vzaar

Thursday, November 1, 2007 ~ 1 Comment

Disclaimer: Adrian Sevitz, who occasionally comments here, is Chief Geek at Vzaar. I have received no incentive to write this post (cheapskates). If I am rewarded after the fact, in anyway at all, I will of course let you all know. As ever, all bribes and freebies are welcomed…

I don’t eBay* much but the recent declutter means I have a few items to sell and when I do, I’ll be uploading a video clip of each item using Vzaar. I’ve mentioned it before and since then it’s continued to be updated and is now pretty slick, so much so that I thought it deserved a little more exploration. Suffice to say that, if you are selling anything on eBay in the near future, I whole heartedly recommend you check what Vzaar has to offer, it really does make a difference to your eBay listing.

And hey, it’s kind of fun to have a reason to record and muck about with video clips.

Using Vzaar is very straightforward, but the biggest challenge in the process is shooting a good video in the first place. Personally, I’m limited to two recording sources, my mobile phone or my ageing webcam. I’ve used my mobile phone in the past but as it records in 3gp or mp4, both of which I don’t have software to edit, it means I have to record everything in one continuous shot. It is possible, and I’ve used it in the past but I’ll be using my webcam in the future. Recording in AVI gives me the ability to edit things and get the most bang for my buck.

Best of all, the software, if you are in Windows-land is free. If you have Windows XP SP2 you already have Windows Movie Maker** which provides a basic set of video editing functions. It’s a very simple application to use; Simply import your video files, then cut, splice, and merge on the timeline before saving your masterpiece. It also has some simple transition effects but probably best if you don’t go overboard with those. You can view uploaded videos on Vzaar if you require any inspiration.

Vzaar limits the video to below 100MB in size, and shorter than 2 minutes (less is more when it comes to video) but that’s more than enough to demonstrate the item you are selling.

Video clip ready, it’s over to Vzaar.

Sign-up is simple and requires you to authorise Vzaar to interact with your eBay account. Once that is done (2 mins tops), then you are ready to upload your video. You can either create an eBay listing as normal, and then go to Vzaar to add a video, or let Vzaar create a basic listing for you. Personally, and this is only because I’m a control freak, I prefer the former option as it gives a little more control. However, as I have several fairly cheap items to sell, I might give the Vzaar listings a bash as it does seem more convenient.

Execution details aside, the basic premise behind the service —the ability to add a video of an item you are selling on eBay— is very much one of those ideas that make you wonder why no-one thought of it before. Seeing an item demonstrated, a book opened, a piano played, in fact anything that shows scale, quality and usage, is far more useful to a potential buyer than a static photo and vague description.

So, a big thumbs up to Vzaar.

You no doubt have other questions, in which case check the Vzaar FAQ, or skim through the Vzaar blog. So far I’ve not seen any mugshots of Adrian so it’s safe to assume the people involved are pretty smart. Instead they let Dan and Emma do the “pretty stuff”.

Now, does anyone want to buy an old Lexmark printer?

* Is this a verb now?

** If it’s not listed in your Start menu, check in the Program Files folder on your hard drive and look for the Movie Maker folder. Double-click moviemk.exe to get it started.

A few days of misc

Thursday, October 18, 2007 ~ 9 Comments

OK, a conscious decision to not think about this blog has meant a fair amount of stuff is getting ‘done’. But I won’t bore you with the minutiae of the past few days as it mainly consisted of shuffling stuff about (mainly into loft), a fair amount of tidying up, a large amount of throwing crap out, and a growing pile of stuff to be “put in car to take to charity shop”. You know how it is.

Aside from that a few things have floated to the top of the pool of things “to be considered”, whilst others have merely skimmed the surface leaving only minor ripples in … yeah, enough of that..

Some thoughts from the past few days:

