If you think "what are we doing here", this video is a must see...


Have a good Sunday!

A light humour post for today... One of the funniest sites on the Internet is engrish.com. Today I've sent this picture as my contribution to that site:



This is in the back of a MR2 and says:

Nature sporty professional
More innovation more adult
A man in dandism
Powered midship specialty

Uh?

This is an update on an early post of mine regarding Fairfax's The Independent Financial Review subscription problems.

I've received a phone call from The Independent and I was told that the person doing the subscription updates made a mistake. They genuinely believe (and so do I) it was an honest mistake because the person wasn't receiving any commision on subscribers' renewal.

Since I wrote a full post about the incident, it's only fair I write another full post about their process, contact and the (valid) apology.

I don't like Subway anyway. The food doesn't taste great. And now they go around calling the police when one of their employees share a cup of soda:

About two weeks after she was fired, police charged her with the theft of two cups of Coke valued at $4. She will appear in Dunedin District Court this month.

Security video footage of the incident shows Lang sharing the drink with her friend, then refilling the cup and leaving it on the table when she returned to work.

"Most people wouldn't be fired and put in a police cell for two hours for sharing a drink."

In a letter addressed to Lang, the directors said she had given the drink to a friend without payment and that was considered "serious misconduct" and a breach of their "trust and fidelity".

Fidelity? Way to go to destroy employee fidelity, Subway.

I am sure the $4 cup of soda impacted your business in New Zealand a lot. Couldn't the company just charge the $4 to the employee's account?

And when we need police action in so many more important cases, I appreciate the time and effort you asked the New Zealand police to put into this "investigation".

A few months back I attended a seminar here in Wellington. Fairfax, the owner of local newspaper Dominion Post plus local IDG titles such as PC World and Computerworld, were giving away a free three month subscription to The Independent Financial Review.

I got one. I received the newspaper for three months and decided it wasn't something I was reading from cover to cover.

So, when it came the time to renew the subscription (or actually subscribe to it since those three months were free) I got a phone call from someone in the subscription department asking if I wanted to change to a paid subscription. I replied, very clearly, that I wasn't interested.

Today I got a Tax Invoice/Statement in the mail, charging me $165.60 for a new subscription. And that's with a 50% savings!

I clearly said I DON'T WANT IT. Don't send me unwanted invoices. It smells like those domain name scams where people receive fake invoices for a domain name they don't own.

Is it hard to understand I DON'T WANT IT, Fairfax?

And no, I won't even link to their publications in this post. They don't deserve Google juice.

UPDATE: I've received an explanation for this and wrote about it.

Enough said: Geeks make better lovers.

This is a small world... I had a stop in San Francisco on my way to Seattle to attend the Microsoft MVP Summit. While walking down, talking on the smartphone and checking e-mails on my Pocket PC I bumped into Nic Wise and wife Leoni.

No, they are not coming to the summit. It just happened that they were disembarking a plane from Madison (Wisconsin), for a short stay in San Francisco before heading to New Zealand. Pure coincidence in time and location. A few seconds before or after we would miss each other...

Another coincidence? Tonight Nick Randolph joined us for dinner in Seattle. He told me his flight from Perth to Los Angeles had a stop in Auckland (New Zealand) and I found he was on that loooong queue I saw in front of the QANTAS gate! We were in the Auckland airport at the same time, unbeknown to each other. I probably walked past him just a few meters away!

Small world...

I had a few hours in San Francisco, so I met an old Brazilian friend for brunch. Great weather, nice food. Flying out of San Francisco to Seattle though and everything changed. Snowy caps in Oregon, and clouds over Seattle. Raining here (no news), but not colder than Wellington on a rainy day.

Also, what's the problem with Air New Zealand? I bought my tickets to Seattle three months ago, and my profile says "aisle seats". When I checked in (and I did so in Wellington, which means a good four hours before the Auckland crowd) they didn't have any aisle seats available anymore.

The food was good though (in Premium Economy), and the wine too. The service was great (unlike the Trans-Tasman routes).

Air New Zealand is always surprising us... You see, I am from a time when flying, even on a 45 minute domestic flight, involved some food and drinks (including soft drinks, alcoholic ones).

Some time ago, for almost two years I had to fly twice a week, every week, and I couldn't complain about the TAM service. The hot breakfast was great, attention was in the details. But I know they have changed ways from fifteen years ago.

Same with Air New Zealand. They used to have nice hot food on domestic flights. Lately they replaced food with a (single) choc chip and water. Wow... Great stuff. They could have left the coke. Even in the U.S. with all cost cuts the arilines at least continue serving free soft drink (and paid alcohol).

