Archive for July, 2007

Thinking of a name

Thursday, July 26th, 2007

I’m all for declarative living and putting everything about myself online, but it’s not for everyone. I’m thinking that I should come up with a name for my wife and daughter to use online.

MetroDad talks about “Boss Lady” and the “Peanut”, both of which names I love, and have frequently been tempted to blatantly plagiarise. 🙂

Ian refers to one of his kids as “predlet” (it makes more sense if you know that his online identity is often epredator… at least, I guess that’s why).

I think Roo has referred to his lady as “Mrs Roo” before (but I can’t remember where, and with roaming data charges at £7.50 a meg, I’m not gonna spend much time looking now – you’ll just have to take my word for it 🙂 ). I like it, but I would worry that if I started talking about “Mrs Dale” then people might think I’m talking about a camp alter-ego.

Kelly uses “The Girl”, which I quite like. And I think she uses “Himself” for her husband. (same excuse as before – I’m writing this offline, and coping without Internet access is a little like coping with half my brain lopped off!)

Anyway, this is really all a roundabout way of saying that, whatever I call them for this post, I’m missing them both lots while I’m away.

Club World… an example of trust working?

Wednesday, July 25th, 2007

I’m sat in the departure lounge at Heathrow, waiting for my flight. Through sheer dumb luck, I managed to blag a business class “Club World” flight. (no economy class seats available at this late notice). So I’m sat in the posh lounge bit for the wealthy types, which is all new to me, and very nice.

I’m feeling very relaxed. 🙂

I’ve been trying to figure out why, and I think the reason (and the value proposition behind the Club World experience – although I’ve not seen it marketed like this) is all about trust. The difference between this and the facilities available to economy class passengers is that they trust you…

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Finally – a chance to use dopplr!

Wednesday, July 18th, 2007

http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/dalelane

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A del.icio.us plugin for Windows Mobile (or C++ is a pain)

Wednesday, July 18th, 2007

screenshotIncreasingly, I’m doing more of my (non-work) web browsing on my PDA.

And as a big fan of using del.icio.us to store and share interesting sites that I come across, I’ve missed the tools you can get for desktop browsers (like Internet Explorer or Firefox) that let you throw your current page at your del.icio.us list.

If you’ve not used them before, the idea is to have a popup window that gets prefilled with the URL and name of the page you are looking at in your browser, lets you add a few tags, then submit it to del.icio.us when you hit ‘Save’.

So I thought I’d have a go at creating something similar for Pocket Internet Explorer – the browser you get with Windows Mobile.

To cut a long story short, I’ve put something together and it seems to work. If you have a Windows Mobile PDA and fancy giving it a try, feel free to give it a go.

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Windows Mobile has a ‘Run…’ dialog

Thursday, July 12th, 2007

screenshot of the Run dialogThis is quite neat. I often use the “Run…” dialog on Windows (press the Windows Key + ‘R’ at the same time) as a quick way to launch apps or open documents without needing the mouse. But I never realised that Windows Mobile has the same thing too.

From here you can type in the name of a program or document in your path (e.g. iexplore to launch PIE) or give the full path of an app to run.

It also means you can give command-line arguments to programs – which is something I’ve wanted to do before.


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Do GPS units spit out wacky coordinates?

Monday, July 9th, 2007

I’ve mentioned before that I wrote some simple code to access the GPS device in my phone and upload the coordinates to a Google Maps mashup.

This is what it was showing when I got home yesterday evening:

google map showing me somewhere in Kazakhstan

Either my minibus driving was more eventful than I remember and I took a quick detour via Kazakhstan, or there are still a couple of problems with the code…

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A quick volunteering ‘fix’

Sunday, July 8th, 2007

I twittered earlier this morning saying that today I was getting to be a volunteer for SYA for a day (helping one of the youth groups and driving a minibus) instead of just being a trustee. I quickly got three replies pointing out that trustees are volunteers, so I was talking nonsense. 🙂

They’re right, of course… but that’s not what I meant.

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