1. I am really REALLY beginning to miss running, starting physio on knee next week, and dieting has started (ish). Hoping to lose weight, tone up, and whatnot before I start pounding the pavement again. Considering not running until next year to give me a chance to improve other areas first. Thoughts?
2. Hard drive enclosures - I have two large hard drives sitting dormant in my old PC. Whilst looking for enclosures I spotted some ‘media capable’ ones with various outputs and gubbins. Anyone got something like this? Is it worth it? I’m thinking: download TV episode in HD, copy to media enclosure, watch on HD TV. Yay or nay?
3. Bluetooth mouse - I am still loving the MacBook (alas I can’t make it my main machine) but have never enjoyed using a trackpad. So I’m in the market for a bluetooth mouse. A quick Google found me the Logitech V270 which looks OK but, of course, I’d love to hear your suggestions. No cables please (duh), and I need two buttons!
4. Leopard - new version of the Apple operating system out on 26th of this month. £80 from Amazon.
5. Speaking of paying, after downloading In Rainbows for £0.00, I’ve since been back to offer the princely sum of £7.43. I think that’s fair.
6. Ohh yeah, I’m now, as of Wednesday, 34. Birthdays are becoming increasingly pointless, I think my 35th may be the last I acknowledge (more on this later).
7. Cape Apple and Mango juice is delicious. Alas the packaging is cack and it’s impossible to pour it without “glugging” and splashing juice all over the place. Me does not like wiping up in the morning (wait, that sounds worse than it is…).
8. Linux - old PC lying dormant (see point 1), so maybe a chance to play with.. Ubuntu? No idea where to start though, pointers welcomed.
9. This weekend will continue the decluttering and should see me finally finished with ripping all my CDs to MP3 and most of them will be stashed in the loft. That means I’ll have 6 Benno CD towers (from IKEA) which I would like to find a use for… creative suggestions welcomed.

Normal service will be resumed at some point, although I do have another blog you know, and I am still twittering away like an idiot.

Life with the Cocoon

Friday, October 12, 2007 ~ 8 Comments

DISCLAIMER: I was given an O2 Cocoon by a PR firm. I am under no obligation to blog about it at all, nor was I to only mention it if the ‘review’ was favourable. If this post offends you, then feel free to leave. But if you were thinking of buying one… read on.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been playing with the new O2 Cocoon. I’ve been using it as often as I can and ‘living’ with it since then, bar a week away in Spain, and overall I’m reasonably impressed. What a wonderful word “reasonably” is…

It’s not a stunning ‘must have’ gadget, but it does have some nice touches, alongside a few annoying quirks.

The OLED embedded on the ‘outside’ of the phone is a nice idea. Subtle and effective and probably my favourite feature. However it suffers through implementation. There are two possible scenarios, both centred around the use of the display when receiving text messages. One is when an unprompted text message is received, the display lights up and scrolls the name or number, and then the message itself, across the outside of the screen.

Now if I have it in my pocket this is kinda useless. If it is on my desk it is in full view of anyone who looks, again not so good.

However if I’m in ‘text conversation’ mode, sending messages back and forth, then the scrolling is too slow to be useful, and I don’t need the name/number anyway. So, a smart idea that just feels a little like ‘an idea for ideas sake’. But that’s only on the text message front. The other uses - time, alarm, MP3 track details - make more sense.

Hardware-wise it feels nice in your hand, until you open it and answer a call. I’m happy to concede that it might just be that I’ve got a funny shaped face but the phone never felt comfortable when I was on a call. However the call quality was good and clear, as was the signal strength, of course it may just be that I was in particularly good coverage zones for the O2 signal.

As a It has most of the usual features of a mobile phone and, by and large, the software and features are nothing out of the ordinary but, as it’s being sold as a music player/phone/lifestyle gadget I’ve spent more time trying to use it with that in mind and, on that count it’s not too bad.

Having loaded up some MP3s I found the music player software is a little quirky to operate but didn’t take me too long to master. The sound quality through the supplied headphones is good and in a nice touch you also get a headphone splitter in the box, allowing two pairs of headphones to be connected to the phone.

Alas the main navigation button/joystick, used to navigate the onscreen menus and options is hugely frustrating and I still can’t decide if it’s over or under sensitive. Sometimes it reacts on the slightest of touches, other times a furious session of bashing is required to make a selection and too often that would result in the WRONG selection and another session of guessing where or how to push, flick or tickle the control.

One of the advertised uses of the phone is to set an alarm, place it on the charging dock, and use it as an alarm clock. With the soft blue hue of the external OLED perfectly suited to this, the idea falls flat on its face because the only accessible buttons are far too small to find easily in a state of Again, close but no cigar. It is a neat idea though, with a lot of people using their mobile phones as their alarm clocks anyway. The MP3 of your choice is usually a better choice than whatever dross the radio is spewing out of a morning.
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I didn’t use the camera much and, in the current climate of 5 and 7 MB models it doesn’t seem a little stingy to only offer 2MB. But for quick snaps and silly video clips it’s fine if not earth shattering.