Now I read on NZ Herald that

The free biscuit - one of the great traditions of flying on Air New Zealand's main domestic routes - is on the way out.

The national carrier has decided to axe the free chocolate chip cookie in favour of charging for a range of costly inflight snacks.

From Monday, passengers must pay or go hungry on all 737 aircraft, which fly main routes between Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch and Dunedin.

The free biscuit is a "great tradition[s] of flying on Air New Zealand"? Please... And now they will be serving overpriced food, supplied by a Wellington catering company.

What happened to "tradition"? No, I am not talking about the biscuit, that was just a cheap replacement to some (decent) food.

Air New Zealand flights over the Tasman to Australia have on-board service, including the food and drinks we would expect. But the food in coach is horrible. The "gourmet hashbrown breakfast" is something that is far away from gourmet, from hashbrown and from breakfast. The best I could have in the last three weeks was a toasted foccacia with cheese and ham.

I was in coach class in the last three out of four flights, and the difference between the food (and service) on business and coach is very visible.

And what about the decision to keep using metal forks, but replacing the knives with plastic ones. Where this very intelligent decision came from? I mean, the metal table knives, with no sharp points is replaced with a plastic table knife with no sharp points, but they keep the metal forks. Do they really think forks are no more dangerous than those blunt knives? Too much paranoia.

UPDATE: You should go and read Lance's take on this. Quite good.

During the last three weeks I have been flying up and down New Zealand and across to Australia to participate in the Google AdSense RoadShow panel.



During the panel publishers had a unique opportunity to interact with local Google AdSense and AdWords managers, ask questions to us publishers - myself representing Geekzone, and Australians Tim van Brugge representing i-do.com.au (a wedding directory) and Paul Greenberg from dealsdirect.com.au (an Australian on-line retailer).

But I decided to write about some non-technical stuff in this post today. So without further ado, here are my Best and Worst Facilities Awards:

- Best coffee: the cafe downstairs from the Hilton Brisbane
- Best hotel location: Sheraton on the Park, Sydney and Crown Promenade, Melbourne
- Best hotel room: the Sheraton on the Park, Sydney
- Best hotel bathroom: the Crown Promenade, Melbourne
- Best breakfast: the Crown Promenade, Melbourne
- Best gadget to have in the plane: Blackbox M14 noise reduction headphones
- Best casino on-route: Crown Casino, Melbourne
- Best airport experience: customs through Brisbane
- Best car show: the Ferrari 60th Anniversary Exhibition, Crown Casino, Melbourne

- Worst in-flight food: breakfast on Air New Zealand
- Worst in-flight movie editing: Casino Royale on Air New Zealand (they cut the poison scene, but left the torture scene in place)
- Worst in-room Internet service: Hilton Brisbane
- Worst airport experience: spending 100 minutes through customs in Melbourne (passengers with better things to do were disrupted because TV program Border Patrol was filming on location)

It all started because I work from home and I wanted to meet people in town. The first to come around was Darryl Burling, even before he joined Microsoft. Then came Craig Pringle, Peter Torr Smith and others. Australian Nick Randolph joined us during the time he was doing some contract work here in Wellington.

The routine is established: every Wednesday from 1:30pm people know I will be at Astoria Cafe for coffee, sometimes earlier for lunch. I bring my laptop and do some work from there. The folks at Astoria are cool with having a bunch of geeks using a couple of tables to spread their gadgets, tablet PCs, latptops and UMPCs around. It helps that they have a couple of wi-fi hotspots (Telecom New Zealand and Cafenet) right there.

Nick Randolph is back in Australia and is starting a similar "coffee group" in Perth:

Sorry about the late post about this, but tomorrow will be the first gathering of the Perth Caffeine Addicts - only kidding (well except for the Perth and the Caffeine bits).  One of the best things I did when I was in NZ was attend Mauricio's Geekzone weekly coffee group and I thought the concept could work well here in Perth.  So tomorrow, with support from Mitch and Alastair of the Perth .NET Community of Practice, we are inviting anyone who has an interest in developer technologies to join us for an informal chat at Tiger Tiger which is located here in the heart of the Perth CBD (opposite Star Surf Shop) from 1:30pm tomorrow.

Although this event is put together by the co-ordinators of the .NET user group I would like to take this opportunity to invite anyone who is doing application (be it web, smart client or otherwise) development here in Perth using any piece of technology to join us and talk shop.  We will be meeting each week, same time, same place, so if you can't make it this week, why not join us next week. 

We do have the occasional visitor to the group and we've also had someone just approach our table asking "is this the Geekzone meeting" or "Are you Mauricio, mind if I join you?".

People from Auckland say this never happens there. Doesn't anyone want to start a coffee group that way?