It's been bad timing for me and this 3G Mobile Broadband review until this week. First the modem doesn't work in my works building and secondly I got married and headed off on honeymoon for almost three weeks. I did try and get 3G to let me blog my honeymoon but, rather tellingly, they said the cost was way too much.

So these next two weeks are a great trial as I cover as many films as possible during the Edinburgh International Film Festival. That means I'm on the go between cinemas almost constantly through the day and trying to keep the reviews coming out.

This first week has been interesting and shown two sides to the 3G Mobile Broadband.

Continue reading "3G at the EIFF" »

Irn Bru have done it again with another absolutely cracking television advert here in Scotland - possibly in the UK as well, I don't know where it's playing.

Anyway the advert does an amazing job of explaining what makes being a Scot as well as capturing the pride you feel to be called Scottish.

Continue reading "Irn Bru "If..." Scottish advert" »

I've just heard the news that the Shadow Home Secretary David Davis has resigned his position in UK Parliment, and while that doesn't interest me that much because UK politics and politicians are like petulant teenagers and deserve little respect, Davis has just broadsided me.

His speech struck a chord and his actions are nothing short of selfless, or so it would seem. It seems that a politician has finally done something for the right reasons rather than bickering like children.

Continue reading "MP David Davis' impressive speech" »

I've written before about utilising tools that are used daily on the Internet to create a new and knowledge focused Intranet with little cost to the business (have a look through the Knowledge Management category), and in that I've talked about the use of Instant Messaging. This has been something that has come up against resistance whenever it's mentioned in a business context, so when I started using Twitter I saw answers to so many of the issues and negatives raised against IM in the workplace.

The Twitter model of messaging is one which would work superbly well in a business that is both scared of employees chatting the day away, and also of employees concerned about the instant intrusion of IM.

Continue reading "Could Twitter replace business IM?" »

I can't remember why this popped into my head, but I was sitting with my wife and it just did, so I searched it out and memories of school came flooding back.

The Elements by Tom Lehrer is a song that sings the periodic table of elements, well as many as had been discovered back then in 1959 when the song was written.

Continue reading "Periodic Table Elements Song!" »

I have to say I love American toilets. You know the actual toilet itself.

It's the design, environmental friendliness, ease of cleaning and the quietness of them that I like. Why can't we have them in the UK?

Continue reading "American toilets" »

We were concerned before we flew off on our honeymoon that we would be flying out of the new Terminal 5 in London's Heathrow airport - you know the one with the huge complaints of delays and lost/delayed luggage that had once again shown just how poorly we British can build and implement things.

However the reality was far from our expectations built from the media coverage, and in fact I wondered if we were indeed in Terminal 5 at all.

Continue reading "British Airways and Terminal 5" »

I was surprised that even in the cheap economy class, called World Traveller by British Airways, that we received their new video on demand during our trip to San Francisco. Well we did and there was a good, not great, selection of films to choose from.

So I picked three titles that I hadn't seen as yet. However, I didn't feel it was worth reviewing them over at Filmstalker or on their own as the screen is something like seven inches and the audio wasn't that great so it really is unfair to do so.

Instead, here's a quick round up of what I saw.

Continue reading "In Flight films - London to San Francisco" »

After setting the Mobile Broadband Modem up, which was perhaps one of the easiest installations of hardware I've ever accomplished, I was ready to start using it. However the real problem was I wasn't actually going anywhere.

However that's been sorted since with a few trips that have been made much easier with the 3G Mobile Broadband access.

Continue reading "First experiences with 3G Mobile Broadband" »

I received my 3G Broadband Modem a few days after getting the instructions, a DVD type box contained a few pieces of paper with simple instructions on how to install, too simple I thought, this can't be right. There are always problems with installing hardware like this, especially portable hardware, so when I realised the box contained no software and the instructions stated that I should simply plug it in and it would automatically install, I was very sceptical.

I couldn't believe when I simply slid the SIM card into place, plugged in the USB dongle, just slightly larger than an average sized USB stick as you can see below, the software began installing, and installing right first time.

