Press trip season is upon us

May has come and gone, spring is here and summer is almost upon us. That must mean it’s press trip season. I’m off to Monaco tomorrow, thanks to Dell, who seem very fond of whisking journalists off to foreign climes for a day to announce things they’re going to press release the next day. Not that I’m complaining: you just don’t get this on consumer IT mags – God bless trade mags!

Anyway, probably no blogging tomorrow, but I’ll bring you back pictures of airports, train stations and probably not much Monaco on Wednesday. Assuming my camera doesn’t get nicked like it did in Zaragoza.

Since it’s nearly a year since that particular event took place, I’m finally able to cancel the contract that I took out with Orange when I got back from that press trip. Despite really wanting to like Orange, they’ve been nothing but rubbish and I’m paying out about £30 a month on a contract, even though I work from home and barely use the phone. So adios Orange, hello Virgin Mobile, I hope.

I say/write ‘I hope’ because getting an address to send my request to is particularly hard now they’ve merged with Wanadoo and redesigned their site. I’ve already tried speaking to a customer service rep, who apologised for Orange being rubbish at customer service and then told me to contact the company nearer the time. He really wasn’t getting it, was he? I’ll keep you updated on my progress.

Welsh speakers told to breed

Well, it’s one way to get more people to speak Welsh, isn’t it?

Still, given the teen pregnancy rates in Wales, isn’t the advice a bit superfluous? This may sound like a joke, but this conversation really happened to my (Welsh) wife when she was back in Wales just before we got married:

Person: “Oh, you’re getting married then? When’s the baby due?”

My wife: “It’s not”

Person: “Oh there’s posh then!”

Things I really just don’t need

Just been reading the latest issue of Private Eye. Found a story about Barking’s BNP situation. Turns out one of the councillors is called “Robert Buckley”. How much did I need that? Precisely not at all. And the thing is, now I’ve written about it, I’m going to get all the Google hits for him. Curses.

Congratulations to Martin

A friend of mine, Martin, has managed to escape from journalism after nearly a decade at the grindstone. So a quick shout of congratulations to him as he makes his way over to the writing team of Emmerdale. Good luck, Martin!

SCHWIF2004 beta available

I’ve finally released the beta of the next version of SCHWIF2004, my handy utility for creating complex HTML messages in Entourage. There’s a few improvements:

  • Added support for background images referenced using attributes in the body tag or in stylesheets
  • Fixed a problem with Exchange server address books following previous Entourage update
  • Improved the documentation slightly
  • Added a warning for pre OS X 10.3 users

Grab it over at the SCHWIF2004 page.

Those jury service people sure are nice

I got summoned for jury service recently. It couldn’t have come at a busier time so I asked for it to be postponed to January. I was expecting all sorts of bureaucratic resistance, autocratic refusal (“you’ll come when we tell you to come!”) and so on.

Instead, I got a nice little letter yesterday, accepting my request for postponement and giving me a date in January to turn up. Now how good is that? So I’d like to thank those nice jury service people for being so helpful and obliging. God bless you all.

Bugger

I’ve been summonsed for jury service. Wonder if I can defer it from the oh-so-busy June to the oh-so-quiet January?

More Spanish and Greek flash cards

I’ve put up week six of my set of Spanish flashcards, designed to accompany Instant Spanish, over on my iFlash page. I’ve also added combined versions of both the Greek decks and the Spanish decks, so you can revise all the words in one go once you’ve completed a book. Enjoy!

PS Learn rudimentary Spanish in six weeks? More like six months in my case. You know why? Journalist with something to do but no deadline: that’s why.