Everyone has had the experience when you have forgotten to charge your phone and you realise it part way through the working day.
I have.
So I bought one of these from Maplin – a Battery Powered Emergency Mobile Phone Charger. It uses a single AA cell battery to put a useable charge back in your device. I experimented with it this weekend and it put a charge back into my Blackberry when it was completely discharged.
I then got my soldering iron out and made a cable up so I can charge my Dell PDA as well. This gadget will also charge my GPS receiver when I am walking – a good safety device.
I finally got around to sorting out my photographs I took whilst walking from St Bees in Cumbria to Robin Hood’s Bay in North Yorkshire. See our blog here http://www.octagontech.com/category/coast-to-coast/. I didn’t carry my Canon Powershot S2 IS with me every day – I heeded the warning we were given on Day 2 when we were soaked through walking from and the camera case had let water through and although the camera was damp it suffered no damage after carefully drying it. On bad weather days I used the perfectly functional camera on my Blackberry Curve for snapping the journey. However if you carry your camera with you in the bad weather see what happens here http://www.rkwinternet.com/category/coast-to-coast-walk/ – however the insurancecovered the loss and Richard now has a new camera. Richard has also posted an epilogue to the walk – I have also written about the experience and plan to post it in sections whilst I am away on my next holiday, when I have time to proof read the entries.
We are having trouble at one of our clients with their ADSL service and it has now got to the stage of getting a BT engineer out to check the line. Outside the office is a lake and whilst we are waiting on BT to pick up the phone and reset the service the water skiers are making ski jumps in the sun shine.
The down side of the whole ADSL not working thing is having to get BT involved. I had swapped all out network equipment as soon as there was an issue to eliminate that as a cause of the problem. I then called BT Tuesday afternoon and explained the situation to them, they carried out some tests and passed it onto engineering. Late in the day on Wednesday I got a call and had to explain the situation again and was offered an onsite engineer visit between 8am and 1pm or 1pm and 6pm Friday – I opted for the early slot and that was confirmed a few minutes later.
So Friday morning I am at the client’s site at 8am, at 9am staff arrived so I went off for a coffee and I eventually got a call at about 10.30 am to meet the engineer onsite.
Now I know BT will have good operational reasons for booking appointment times as they do (I do not really consider 8am to 1pm an appointment more like an intention to come) but I work with many support companies both large and small and BT is the only one to do this to me.
Anyway the engineer turns up – and after a few tests discovers we have a serious problem. He has trouble contacting various departments he has to speak to – and then he tells me about the system that means he has only two hours allocated to this job and if he cannot solve it in that time then he will leave and a new job raised and another visit organised (and I expect it will be either in the morning or in the afternoon). The even better news is that if that visit does solve the problem in two hours they will leave and another job will need to be raised! You can see where this system is going. Somewhere at some senior board level in BT or OpenReach they think this is good or even acceptable customer service!
On the up side each person who I have spoken to or dealt with in this system has done a good job, is polite, knows what they are talking about and are very helpful. As I write the engineer is down a manhole checking wires and testing at a furoius pace trying to solve my problem. The issue I have is with the system.
On looking on the forums, I was disapponted to find that I cannot post by email to a blog on WordPress.com – this is something RKW Internet has added to our company, WordPress, website using Postie (if you need to do this for a custom install of WordPress go to the WordCampUK 2008 Wiki where you will find his instructions).
Further investigation led me to the url http://m.wordpress.com. Try the link it is a very thin client for WordPress.com bloging,suitable for small devices or even quick blogs from a computer.
My PDA has wifi so this post is being made from it. It is enough to get words out here quickly but I cannot include an image.
I have a Flickr account and have found some other information about post to your blog via that using email – I hope to get to grips with that before I go to Scotland, so I can photo blog from my Blackberry.
A short post tonight – but I am inspired by my experience at WordCampUK to publish a worthwhile blog over the coming months. I have a holiday coming up soon expect blogs then. I have also been writing about my Wainwright Coast to Coast experince and expect those to be posted in the coming weeks. I also want to share some of mobile tech experience.
So the first moblog experience I will share is this from my PDA – I’ll review it when I see the post on my laptop.
I work in technology and system support and run Octagon Technology a company based in Lincoln. Our website www.octagontech.com is based on WordPress and was developed by Richard at R K W Internet.
I went to WordCampUK2008 in Birmingham to support Richard who presented two sessions to the conference – and this has inspired me to start a personal blog. I have used the blog on the company website to document walking the Coast to Coast footpath with friends – and want to carry on but the company blog is not the place to continue. WordCampUK2008 has inspired me to start my own.
I am interested in mobile computing and have had a wide range of PDAs over the years and it was whilst walking with Richard, practising for the Coast to Coast walk that we decided to moblog the walk with photos from our mobile phones. I am pleased to say that Richard sorted the technology and the results are here.
This blog is going to be about using mobile technology, walking, photography and other stuff. For it to be mobile technology it should be able to be carried in a pocket – it could be a large pocket!
Another thing that has motivated me to start this blog was whilst at WordCampUK2008, I was browsing on my PDA I found this link and I am going to use that page to update my blog on road.
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