small toolbar icons does not constitute not a breach of copyright.

ExtremeTech produced an excellent, comprehensive review of ThinkFree which describes the features in more depth.

The city of Copenhagen (near Denmark) has a lot to commend it.

Unfortunately, the view from my hotel window is not one of them.

Probably the worst view in the world.

People often ask me Norman - when will you be updating your award-winning Sport bars of Europe meme ?

No. 2 - The Irish Rover - Stroget, Copenhagen

Satellite feed - RTE. Thankfully, we were spared Tyler's orgasmic 'ON - REEE !'

Food feed - Irish Rover Burger (inevitably). Just like a standard burger in a English pub.

Smoke feed - Intense. Peaked around the time of the missed penalty.

Beer feed - Carls Special and Tuborg substituted at half-time for Leffe.

Game feed - A team in yellow outplayed and outclassed a team in red. The team in yellow had a goal disallowed and missed a penalty. The team in red appeared to win overall.

Just wrote a quick letter using ZohoWriter. An interesting product. Think of Microsoft Word on the Web. ZohoWriter supports the standard WYSIWG editor, document versioning, collaboration, blog publishing and export to Word/PDF formats. My document is saved safely on a server in the event of any media based disaster striking my PC.

The only comments I have was that it wasn't obvious how to suppress the header and footer when printing the final hard copy, I couldn't see a speel checker and WordPress.com wasn't listed in the list of supported blogging platforms. But don't quote me as I never took the time to RTFM so all of this may be possible.

Otherwise a decent product although I suspect Google will be unleashing a revamped version of Writely soon which could be interesting competition (nail in coffin) for ZohoWriter.

Web 2.0 aficionados, across the globe, held their collective breath today as Mr. Norman Brightside, a little known and largely unsung blogger, from Newcastle (near Norway) delivered his much awaited, quarterly update to his renowned State of the Blogosphere address.

Fresh from the successful launch of a book club, Brightside told an adoring and expectant audience:

The blogosphere is in a right old state. There are a few more blogs appearing and the rate of growth is directly proportional to a fascinating new factor. Blogging growth = Technorati apology growth

For example, last month you might see the apology appear once a day. Now you see the apology twice a day. You can immediately conclude that the blogosphere has doubled in size during the period.

And, err, that's it.