Overall I whilst there are some faults but then every phone has those and some of the quirks I found won’t affect everyone. In particular the joystick may be fine for others, it is probably just me. However there isn’t that much that stands out other than the OLED display and the provided dock. For me, those don’t make the phone a must-have gadget but if you are in the market for a phone/music player then it’s worth a look. The big question is whether the OLED display and the dock are enough to give it a competitive announcement.

I must admit that initial impressions were good when I got this phone, but over the course of a couple of weeks it fast become just another mobile phone. Given that O2 are the UK network for the Apple iPhone, something that DOES have the ‘wow’ factor that the Cocoon aims for, I think it will take some clever selling strategies to shift many units of this handset.

Finally a word on O2, excellent coverage, and their customer support handled my one and only query efficiently and friendly and it’s more than likely that I’ll switch my main phone contract to them as soon as I can. Orange should take a leaf from their book if you ask me.

Cocoon

Monday, September 17, 2007 ~ 10 Comments

I’m currently playing with the new O2 Cocoon, a mobile phone cum lifestyle friend, or whatever warm fuzzy marketing spin they are putting on it.

Essentially a mobile phone with media player leanings, there are a few nice touches that elevate this above your standard mobile phone fare. I’ll post more about how it handles day to day usage in a week or so, but first impressions are good.

And, these days, first impressions start with the box, or more accurately with the unboxing experience. When I picked up the phone from the Post Office I was a bit perturbed at the long thin box I was presented with, had I been sent a keyboard by mistake? I was relieved to see the word Hello, spelled out in an LED font, lightly embossed on the surface of the box.

After cutting through a small piece of tape, I opened the magnetic catch and swung the box lid open to reveal the phone nestled in a large soothing background image of sky and flower blossoms. But where were the usual cables, booklets and other paraphernialia that accompanies every gadget these days? Twisting the box round a small tab labelled “Pull” caught my eye and, on doing so, a drawer slid out containing all of the above and more.

Unlike other mobile phones I’ve received, the dock, a headphone splitter and two sets of cables greeted me.

Now, like most people, I’ve owned a mobile phone or two, so I know the first thing to do is get the battery charged. Extracting the slim white usb power adapter (which will handle other usb powered gadgets, hello iPod?) and the battery from the box. Now all I had to do was figure out how to get the cover off the phone so I could insert the battery. Does it slide? No. Umm.. pull? No. How the hell?? Ohh wait, what’s that little button on the side? Ahhh, a lock for the battery compartment, how handy, if a little different from any of the other mobile phones I’ve used before.

Once I’d cracked that little puzzle, I plugged in and there I saw the first flash of something different, the light blue OLED display on the white plastic surface. Unless you’ve seen one before it’s hard to explain, suffice to say that what looks like a solid plastic surface, actually contains a set of lights underneath, through which information can be displayed. In the case of the Cocoon, it will display the time, message info when received, and the title of the currently playing track. Kinda neat and leads us to the dock which is supplied with the phone. Sitting the phone lengthwise in the dock, the display acts like, well, a clock. Upon investigation I realised that this was a key feature of the Cocoon, and that using it as an alarm clock, was part of the core design.

Thinking about it, it does make some sense. You set an alarm, dock your phone, and you have a nice subtle clock on your bedside table. After all, how many of us have a bedside alarm clock that tells us the time all day, when we aren’t even there. Hmm there are “green” connotations afoot!

Once charged, and with the PAYG sim inserted, I had a quick play with the interface and it’ll come easily to previous Nokia users I’m sure, but I’m not one so it feels a little ‘off’ to me. But that’ll change as I use the phone more often. Nothing is particularly hard to find.

Alas I can’t tell you much more as I can’t get it to talk to my PC, the USB will charge the phone but I can’t connect to it to try and sync my contacts. I’ll try on the Mac later.

Ohh and if you are wondering, no I didn’t buy the phone, yes I was given the phone as part of a promotion, no I don’t need to blog about it if I don’t want to (and if I end up not liking it, it may find itself on eBay). Am I whoring myself out? Perhaps, but if you were thinking of buying the Cocoon then hold off a week or so and I’ll let you know what I think.

Finally, a quick word on O2. One of the thing that has plagued Louise and I is the signal coverage in our house. Orange and Vodafone are sketchy at best but the Cocoon gets a good signal in all parts of the house so, if nothing else, I’ll probably be switching to them when my Orange contract is finally dead.

