Paul Hammond's Blog

I love theme parks.  In particular, I am a big fan of the Disney theme parks.  Their attention to detail is amazing, and their approach to customer service is exemplary.  I try to visit regularly to get a fix of Disney park fun.

As a cheaper alternative, this past year I decided that I would buy a Merlin Annual pass for the family.  This would allow us 365 days of unlimited access to Chessington World of Adventures, Thorpe Park, Alton Towers, Legoland, Madame Tussaud's, The London Dungeons, Warwick Castle, the London Eye, the London Aquarium and the many UK Sealife Centres.  Since Chessington is less than 5 miles from my house, it seemed like a really good idea – we could drop by and ride the rides whenever we wanted.

We've certainly had our money's worth at Chessington over the past few months, and that is before we even visited any other attractions.  It has been great to see the kids riding all of the rides, and I think it has help them overcome some of the trepidation and fear they both felt about riding attractions when we went to Walt Disney World in Florida back in 2006.  The pass is definitely money well spent, and I will definitely consider it again when renewal time comes.

But I guess I have been very spoiled by Disney.  Despite having some fun thrill rides, I feel let down by the experience at Chessington.  The decor seems tired and feels like it lacks the love and attention it needs to sparkle.  Many of the "side" attractions require more money (on top of the entrance fee) to be spent to play; this gives the park more of a fairground feel.  The employees feel like they are simply "employees" going through the motions, rather than Disney's "cast members" who are there to bring the fantasy alive.

The final straw for me was when I was queuing for the Vampire Ride the other day.  All along the queue line are fun props that try and create some sort of Vampire fantasy as you queue; most of these require some attention. Even just some weeding of the overgrown areas would help enormously.  I could forgive this.  But, also situated along the queue line were a number of TV monitors.  Instead of showing pre-ride film, heightening the excitement for the attraction and drawing in the audience, they were showing adverts!  In our case, mostly for Kellogg's Frosties.  Emblazoned underneath the advert was a big message saying "TO ADVERTISE CALL XXXXX XXXXXX".  Such a shame.  I can't help feeling that more attention to the experience would bring more guests, and negate the need to make money from advertising.

[Click the image to the right for a larger view.]

I’ve posted before about Sara Bareilles and how much I love her music.  Last night, I had the chance to see her perform live at Scala in London.

The evening was opened by a guy called Rod Thomas.  He played solo, and used looped recordings of various instruments to build up songs as he went, recording each one live, there and then.  Rod’s a great singer with some very well written songs, and I am always impressed with a solo act who can create such a full sound all by himself.  I particularly liked his layered harmonies in some of the later songs.  Actually, he reminded me of a singer I saw when I was on vacation in Lake George, NY this summer – Rich Ortiz – who did similar things with looped and layered recordings.

Anyway, on to the main event – Sara and her band.

Let’s start with the sound quality.  It was awesome.  Everything was the perfect volume and the sound guys created a great mix that made every instrument and vocal nice and clear.  The only criticism was that the band’s microphones were a little too quiet for the harmonies to cut through like they do on the record.  The drums were mic’ed superbly, with a huge bass drum that you could feel in your chest, and excellent clarity from the snare and cymbals.  Usually I am left disappointed by the drum sound or mix, but not on this occasion.  The bass levels matched those of the bass drum perfectly to create a nice fat bottom end.  The guitar stack was on the same side of the stage that we were standing so very occasionally the guitar was too high in the mix, but that didn’t matter at all.

The set list was a little shorter than I would have liked, but was excellent.  Most of the tracks were from the album, with one Beatles song thrown in for good measure.  The songs are so well written; they sound great on the CD, and easily as good live.

The band was awesome.  Sara was backed by Javier Dunn on guitar, Josh Day on drums and (I think) Brian Allen on bass.  All three are excellent musicians, and I particularly liked Josh’s work on the drums.

And Sara.  Well, what can I say?  Sara has such a fantastic voice.  She has complete control, singing subtly in the sensitive phrases, open up to be strong and powerful when the songs build.  There aren’t many artists today who sound this good outside of the protection of a studio, with all of its sound tools and multiple takes.  There were certainly moments in the show where I had goose-bumps…

If Sara Bareilles tours in a town near you, do yourself a favour and go see her.  You’ll love it.

…the taste of it’s cherry chapstick (Thanks Katy Perry - song reference here).  Sadly though, after a month of use, I have reverted back to my Windows Mobile phone.

My wife bought a first generation iPhone and then upgraded to the iPhone 3G when it was released.  This left her first generation handset sitting on my desk, nothing more than a tastefully designed paperweight.  My mobile account is with another provider, so at first I couldn’t use the phone with my SIM card.  A short session with my Mac Mini and the Pwnage tool soon had my phone unlocked for use on my own network and running the iPhone 2.1 software.  All in the name of research you understand…

Anyway, on the whole I like the whole iPhone experience.  The handset itself looks and feels great, with a nice “solid” build quality, and a satisfying weight when held in the hand.  The touchscreen is bright and responsive, and again the firm feel of “finger on glass” has a more solid feel than the stylus on my Windows Mobile PDA.  Some of the applications available from the App Store are pretty nice too.  I was particularly impressed with the MLB At Bat software, the Apple Remote software that can control iTunes over a wireless network, and the dual spirit level was fun and actually useful (who knew that the accelerometers in the iPhone were so sensitive!?).

