Neil Lathwood’s blog on the world :)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/7292657.stm
At least the Judge had sense to say no to this one, seem to be far to many bizzare cases that get won nowadays since the American Mcdonalds coffee case.
I’ve had NST (Nokia Sports Tracker) installed for a while now and I’ve used it a couple of times when I remembered, this was, unfortunately half way round a walk so I couldn’t track where I’d been 
Needed another time to test it, a bike ride would work and luckily we had one planned for the Saturday just gone! Another trip over to Watergrove Reservoir sorted that out. I remembered before setting off, to get the sat nav locked onto our location and fired up NST. The software itself is so simple to use and provides a wealth of information about the journey you’ve been on. Obviously using the in-built GPS means that the battery life gets sapped pretty quickly, couple with the fact the missus had been using it the day before as well meant it didn’t have long to live.
Luckily it held out for three quarters of the day before powering itself off. I’d not used nst when the battery has died before but it handled it well, it reported that it had crashed upon the next reload but the full details of what we had done was still there just 1 hour short I’ve uploaded the days activities and you should be able to view it here.
NST has pre-defined setup for Walking, Cycling, Running, Skiing and 2 other custom activities. It supports things like Live sharing where you can constantly update your progress online, Auto pause when your speed drops below certain levels speed averaging. If you have GPS enabled Nokia phone then I highly suggest downloading and installing this - well unless your a bit of a fatty 
Well, it got announced that it just got better.
Still no sign of a new hardware version with 3 or 3.5G available which is still a bit of a problem/pain for some. However with the updates in software, most relevant to me is the MS Exchange ActiveSync for mobile push email and the Cisco VPN client.
Having just signed a new deal to port our work mobile phones over to O2, we have been given a free one. The other phones we are going for means that we are finally making the move from an Open Source email solution to a MS Exchange based system with blackberry BES system for the few users who will be getting blackberry handsets. So this means the odd one out - the iPhone, will eventually be able to mingle with the fold once again
Let’s see if I’m a terrorist then.
1. Taking photos - check.
2. Living in a house - check.
3. Having more than one phone - check.
Quick, someone call the police!
Don’t really use Windows much now apart form at work but could this be a good step in the right direction?
Think i’ll give it a go on my asus to try it out…….
Been using the macbook now for nearly two weeks and slowly i’m getting everything setup how I want it to be which is half the battle. I’m finding though that I spend more time using the mouse than the keyboard which is annoying but not nearly as annoying as……..mail.app marking all your emails as read as soon as you click on them with no way of stopping this or even putting a delay in like so many other mail clients.
This on it’s own I suppose isn’t a major headache - well it is, but, if you delete an email or move it to another folder, mail.app will then select your next email and obviously mark it as read. This has caused me a bit of pain at first as you don’t expect it and happily just click your way through preview enabled emails.
I’ve submitted a feedback form via http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html lets see if they take notice!
Would I have recommended them before yesterday, maybe, their prices seem pretty decent and the website is useable.
Would I recommend them now, not in the slightest, their staff are rude and abrupt on the phone when I called up to see about what they could do for me on another - more expensive lense price wise. So onto my experience.
I’d been looking around for a new lense for my Canon 350d, originally I had decided on a EF70-300mm f4-5.6 IS USM but after reading review after review, most people seemed to be suggesting that the 70-200mm f4l would be a better buy, especially if coupled up with a teleconvertor. So I changed my focus onto one of these lenses, more expensive but obviously it’s an investment more than a cost decision.Looking around for the best price and somewhere that had it in stock led me to www.warehouseexpress.com, I had a look at their ‘bargain basement’ page and came across the lense people were recommending but with the nice addition of IS - Canon’s Image Stability system which would allow a few stops lower. They had it on the site priced at £414, bargain I’m sure those who know, would agree. I loaded up my cart over the course of a day, trying best to assure myself that this was a good choice and checking around to confirm pricing. I left things until a day later before deciding to go for it so again I loaded up the virtual shopping cart with the lense, a Slik 700DX tripod and a Manfrotto monopod and finished off the order process.
For the next hour and half, I kept checking back to my email expecting a order notification - I never did. Instead what arrived was the following
“Many thanks for your recent order with ourselves.
I regret to inform you that we are now sold out of the-Canon Ef70-200mm F4.0 L Is USM and unfortunately this item was the lastone. Ive cancelled the order, and no payment has been taken from yourcredit card.
Please let me apologise for any problems this may cause.
For alternative items please visit our website or call our sales team on
01603 486413.”
Short sweet, doesn’t seem to really make sense in saying they’ve sold out and this one is the last one???!!! Anyway, I called them up to see if they could offer something similar to what I had ordered for a reasonable price. The lady who answered the phone was in the least bit helpful, all she could do was read a list of lenses from the website which were similar in specs to what I had asked for - I’m capable of doing that myself. I told her they weren’t really what I was after based on the price of my original order and specification so I ended the call. After looking around for other suppliers I decided that I would just plump for the non-is version as I had originally intended.
Ebay and a lot of other stores were all selling this lense for quite a lot less than could be bought from warehouseexpress.com so I thought I would give them another call to see if they could do anything on the price. I got through to a chap this time who mentioned they price matched with certain companies and asked me where I had seen the price. I also mentioned about my cancelled order and then as soon as I mentioned it was from Amazon, he said we don’t price match with them so I asked about another company to which he just point blank said ‘NO’, ok nice customer service skills here. I once again mentioned how I’d not long ago had my other order cancelled due to a fault on their part and could he look at offering me the lense at a slightly reduced cost, the answer again was quite categorically ‘NO’. At this point I’d had enough of speaking to them so ended the call and went and sourced the lense from another company - well done warehouseexpress.com, you lost out on a £500 order all because you seem to want to quote the classic Little Britain T.V show: “Computer says no”. Got the lense from another company for cheaper, also ordered the tripod and monopod from elsewhere for again, cheaper.
So folks, my advice, avoid warehouseexpress.com.
Wow, no new blog posts this year - really need to get cracking with these this time round and actually post stuff worth reading! Anyway, picked up a new lense for the trusty ol 350d, weighs, erm, just a tad more than the 28-135mm lense I’ve got but that will be down to it being an L lense 
So, what did I get? A rather lovely new 70-200mm f4l USM lense along with a 1.4 x teleconvertor. Would have got a IS version for around the same price but the very kind people over at Warehouse express decided that they couldn’t wouldn’t sell it to me, see my blog post about that to come.Have to now hope that the weather brightens up a bit over this weekend so I can maybe get out and about with it and take some excellent pics - if that’s even possible for me yet! I’ll post back though if I do manage to get some good snaps so stay tuned to my dslr gallery
