There’s a band in the house

This is what happens when you have a band come to play in the house. When Jackie came home and said that she’d asked the Vista guys to come and play at a party for her birthday, I thought it was the stupidest idea I’d heard in a while. Not because of the band, but just the logistics.

Anyway, I worry too much evidently. I was wrong and she was right.

It was a great night and only one complaint from the neighbours. They’d only just moved in at the back of us and asked us to close the doors. Wouldn’t mind but it was only 10pm.  I guess they were quite loud.

It was their first outing as a trio and they were bloody good.

As usual, my camera work is less than stellar.

More videos here

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I got some new business cards

New biz cards

I like Hugh McLeods cartoons and I thought this one was appropriate.

It’s quite funny.

-pc.

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oh, man. Where did the time go?

Into the ether.
I’ve been away. It looks like I’ve been lazy, but I haven’t. I’ve been blogging over on TALK - the wiki that we are trying to get established in the local government sector here in the UK. That’s taken a lot of time and it’s a slow burn. We are doing some things well and some things less well…but at some point it will ignite and we’ll be very happy.

I’ve also been working on i4sm. That’s another slow burn project that is finding it’s legs. At some point it will ignite and we’ll be very happy. There are lots of people stoking the fire.

And I’ve been working on another project. At some point…well, you get the idea.

In my absence, you should watch this. I’ve already said that this was my favourite track from 2007. I’m saying it again and showing you the video. It’s truly wonderful. Go buy it. The album version is better.

-pc.

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We got our bags back after 17 days

Much appreciated, Willie.

So long and thanks for all the fish. You won’t see me on one of your planes again.

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BA in daylight robbery shocker

It’s ten days now since we got back from Canada.

I feel like BA have stolen my property, which although technically not true, to all intents and purposes they are holding my property on their property and showing no sign of bringing it back. That sounds like robbery to me.

I’ve called them a few times for an update and been lied to, patronised and fobbed off. Great british customer service from a ‘great’ british company. Well done.

The best line I’ve had from them comes from a very nice Geordie lass who said:

“Imagine a big pile. That’s a pile of bags. Because you came into T5 early on during these problems, your bags are at the bottom of that pile.”

I felt very comforted. I wasn’t quick enough, but should have replied - directly to Willie Walsh:

“Imagine a big pile of papers. That’s a pile of CV’s of all the people who have messed up on this T5 project. Because you are ultimately responsible for this monumental b*lls up, yours is on the bottom.”

Happy job hunting, WW, because your days are surely numbered* and the pile of CV’s is huge.

*unfortunately, we all know this won’t happen. If it does, WW will just go on to a big fat pay off and an even higher paid job. Maybe we could get him working on the Olympics.

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Shoot me now…super smooth transfer at Heathrow T5

Ah, we checked in at Toronto for our BA flight to Heathrow then Manchester in plenty of time. I’m a a bit anal about things like checking in…

The very pleasant BA lady at the desk (unusual in itself) said “you’ll be into Terminal 4 and out of the new Terminal 5, here’s a piece of paper that tells you about the transfer.” Cool, I thought - supposed to be super smooth getting through there and the building is jolly nice, by all accounts. So, in a sad kind of way, we were looking forward to it.

Now, I’m not the biggest fan of BA. TBH, I thought they were a bit sh!t before they lost one of our bags into Vancouver a couple of weeks ago. I thought they were more sh!t after giving us a credit card to get some cash for incidentals whilst we waited for our bag - the card didn’t work. I thought they were really sh!t when it took them 3 days to get the bag to us.

It could have been worse…the guy in front of us at Vancouver Airport was heading to Whistler for a week. They’d lost all his bags…skis, cold weather gear - the lot. Imagine the joy of being in a ski resort with none of your gear. I mean, how hard is it to put your bags on the same plane that you are travelling on?

Apparently very difficult.

So, we landed at Heathrow and I switched on the iPhone to check the news on the BBC. “Chaos at T5″ was the headline (or somesuch)…which brought a resounding ‘hmmm’ from yours truly. Now we were into T4 (well, I say T4 - but it could have been anywhere as the plane was parked on the tarmac and we were bussed to the terminal).

From there, we went up the stairs, down some stairs and into a queue for flight connections, onto a bus for the 18 minute (count ‘em) transfer to T5 (other airports spend some of their £4bn on whizzy trains) with a load of stinky long haul passengers and then up an escalator.

“oooh, T5 looks nice” I thought as we careered into another queue. This one was to get through a door (remember “super smooth transfer”, the next one was for the boarding pass check (we bypassed the 400 strong line at the customer services desk and the 400 strong line at passport control for non-UK transfers). At the boarding pass check a kind lady was telling people that their flights had been cancelled…nice of her. “No, I’m sorry I don’t know when the next one will leave, please join that queue” (the 400 strong one).

The next line was for passport control. Smile for the photograph. I asked the lady what was going on about 20 feet to my right where about 200 people were stood at the bottom of an escalator. “Oh the security screening is at the top of that escalator and there are too many people up there, so they are having to manage the queue” (remember super smooth transfer). Great.

To be fair that queue moved fairly quickly. After about 10 minutes we were up and into the security screening queue. Shoes, belt, coat, jumper all came off…into the fully automated screening x-ray thingy. Very good, but I feel that the flow may not work so well when it is super busy…you’ll see what I mean when you go through.

At last we were through and into the terminal proper. It’s full of high end shops - Harrods, Mulberry etc attempting to wring the last of your pounds into their coffers…and to be fair again, is very, very nice.