Continue reading "Installing the 3G Broadband modem" »

Connecting to the Internet on the go hasn't always been a priority for me, but with my Windows Mobile phone I've always had a convenient connection to retrieve the odd bit of information to settle a friendly argument or to perform some routine maintenance on one of my sites.

However the Windows Mobile isn't ideal. Sure it has a standard keyboard on it, if it is a little slow, and it has a decent screen with a good browser, but there's nothing that can beat a laptop and a full sized screen. So far the problem to that has been weighing the cost of portability against the ease, cost and speed of connection.

Continue reading "Reviewing mobile broadband" »

Intranets are a mess, let's face it. They're most often a big dump of information that is more a legacy system than any other computer system within your organisation, that is if you have the traditional model of adding in new groups of pages then your model dates back to the early days of websites.

Nowadays things are changing, and our need for information access is changing. We're overloaded with information, we're getting information pushed to us, we're deciding on the information we read and the presentation of that information, and we want it in a timely fashion.

None of that is addressed by the standard Intranet model.

Continue reading "Creating a useful Intranet" »

The wedding posts have been sparse for some time (as have all the posts here!), mainly because I've just been so busy, but the day is drawing near and things really needs to be done.

So where are we up to? Well let's do a quick recap, talk about the things still left to do, and look at the part we're working on right now, the honeymoon.

Continue reading "Update on the wedding plans" »

While the learners, users and customers of companies are becoming more curious, more engaged and more vocal, the companies themselves are clinging to their strict and outdated policies, rules and control.

They are in danger of, and already are, losing employees and customers who could be benefiting their organisation. While they try to control and restrict these people, they are fostering negative groups and holding themselves back.

Continue reading "Employ bloggers, don't kill them" »

I’m looking for a new online calendar application and have been using Calendar Hub for some time, while I like it, there are limitations, it’s a bit slow and cumbersome and comes up with a lot of errors when I’m trying to do some basic tasks.

So I started looking around, and although my feature list isn’t that extensive, it’s been difficult to find a functionality match. Google came closest, but incorrect programming on their part might rule them out.

Continue reading "Online calendar – Google vs Calendar Hub" »

Happy New Year to you all. This year things have been a bit sporadic on this site, mainly because I've been doing so much on Filmstalker, and in 2008 that doesn't look set to change, in fact things look set to get busier.

Not only is there Filmstalker to do, but I'm getting married in five months, there's a honeymoon, and I might well be involved in another site start-up as well as doing some more writing on another site.

Continue reading "Happy New Year" »

Since I’ve moved to O2 Broadband on the 30th of October I’ve had nothing but problems, and I’ve struggling trying to get an uninterrupted connection to the Internet.

Honestly I can’t remember how many times I’ve called their support, but I’ll try and talk you through what’s happened and update things as and when they happen. Here's a rundown of the problems that I've been experiencing with the service.

Continue reading "O2 Broadband fails to deliver or support" »

I was with Demon Internet for something around seven years, over three years at the current address. In that time there's never been more than two or three periods of downtime, and they've been rectified quickly.

Of course they are over the market price consistently, but you get a good uptime. However I was getting tired of paying over the odds and particularly tired of talking to foreign call centre staff. So I moved, and that showed the worst of Demon.

Continue reading "Demon Internet argues to retain customer" »

I have both the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3 at home so I consider myself pretty lucky. I'm also not one of these people who loves one console over the other fanatically.

So I think I'm in a good position to be able to speak about both consoles, and in particular the poor online services they offer.

Continue reading "360 and PS3 deliver poor online gaming" »

There was, and continues to be, a big fuss about Web 2.0, but what has it actually brought the end user? From where I stand it doesn’t appear to be that much.

We’ve ended up with a reliance on cumbersome widgets and closed systems, although the appearance of more and more dynamic content on sites is nice and swish, has it resulted in more exclusion and fairy lights over content?

Continue reading "Web 2.0 fails and how systems should be" »