Let Go

Thursday, September 13, 2007 ~ 11 Comments

I’ve mentioned this before, and much as I hate to go on, it’s a subject I want to try and tackle one more time. I’m going to focus on one particular application, but the principals are applicable across many, they are not limited to a particular type of file but there are some thresholds which factor into this discussion.

Specifically, I want to discuss iTunes and the MP3 phenomenon.

I don’t want to discuss whether MP3s are ‘killing CDs’ or why Ogg Vorbis is a much better format, nor do I wish to bemoan the features of iTunes. However I think it’s easier to talk about a specific example, than to talk about “library applications” (applications which will act as the interface to your files) and “numerous files” (as we are only talking about applications that handle 1000s of files at a time, not those that are concerned with one file at a time). So, with that in mind…

Whether you like it or not, MP3 is the de facto choice for music files. It has won the battle and is unlikely to be replaced and, as such, the number of MP3 files is only going to increase. Making the decision of which file format to use was something I didn’t really bother with, I just followed the crowd. Many others have done exactly the same.

Over the years as I’ve slowly added MP3s to my music collection, I’ve swayed between different MP3 applications, FooBar, Winamp, and others. Winamp held the floor for quite a while, and when they added a library function to help organise the thousands of MP3 files that soon accumulated I started to rethink how I handled my MP3 collection.

In the Winamp days, I spent a lot of time managing the MP3 files themselves. Making sure the internal information, or tags, correctly listed the artist, track, album and so on. I would then make sure the files were in appropriately named folders organised by first artist, then album name. Even the filenames themselves were carefully managed and all in all I had a fairly streamlined workflow that kicked in whenever I was ripping a CD to MP3. It used two different applications, one to handle automating the tagging process, another to tidy up any erroneous tags and intelligently rename the files (Tag & Rename if you must know).

Then one day a company called Apple released a version of their iTunes application for Windows. I’d heard a bit about iTunes and, curious as to what all the fuss was about, I downloaded it and gave it a shot. First impressions were not good. It was slow, clunky, ate RAM and, worst of all, it screwed up my carefully managed folders. How very dare it!

After some searching I found some answers to solve that problem, mainly some settings to change but it wasn’t enough. iTunes just wasn’t for me. As far as I was concerned it didn’t fit in my workflow so the application was unsuitable to the way I ‘worked’.

I hadn’t factored in the Apple marketing department though, and soon as I was back in iTunes-land. Why? Mainly because my shiny new 10GB iPod preferred it.

However I was still embedded in my MP3 workflow. Rip, rename, tag, file, repeat. Rip, rename, tag, file, repeat. All my files and folders neatly arranged and tagged. This continued for some time until, and I’ll be honest and admit that I don’t recall exactly when, I had ripped a large number of CDs into iTunes and didn’t have time to properly clean them up. I figured I’d do it later.

A few days later I sat down at the PC, fired up iTunes and searched for the one of the CDs I’d ripped.

That’ll be about when it hit me. That’ll be the precise moment I realised that my renaming and filing days were over, as iTunes found my music and started playing it, based purely on the tags containing the artist, album and track information. It was, laughably, a light bulb moment. The sudden realisation that I could just leave the filenaming and storage location to iTunes and largely not really care what it did as long as I could search for a track by any of the variety of information held within the MP3 file itself.

Since then I have done exactly that. Other than specifying the parent folder into which iTunes rips or copies MP3s, the underlying folder structure, for all I care, may be a complete mess. I really don’t care as I interface with the files through iTunes.

I know there are some of you out there that are baulking at this idea and I will state that it is not solely because I use iTunes. I think the same revelation would’ve occurred if I’d been using Windows Media Player, or if the Winamp Library facility had had a search function.

I now treat my photos in a similar manner, worrying only about the metadata associated with them (location, date, occasion) and not really caring how they are stored.. Picasa takes care of that for me (and if I could find a way to get iPhoto to scan networked folders I’d have a shot with it but it seems to insist on copying the photos to the drive first).

And finally, with reference back to my post on RSS feeds, as Google Reader (my tool of choice) now allows you to search through your feeds, what does it matter if I have more than 1000+ unread items in any folder. The folder isn’t important, searching for content is.

I agree this kind of approach to data isn’t for everyone but, in our current climate of “too much”, anything that minimises the amount of work that I need to do for menial tasks like organising my ever expanding music collection is very much a GOOD THING. There is, of course, an argument for cutting back and decluttering your digital life, but that’s a different discussion.

