Yak & Natter

I’ve just ordered my first replacement gadget. I’m getting a Sony SRF M95 digital radio to replace the mp3 player. I’ve ordered it from Purley Radios Ltdand it should be with me in 5 to 7 working days.

One of the cheques that the insurance company sent was made out to one of the companies that some of the previous gadgets have been bought from. I called them to see if they could order this radio for me, but they said that they didn’t deal with anything other than computer equipment and so they weren’t prepared to order anything in for me. I’m going to call the Nationwide next week to see if they will re-adjust the cheques if I explain the circumstances.

I’ve recently started using Intellisync for yahoo to synchronise my palm to my yahoo calendar, address book and todo list, and so far it’s working really well. It means that when I do a hotsync from my Palm rather than synchonising with the palm desktop, it syncs with the yahoo software making my calendar etc available to me over the internet. What I especially like is the fact that I can choose which applications to sync with yahoo, so at the moment I have the calendar and to do list synchronising all the time that way. The Memos and Addresses I sync with the Palm desktop (at the moment) as they are more likely to be changed from home rather than on the fly. So far everything is going smoothly, and I’ve even got it working from work – so that my Outlook account exports calendar and synchronises task list data to yahoo (I’m only exporting calendar data rather than synching it because I don’t really want everyone at work to know what my social calendar is like…). This means that for finally I have my personal appointments and my work appointments all on the palm, but without having to type the work ones in.

This is of particular use at the moment as I haven’t found a new PDA yet and so am using a PalmPilot Professional. To be honest, PalmOS doesn’t seem to have changed much in the 4 years since this was bought (which is a bit dissapointing) but I find that the grafitti recognition is now too slow to be practical on this old machine. So, being able to update events in my yahoo calendar is a much bigger advantage.

My insurance cheques came through yesterday for the items that I lost when my bag was stolen. We’re insured by Nationwide Building Society, and I think the fact that they turned around my claim in under 2 weeks was really impressive. Well done Nationwide.

We headed off to Middle Wallop airfield on Saturday afternoon, and spent a great hour or so playing with our delta (before the rain set in) and watching lots and lots of buggiers and mountain boarders enjoying the vast space available at this festival. This is the third kite festival we’ve been to and this was undoubtedly the best. It wasn’t the most informative (the Dunstable one probably was), however, there was a huge amount of space available to play in and just watching such a large number of buggys and boards was great.

I also spotted some team fliers practicing their routine in a manner I hadn’t seen before. They all had small sticks with cut-out kites on and were using those to run through their routine. I thought that this was a really good idea and was quite fun to watch.

We plan to return next year and spend a bit longer there. We may even have our own buggy by then!

I wandered to the bottom of the road this afternoon to see if things were getting back to normal. They weren’t. Police are everywhere and a large area is still closed off. And it’s very quiet. Normally in the day time our road is full of cars parking close to the tube station, and a few buses running up and down the street…but as everyone is being kept away none of that’s been happening.

We woke up this morning to the radio telling us that “Irish dissidents” have bombed the suburb we live in. The BBC have pictures.

I had my driving licence sent back to me in the post yesterday. It’s a bit torn but at least that’s one thing less to replace. It was sent in a Royal Mail envelope with a return address of the Surcharge Unit at Gatwick Mail Centre. There was no note or anything inside, so, if someone from the Gatwick Mail Center happens to stumble across this. THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

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We headed off to the Dunstable Kite Festival today, on probably the hottest day of the year so far and had a really good afternoon out. Lots of people were around and about, and there were lots of different kites on display. Take a look at our photos.

We went for a wander down Tottenham Court Road yesterday to look for new gadgets to replace my stolen ones. We didn’t buy anything, and to be honest I was a bit dissappointed with what was on offer.

After the trouble I had in the first place choosing which mp3 player to buy (read the blog) I’ve decided to try and find a good, small, digital radio. Whilst this may sound like an odd choice, my reasoning is that in around a months time I wont be spending as much of my travelling time underground (assuming the move to Brighton goes ahead) and so will get radio reception for the majority of the time. I was looking at the RDS models (so that I wouldn’t need to re-tune on my journey) but they are quite large, so I’ll probably go for a small, standard digital radio insead with a good supply of pre-sets.

We also took a look at new PDAs, and they are really uninspiring. All of the Palm OS ones are still the same old thing, nothing much seems to change from one release to the next. The Visor Edge is a nice looking machine, and I also had a play with a Sony Clie – I’ll be interested in looking at the colour one when it is released over here – but other than that, nothing of interest.

Probably the most inspiring things we saw were some prototype Japanese phones that a shop was using to get opinions. They were really small, light and yet had a large screen diplay. Oh and they were colour. They should be on sale over here in about a years time.

I had my bag stolen from the Hogshead pub in Cowcross street, near Farringdon station in London yesterday. It’s a really nasty experience and I lost everything, cash, cards, tube pass, keys, phone, visor, mp3 player, headphones, eyemodule. The most annoying thing is that the pub has CCTV, and it has a camera which was pointing directly at where I was, but they don’t bother to put tapes in and record the pictures. They just had the picture of the bar visible so they could see how busy they were. The police weren’t very impressed when they found that out. They recommend not bothering to drink there again, as there are many other pubs to choose from.

So, I guess in the short term I’ll be fishing the old PalmPilot Professional out of the loft again to make my journeys to work less boring, at least with an electronic gadget I can catch up on the news, read emails etc. I’ve got a bit used to the 8MB of storage I get on the visor so shrinking back to 1MB might be a bit tricky. But, I guess I’m in the market for a new PDA, not sure which to go for so I’m planning to do some research and find out which are the best to be had now.