Fucking Hotels

Personal, Travels

I have just discovered that the hotel we were going to stay at in a couple of weeks’ time (Malmaison in Edinburgh) doesn’t include breakfast in its rates. This is despite the fact that we’re paying not an insignificant amount of money per night.

This seems to be a growing trend with hotels. Why on earth should they make you spend £20 a head on breakfast – which consists of a few stale rolls, some cheese and incipid coffee – when you’re spending £200 a night.

To be honest, I wouldn’t normally be so annoyed, however in this case Malmaison don’t make it obvious that their prices are "rooms only". If they did, then I certainly wouldn’t have booked with them.

Now it’s too late to cancel and find another room (especially as it’s festival time), we’ll just go out and buy some milk and cereal and take liberties with the tea & coffee making facilities.

Utter, utter cunts.

New phone

Personal, Photography, Tech

I have a new phone, a sony ericsson W810 :)

sony-ericsson-w810i.jpg

So far, it’s pretty much identical to my old K750 (it was free), however the worst thing about it so far is the ratherodd USB interface. It has two modes – one that emulates a USB mass storage device and another that uses drivers to talk to it (so you can sync to it etc.). This is wierd in itself, but if you choose the USB mass storage mode (say, if you want to copy MP3s onto it) it disables the radio (no calls!) and reboots the phone into some odd mode where you can’t do anything.

On the plus side, I’m really loving the ambient light sensor which dims the screen and brightens the keypad dependant on the brightness. It’s quite spooky and quite fun :)

The walkman application is a bit rubbish – you can’t order by MP3 track ID for example, but it’s enough for me and my occasional music listening. Oh, the phone has a flight mode as well, but if you were flight crew, could you tell the difference?

Moving

Tech

 Purple is moving to a new data centre this weekend. As part of this, its IP address is changing.

 In general, there’s nothing you need to do, unless you manage your own DNS records and point your entries at purple via an A record (IP address). In an ideal world, you should CNAME your entries to “purple.alexlomas.com” however, if you need to create an A record, please now point it at 195.167.185.170

The DNS entry for purple.alexlomas.com will be updated tonight and the server move itself will take place from about 0800 tomorrow morning, finishing by midday at the latest. It can take up to 24 hours for cached DNS entries to reflect these changes.

 This should hopefully be the last move for some time and will bring better speed and reliability.

Server Move

Tech

Having just had a three hour outage on my ADSL line this morning, it comes as good news that my server should be on the move come Monday.

Of course, this will mean an extended outage for the duration of the physical move and also whilst DNS catches up on the change of IP address.

More details on the day of the move.

Slingbox

Tech

Slingbox have now launched in the UK, with integrated DVB-T tuner, PAL and 16:9 goodness.

Now, as soon as someone works out how to get them to stream to more than one place at a time, I might thing about buying one. Oh, and when they cost much less than £180.

slingbox.jpg