As Obi-Wan once said, “Let go”.

The Good, Bad and Ugly of RSS

Tuesday, September 11, 2007 ~ 17 Comments

I think it’s safe to say that I’m almost completely reliant on my RSS feeds to ‘manage’ the websites I visit. These days I rarely start any form of “surfing” by visiting a website, instead I head to Google Reader to see what’s new in my feeds.

Aside 1: A quick plug for the FaviconizeTab extension for Firefox which allows you to have the tabs which contain specific websites resized down to just the icon. Handy as you can then leave Google Mail and Google Reader open in two small tabs, leaving plenty of room in the tab area.

Whilst I’m fearful of projecting my own thoughts about my growing adoption of RSS and call it a “trend”, it certainly seems like I’m not the only person who is relying more and more on their RSS reader to help filter and streamline their online time. But let’s not get carried away here, a newsreader can’t account for the amount of time you spend giggling like a loon over LOLcats.

Aside 2: As yet, I’m unaware of the collective term for the applications used to monitor and view RSS feeds. Newsreader? Feed reader? RSS reader?

The case for syndicating your content, in a really simple way (Really Simple Syndication), seems like a bit of a no-brainer. Offering your content to your readers, in a way that makes it easier for them to handle is almost an expected courtesy these days. As I’ve finally made the leap to RSS-centric content consumption, I now find myself discounting any websites that don’t have an RSS feed. If you are hiding or blocking your content, forcing me to visit your website then, sorry but it is unlikely that I’ll visit very often.

And that brings us nicely to the whole “full or partial” debate, and here I have to agree with Mr. Scoble who says (of people who offer partial feeds)

“I notice I read a lot fewer of their items than I read items from … [other sites] … who offer full text feeds.”

Full feeds allow me to digest a post or article in-depth without spending time nipping between websites, and with a requirement for me to invest some of my time if I want to add to the discussion then, implicitly, any comment I leave is more likely to add value, than being just a “Me too!” (or “First” which seems to be a fad at the moment, for why I have no idea).

Of course, the downside of offering all of your content in such a manner is that, as ever, nefarious types may take your lovingly created content, and re-publish it without attribution and possibly even claim it as their own. I’ve long since made my peace on that front, largely because I ‘give’ away my (obviously high quality and high value) content here for free and, frankly, I’ve got better things to do with my time than monitoring and confirming who is taking my RSS feed. Naturally that doesn’t apply to everyone, and some of my regular reads only publish partial feeds and have their own reasons for doing so.

On the flip side, partial feeds do offer advantages as they allow the reader to skim down a shortened list of posts, with less content to consume, and so should simplify the choice of whether or not to visit a site to read a complete post.

However, if that is your stance then I’d suggest you might want to consider how you use your own set of feeds. Most feed readers have the option to ‘Go to next…’, functionality that allows me not to care if your post is 5000 words or 50, it’s easy to skip it if I don’t want to read it. With this model I’m LESS likely to visit your site.

If I have a list of partial feeds on a page, I will scan down the titles and the opening lines of content on the page and, if I want to read the full post, I need to click to go to the site.

But if I have a list of full feeds, I will still scan down the titles and the opening lines of content but if I choose to keep reading, then there is no further action needed. No switching of context and view, I just keep on reading. Simple.

And yes, the presumption is that every post is likely to be as interesting as the next, after I’m sure you carefully selected the feeds to which you subscribe. I know I did, and I have impeccable taste.

Regardless of which type of RSS feed you offer, full or partial, the fact that you offer an RSS feed at all is likely to directly impact on your website stats. Diamond Geezer touched on this recently.

Presuming you care about stats, and let’s face it most of us do check them far too often to be healthy, there is something about checking all those weird referrers, the tangible evidence that real people are actually visiting. These days, ultimately, what you need to be tracking isn’t visits but ‘reads’. How many times has post X been read in the past week, regardless of whether it was via RSS, or on the website itself.. and herein lies a small quandary, is that even technically possible? If I visit your blog, read a post but don’t comment on it, how do you know I read it?

This is another bad side of RSS, you lose visibility of how, why, and where your content is being accessed. Lost in the ether. “Much too much to read, far too little time.” said Diamond Geezer, and I think that that, again, suggest that full feeds are better than partial feeds, the competition is high, so why place another barrier in the road?

