Gary Gale

This week's trawl through my Delicous bookmarks. Actually this is last week's trawl but real life got in the way of posting and I beg your indulgence.

• Last week, Snow Leopard, AKA Mac OS X 10.6 was released though some places seem to now be selling an even more advanced version, Mac OS X 15.6.
• I like chilli sauce, I have a fine and wide range of the stuff in the larder at home; but some people must really really like the stuff to buy it a gallon at a time.
• In my day job I do geo stuff but I wasn't aware that a globe, an inflatable one come to that, has sharp corners and isn't suitable for children.
• While we're on the subject of geo, Virgin Media found out the hard way that place names aren't unique and sometimes there's more than one place sharing a name; Whitchurch in this particular case. Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

It was inevitable, but once I'd found out that a new version of the Cisco VPN client was available, the one thing that was stopping me from installing Snow Leopard, then a Snow Leopard upgrade was on the cards. So off to the Apple Store on Regent Street in London I went.

Once home, it was time to see what's in the package, to which the answer was not a lot, as it was even more minimalistic that the Leopard box.

And then on through the best part of an hour's worth of installation with a single reboot roughly half way through.

... and yes, I do have more disk space now that there's no PowerPC support and so there's no Universal binaries and yes, though it's totally subjective it does feel a darn sight faster. Now to test Exchange 2007 support ...

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

Now that the so called smart phones, such as the BlackBerry, the Nokia N series and the iPhone, are becoming more and more ubiquitous, so airlines are ramping up their paperless or electronic boarding pass programs. I came across this recently when flying KLM out of Amsterdam Schipol when returning from the State of the Map conference; I'd checked in online from my hotel room but had no access to a printer. KLM's online check-in system offered me the option of having my boarding pass on my iPhone, which duly arrived as a link in an email.

British Airways allegedly offers this service out of London Heathrow though I've yet to see it being used and there's no evidence of any scanners at the gates at Terminal 5 or Terminal 4. British Midland and Lufthansa are also operating trial programs and now Continental Airlines are offering a trial at San Francisco. When moving around Schipol the system worked incredibly well even though some staff seemed not to have heard of it and looked a bit confused when I showed them my phone after being asked for my boarding pass. Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

Is it lying in your shed or garage, unloved, a bit rusty and in need of some care and attention? You'd love to get it going again but lost the original maintenance manual?

Maybe this Haynes manual, spotted this morning in Foyles on London's Charing Cross Road, is what you need.

It even covers the Saturn V you have lying around under the bed; you know, the big rocket bit that goes under the lander. Go on, there's really no excuse now.

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

Here in the UK we're used to bad or non-existent customer service, so much so that it's virtually ingrained into our genes. We're well aware of the oft used expression that you get what you pay for except that you actually don't; you continue to pay and act pleasantly surprised when you actually get what you've paid for, murmuring "well that's a turn up for the books". We look longingly across the Atlantic to the US and talk admiringly of the "American service culture" whilst conveniently overlooking the fact that our US counterparts get paid rock bottom wages and have to work damn hard to garner enough tips to make a living.

Posterous continues to impress and is fast becoming the main source of blog posts, both on my Posterous blog and autoposted onto my main blog.

We're all good Web 2.0 citizens these days and that means we tag everything; the Posterous FAQ has this to say on the subject of tags: "Add tags simply in the subject of your email using the syntax ((tag: apple, gadgets)). You can see your tags on the homepage of your site and click on them to see those posts."

So, in the continued spirit of experimentation, this post is tagged with "experimentation", "posterous", "autopost" and "wordpress" via the subject line "In the Spirit of Experimentation, Part 2 ((tag: experimentation, posterous, autopost, wordpress))"; let's see how this gets reflected in the post and in the autoposted WordPress version.

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

Here we go again. I'm not entirely sure which is worse; being wide awake and up at 4.00 AM or deciding to write a blog post about it.

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

There's nothing like being at the seaside; the cry of seagulls, the tang of ozone in the air, Blackfriars Bridge, The Gherkin and St. Paul's Cathedral in the distance ...

Blackfriars Bridge? It's easy to forget that the Thames is tidal and if you time it right that there's several stretches of beach at low tide.

Some parts of the shoreline even have sand, though the daily high tide does mean that sandcastles are seldom seen.

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

A combination of oversleeping, train cancellation and the temporary loss of my Oyster Card, once I'm on a train naturally, does not make for an auspicious start to the week after the Bank Holiday.

But then the final straw; no coffee at my local station. "Shut Happens".

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous