Daily Archives: March 29, 2007

Rugby World Cup 2007 broadcasters

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I’ve been trying to find out what channel the Rugby World Cup would be broadcast on in the UK because that’s most likely where I’ll be when it’s on. It’s been very difficult finding that information, so I thought I would post what I know here in case someone else is looking for the same information.

So, in no particular order, the broadcasters that I know of are:

  • New Zealand: TV3
  • United Kingdom: ITV
  • France: TF1

OK, so that’s not really a very complete list but it will do for now. I tried looking for an “official broadcasters” page on the RWC web site but couldn’t find one. It would be a good idea if they don’t have one already. If you have any more information to add please leave a comment!

My flight to San Francisco (12 Aug 2007)

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Hello.

Finally I am going to write to you about my trip. I was going to just backdate the articles but that’s just going to get confusing as you won’t know whether something I have written now is new or not.

I left New Zealand on 12 August 2007. That’s a long time ago. Family and friends (you know who you are) fared me well (I think you can say that) at Wellington Airport, and I was suitably sad on the plane, but when I got to Auckland, who was there but my uncle and cousin (who also know who you are). I have decided to protect people’s anonymity, you see.

Now, as you may remember, air travel during that time was a bit strange. Two days before I left, British police has just foiled the plot to bring down planes flying from London to the United States. Liquids and gels were banned from hand luggage on some flights. On some flights you were only allowed to take a plastic bag with your passport and glasses if you needed them (without their case). Luckily I wasn’t subjected to that because it would have been a very long, boring flight. Not that I actually used my computer at all during the flight but it’s nice to have the option.

I flew on one of Air New Zealand‘s new Boeing 777s. It’s a very spacious plane. It was cool. There was even enough legroom in economy class. I asked at checkin if they could put me in the emergency row and they said they’d try, but it didn’t happen. Here’s something I wrote on my Pocket PC while I was in flight:

So, about 5 minutes after they turned on the entertainment system, my one told me that the movie I wanted wasn’t available. Then it rebooted with a Windows CE bootup screen. It looks like it reimages the device every boot. took a really time too!

The Coke is singaporean.

That is all…

Air New Zealand has a personal inflight entertainment system, based on Windows CE. Mauricio Freitas had commented that he had managed to crash the system a few weeks before I travelled and sure enough I did the same!

There were some good movies on the plane but I can’t remember which ones. I did remember that I saved some of the movies for my flight to London, as the same movies would be shown then.

I landed in San Francisco and was greeted by my Cousin. Who shall remain anonymous like all the other characters in my story. Incidentally, I arrived a few hours before I left Wellington!

I will write about my time in Northern California later, but if you want to see some photos check out this photoset on Flickr. If you sign up to Flickr and add me as a contact, I will be able to mark you as friend or family and you’ll be able to see some more photos (of people). Otherwise you’re just stuck with things.

More on Zooomr

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Bloody Microsoft Word! I had actually written this whole post out in Word. And then Word crashed. For no reason. I didn’t even get a chance to take a screenshot of the page so that I wouldn’t have lost everything. Oh well. I shall start from scratch.

Last week I was quite keen to see the new version of Zooomr, the photo sharing site. It was down for a few days as they were deploying the new version. Turned out the new version wasn’t quite ready and they ended up rolling back to the existing version. I commented that it looked a bit “busy” (design-wise) and lo and behold (I’m pretty sure that’s how you’re supposed to spell that expression) Kristopher Tate, the founder of Zooomr, within about an hour, responded to my comments. I am guessing he found it from Technorati (where my site is included automatically thanks to Blogger – not that Blogger is the only blog service (hosted or otherwise) that allows this). There’s something neat about writing about someone’s product and then having that person respond to you. It’s cool.

Anyway, more than a week later and still Zooomr Mark III (I’ll just click Save now as I have written a bit) isn’t up. But, it’s good that it’s not up because I think everyone would like a site that works. Nothing is more frustrating than seeing new features and not being able to use them. Mark II, apart from its ugliness, is pretty cool. I like the way it does geotagging, particularly as it uses Google Maps. It’s also cool to be able to get a page of photos taken in the vicinity of another photo. You can see the photo in context.

Zooomr, like many sites out there, uses the Google Maps API. Zooomr Mark III in fact promises an API (perhaps there’s one out there for Mark II already, but I’m not sure). Flickr‘s got one, as does Facebook. Amazon‘s had one for a long time. It’s amazing what applications people can come up with by using public APIs of other services.

In response to my “busy” criticism, Kristopher pointed me to this screenshot of a page in the new Zooomr. It’s much more to my liking.

I have to congratulate Kristopher on having his finger on the pulse of what his users (and non-users, as I was at the time of the post) think of his service. It’s good to see the personal touch. In fact, I wouldn’t have written more on Zooomr if it weren’t for his comment. It’s not just good marketing – it shows he believes in what Zooomr offers and wants to share that with others. As we say in France (sometimes – although apparently it’s a bit dated) – “supercool”. Seriously. They say that.