Using RSS gives you the opportunity to monitor far more websites than you can read, and if you are happy to ignore the number of unread items then the sky really is the limit. Personally I’ve stopped looking for additional links to other blogs on any of the websites that I end up visiting. “The blogroll is an endangered species” I’ve heard but, in a neat twist, I am starting to see more examples of the “live” blogroll, powered by, you guessed it, RSS Feeds. Rather than a static list of links, you can have snippets of latest content from your favourite reads appear in your sidebar. This is, of course, until the backlash really kicks in and blogrolls see a surge in usage.

However I think that change in the use of blogrolls is telling, after all, how many of you still check them on other people’s sites? How many of you have even noticed that I removed mine a week ago? Perhaps the size of blogrolls was an issue, and RSS combates that by offering a guarantee that you can check for updated content.

Or maybe there is more to it than that?

How many of you will visit a link in a post, but not randomly choose from a list of links in a blogroll? My guess is that including a link in a post is an additional level of endorsement and, as interactions on the web continue to evolve and gain in complexity (in the social scheme of things, what price a link these days?) then what we are really experiencing is a change in the level of endorsement. Linking to something from a post suggests higher endorsement than linking to something continuously in a sidebar. Linking to something from a post presumes that link is current, and the same isn’t always true for a blogroll. As RSS offers us the ability to monitor hundreds of websites, then we already have a reliable way of knowing when someone updates their site. So why bother with a blogroll at all?

By adapting how we process both the consumption and locating of content, we can really start to use RSS to our own advantage. As a consumer I have the power to monitor a multitude of sources, cherry-picking what I want to read. Any barrier to that usage, anything that blocks my reading process is removed by switching my attention elsewhere. Yeah, it’s not nice but it’s true. As ever there are always exceptions to the rule (around 5 of them off the top of my head).

RSS is good, it puts much more power into the hands of the consumer. Yet that shift of power isn’t without pain, and the downsides are evident.

Despite all that I’m spending less and less time visiting websites, and more and more time consuming content from RSS feeds. If the content is good I will invest some of my time, that which is most precious to me, in providing some form of feedback to the creator. And the real downside is that even then my contributions are slowly petering out. Information overload means we spend most of our online time in a state of distracted flux and RSS can either help you reduce the stresses of being a “web citizen” or add to your pain.

I’ve yet to find the balance.

Mixed Fruit

Thursday, September 6, 2007 ~ 15 Comments

I do feel a little guilty doing this kind of post for the second time in as many days but.. well.. see the previous post as to why.

So let’s start with, and you knew it would be this way, the recent Apple ‘event’ (product launch). If that doesn’t interest you, skip the next paragraph and read on from there, can you help me get out of my contract with Orange!

Is the “iPod Touch” a fallback position because they couldn’t garner contracts with the mobile telecoms in Europe? Why DID they add Video to the Nano, it was perfectly suited as a music only player and if they are keeping the Shuffle as a highly focussed product, why are the others all starting to converge? Why WILL it take Starbucks until 2009 to roll out their partnership stuff and, frankly, do I even care?

Apples and Oranges, purely coincidence I promise.

I have a contract with Orange which lasts another 8 months or so (it’s an 18mth contract). However, I’m less than happy with their services, coverage at our house is appalling, and the handset whilst not broken is full of annoying faults which force me to hang up on calls now and then (the sliding mechanism doesn’t always seem to lock in).

I’ve spoken to them about the handset but, and I think I’ve got this correct, if the fault isn’t listed on their system then they can’t offer replacement handset. I argued that one for a while but eventually gave up, as even the ’supervisor’ (presuming it was actually said person) confirmed that the ’system’ wouldn’t allow such things. Handy that, eh?

That, coupled with various other interactions with their customer service department, has me cringing every time something goes wrong with my account or my mobile phone. So I wanna ditch them before the end of my contract? Any suggestions? Saying that I’m going to working abroad for the next year is an option perhaps??

So it’s R.I.P. for Pavarotti. I’m not a fan of opera, but he seemed a nice big chap, didn’t he. Couldn’t half warble. Admittedly I’m less than thrilled that the airwaves will be filled with Nessun Dorma for the next day or so as I’m sure that he had better highlights but, well you’ve got to pander to the proles don’t you. I’m sure Gert will be expressing her sadness.

And finally, bananas. I used to work with a woman who found them wholly disturbing things, couldn’t even look at one. Isn’t that odd?