At the gate the staff didn’t seem to know how to work the screens or escalators to take you to the plane as they were letting people through then holding them at the top of the escalator for a few minutes. There were no updates as to when we were boarding and when we did it was just a free for all. Ho hum.

We sat on the plane for 40 minutes whilst they loaded on the cargo and struggled to close the doors. Hmm. How ironic. Struggling to get the cargo on. Maybe they are waiting for the bags to come over from here, there and everywhere.

The flight was punctuated by the tale of the lady sat next to Jackie. She’d got to T5 at 3:30 the previous day, had her flight cancelled, shovelled into a crappy hotel told to come back at 5amonly to be told that her flight was cancelled and then herded onto our flight. She was only in the north west for a couple of days.

Imagine how she’ll feel without her bags. Yep, no bags…no bags for anyone on that plane (well bar about 10 people), which we were kindly informed of when we got to the carousel.

And we still have no bags. Three days later. BA don’t seem to know what is happening to them.

I guess at the end of this, my previous resolution should have been stuck to. “Don’t fly through Heathrow”. I’ve now added “don’t fly BA. EVER.”

BA are simply terrible. Their flight crews are rude and cranky, their staff on the ground, whilst pleasant are poorly trained and lack customer service skills and their bagage handlers/systems clearly rubbish. And not just at T5. I know someone who works at Manchester Airport and they regularly have ‘hundreds of bags a week’ stacked up there that are misplaced. When I called to check on my bag yesterday the guy on the phone just outright lied to me and said that both flights bringing our bag up had been cancelled. He looked a bit foolish when I told him I’d checked the flight status online. Come on, don’t lie to me. You’ll get caught.

I don’t know what has gone wrong at T5. Other than crass incompetence, finger pointing, lack of training, poor testing, poor communication, poor preparation and a distinct absence of management listening skills. BA went for the glory - the big bang of moving almost all their services to T5 in one go. Big bang? Big mistake. A schoolboy error.

All in all, it’s not that big a deal I suppose. No-one has died and a few bags are late to their destination - at least on the face of it. The repercussions of this for each individual involved are unknown and unreported, so the true cost of BA’s incompetence will likely never be known. For us it is a late bag. For others cancelled holidays, missed meetings, perhaps missed time spent with family. Who knows?

It should never have been like this. I do wonder if BA knew that they were flying into a storm and just thought they’d brazen it out. They must have done…after three years planning for the change over it was probably way too late to change their plans. I also wonder if the could have used the regional airport network more effectively than just piling everyone into a bad situation at Heathrow. I don’t know.

But I do know that I will never fly through Heathrow again and I’ll never fly BA again. If I do, please shoot me.

-pc.

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justtoobusy…

sorry I’ve been silent. I keep apologising for that, so sorry for that too.

I’m just too busy at the moment to blog here. It’s down to a number of things:

the TALK project that we are working on for local government is taking my time. upgrading it this week.

the Institute for Social Media is taking my time. need to get the blog launched this week.

the little entrepreneurial side project I’m working on is taking my time. It’s also receiving a lot of encouragement from some serious people. might be on to something here. if you ask me nicely I may tell you about it, or even let you help test it. but it may be a little early.

oh yeah, and this week I’m going to Canada on holiday. as I said to Ewan yesterday, my brain is bent out of shape and I need a break. there is never a good time, or a bad time, to go on holiday. this one fits that bill.

So, I doubt I will get time to write again before I go on holiday, so I’ll shut down for a couple of weeks.

Be safe while I’m away.

-pc. 

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@LIFT: Ewan McIntosh - bebo boomers

My mate Ewan McIntosh is doing some sterling work in the world of Education and social media. Here, in 5 minutes he gives an insight into why this work is so important.

In the un-conference style of Lift, Ewan was voted onto the main stage by those attending the event. It’s a neat little way to include your audience more…small but significant and it means that at least part of your conference agenda is relevant to the people who have paid to attend! Not that I’ve been to irrelevant conferences in the past…just boring. Lift certainly wasn’t.

Anyway, Ewan had just 5 minutes to get his point across. Watch it, there are some very important points in here. If not for that then for the cup stacking world champion!

-pc.

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justonething Iphone’d

Thanks to the tip from Pedro I’ve just put the IWphone plugin for wordpress into action on justonething.

Works a treat…check it out on your iPhone or iPod touch.Normal service is maintained on the web. The interface on t’Iphone is really sweet I think - shame that it still doesn’t support Flash, as a few of my posts have flash video embedded, but it seems that this may be coming soon.

I for one am looking forward to BBC iPlayer on the miniature marvel.

-pc.

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@LIFT: Francois Grey - @home Citizen CyberScience

A few years ago there was a bit of a phenomenon around the SETI@Home application. it was something that kicked in when your machine was idle and helped to analyse radio telescope data in the Search for Extra terrestrial Intellegince. There are over 3 million users right now.

The Folding@Home app has recently gone over 1 petaflop over computing capability…this is distributed, voluntary computing that has reached epic proportions.

Francois Grey talked about how these distributed grid computing initiatives, volunteer computing efforts, have grown into ‘volunteer thinking’ efforts. So, not only does the computer get used to crunch some numbers and transfer data, but the person at the end of the keyboard is also put to use. You may be asked to identify the shape of distant universes at GalaxyZoo or help construct a better map of Africa (link to follow if I can find it)…

There’s huge potential in these applications use of the idle time that our computers have, and even more in using the brain power that sits idle between our ears.

Put it to use. If you know of any other @home projects, let me know.

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