Category: General

Posts about life & other things in general

Garmin, educate your vendors

I've helped two people in the last year to update the firmware on their Garmin units.  It is a fairly simple procedure, and it is FREE.  But in both cases that is not what the stores where the bought the units told them.  Both stores, different ones, tried to sell them new map software, which would not help to fix the issues they were experiencing, but on which the store would make a big profit.

Surely these sales people should have the training and INTEGRITY to help Garmin's clients, and if not, why are they still agents? 

Sounds quite kinky

I received the following sentence in a document from a vendor, quite a well known company as well.  

"The … system poles the staging area to see ifany changes are received"

Moral of the story, get someone else to proofread your documents before sending them to your client, Word's spell-check does not pick this up. 

Home Sweet Home

We landed back home this morning after a good last few days away.

We spent the last few days of last week visiting some more museums and other touristy attractions, and then went for lunch at Hard Rock Cafe in London on Thursday.  DON'T DO IT!!!  R1,500 for four of us, for some of the worst food I've had in my life!

Leigh-Ann also managed to find a shop with a Wii in stock, and bought it for Josh for his birthday, I may be playing with his birthday present as much as him.

On Saturday morning I was out of the house fairly early, and in town around 10.  I walked around the Prologue route making sure that the spot I picked on the map was a good one, which it was, and at around 12 I took my position when I noticed that the railings were starting to get crowded.

At around 1:30 the race caravan started coming around the route, I knew the caravan was long, but I did not expect it to last for almost an hour with continuous vehicles coming past.  Some of these must be very scary & uncomfy to drive for the full Tour route, but they do.

Once the first rider went off it was all action with a rider coming past at least every minute and few seconds, the million and a half crowd going wild every time a british rider came past.

At 6, a few minutes before the last rider went off, I decided to beat the rush, and left my spot to walk back up to Marble Arch to catch the tube back home after standing in the same spot for just over 6 hours, it hurt almost as much as riding for that amount of time, but definitely worth it in the end.

Next time I will make sure that I follow the Tour for a few days, and not only get to watch one.

Sunday was spent travelling back to Paris, and Monday we basically had to get to the airport with all our baggage so we couldn't do any more sightseeing in Paris.

Some London site seeing

Today we spent some time in London city itself, visiting some museums and finally taking one of the open top bus tours.  If this rain would just stop for a bit, maybe we'd be able to do more.

Our first stop was the British museum, where we saw a lot of artefacts from Egyptian, Roman & Persian times.  Quite interesting, but we couldn't stay too long, this place definitely did not interest children.  Next stop was the Natural Science museum, lots more interesting stuff to see, with lots of fossils and other displays.  A day at the museums is not the most interesting place for a five year old, so we had to move quite quickly through most of it, until we got to the T-Rex display, where we spent some time.

For lunch we tried Burger King for the first time, needless to say I will not be doing that again, as bad as McDonalds, if not worse.

The rest of the afternoon was spent on an open top bus, with us sitting in the covered part of the top section because of the rain.  The plans were to stay in London for dinner and then go on the eye, but then rain started getting worse, so we decided to come home and try that another day.

My Sunday was spent doing some gadget shopping, as I was looking for an iPod replacement after mine decided to stop working a while ago.  After visiting about 40 electronics shops and comparing prices, I was very tempted to buy myself a UMPC, but they are still a bit pricy, coming in at around 750 pounds.  I settled on the Archos DVR, which is basically a personal video and music player with 80GB of storage, a 4" display, and the ability to connect to any TV/AV device and record from it, or play back to it, as well as change channels etc when necessary.  I'll be doing a bit of a review once I've had it for a while.  I've seen these second hand on Bid or Buy & eBay for around R2,500, so when I managed to bargain the guy down to 200 pounds I was quite happy, this one came with a remote & tv pod, which the second hand ones didn't have.

Keep your blog from sucking

Scott Hanselman posted an interesting article on what your blog should do to not suck.  Read it here.

Now I agree with most of what Scott says in his article, and with this I’ve enabled anonymous comments again, as well as enabled the spam blockers.  If your comments don’t show immediately, I still have moderation on, and all comments will be read.

I will probably also be moving my feed to one of the providers, but am still toying with that idea.

As far as keeping two blogs and cross-posting goes, I disagree with Scott.  I keep two blogs, one for my technical posts, and one for all my posts, all technical content gets cross-posted to the technical blog at dotnet.org.za.

I might think about only posting an excerpt on my technical blog with a link back, but will definitely be keeping both.

I will be making some changes here on the points I agree with, so keep an eye open for them.