So why did I switch back?  There were a number of reasons.  Some things were just small niggles, other things downright frustrating, and all combined to make my old phone a better option right now.  A few of them are below:

• No ability to cut and paste text.  There are plenty of comments around the web on this.  Only qualifying as “mildly annoying” for the most part, but it was definitely something I missed.
• General instability of applications.  More often than I would have liked, an application would stop responding (hanging the whole phone while it did) and after some timeout period it would crash you back to the home screen.  The most annoying times this happened was after typing some lengthy email replies but before getting a chance to send them.  I lost quite a few emails this way.  Grrr.
• I actually found some of the applications very slow.  Opening my SMS inbox would display a blank screen for a good few seconds before displaying my text messages.  Ditto for the messaging inboxes.  Going back to my Windows Mobile phone seemed positively lightning quick in contrast.
• No “true” multi-tasking for applications.  In Windows Mobile, I can load IE and start a page downloading, then switch to my inbox, or some other application, and switch back and forth happily.  Some iPhone applications appear to remember where you were, but do seem to load afresh each time you enter them from the home screen.  For example, the At Bat software would reset to the home screen of the app (instead of just redisplaying the page I was on when I flipped over to my inbox). This didn’t suit my need for truly doing more than one thing at once.
• A question mark over my Exchange Calendar entries.  After syncing with my iPhone, I have been getting some odd behaviour with Calendar entries.  Deleting an occurrence of a recurring meeting now doesn’t work correctly (it leaves the meeting in my Calendar, but with the time marked as Free).  I’ve done nothing else to my Calendar in this time so I am suspecting iPhone-Exchange functionality, but I cannot confirm this.

My Windows Mobile phone is a couple of years old now, running Windows Mobile 6.  Even so, it still does as good a job as the iPhone for most things I need, and in many ways it is better.

I will be watching future iPhone software and hardware revisions closely, as I feel like it could eventually become my phone of choice.  Not right now though.

I have but one regret - if only my HTC looked more like the iPhone instead of a brick, I could retain at least some street credibility…

I had the pleasure of watching my twins Dylan and Niamh play the steel pans (you might know them as steel drums) in their school's summer concert this evening.  They have only been learning for 10 weeks, but they have come on enormously.  You can see them playing in the Soapbox video below.

(BTW, I misheard the name of the second song and captioned it wrong in the video; it should be "Janey Girl".  I didn't notice until after the edits had finished processing, and I didn't want to wait while it encoded it again!)

At the end of the concert, the head teacher came on stage to thank all the staff.  He thanked the recorder teacher, adding that she had also helped out the brass teacher this term; trumpets and tenor horns and the like.  She acted very modestly as if she had done nothing special, and then tried to validate her coyness by shouting out to the audience "I'm very good at fingering, I just can't blow".

I thought my head would explode from the pressure of keeping the laughter inside!

Most people know that you should probably shop around for insurance when your renewal is due.  It doesn’t matter what type of insurance – car, house, pet, life – you should always do the due diligence around renewal time to ensure you are getting the best deal for the right kind of cover.  Now, normally I am not so good at taking my own advice, since I have tendencies towards procrastination when it comes to that kind of thing.  This year was different.

The house insurance renewal quote came in the post (building and contents under the same policy) and I was quite surprised at how expensive it was.  It was up 10% from the previous year, and was in the £800+ range.  I asked my wife to check out some of the comparison sites on the Internet to see what other companies might charge.  She managed to find some quotes of £250-£300, which was obviously quite a difference!  I presumed this was because the cover was different, and that these quotes were somehow inferior.  To check, I asked her to get a quote from our current company.  Once she’d selected all the same options we currently have, the website told her it would cost us £310 to insure our home.

Wait a second.  Let’s review those numbers again.

Renewal quote: £825.  New customer quote: £310.  That’s a saving of around 62% on the initial quote.

I called the retention department to complain.  I was told that there were large discounts for getting a quote online, and that there were numerous “free” portions of the insurance right now for new customers.  In fact, the whole insurance industry in the UK right now seems to be geared towards customer acquisition and not customer retention.  Even so, no-one could explain where such a huge difference came from.  What was worse was that the retention team could not match the online quote – their software simply wouldn’t allow an adjustment of that much.

Then the helpful lady told me that I should simply cancel my current policy and take out the new, cheaper one.  Which is what I did.  So, I have exactly the same insurance with exactly the same company (that I am very happy with, by the way), at 38% of the cost.  Scary.

Ladies and gentlemen, check your policy renewal prices!

I am going on holiday with my family in August, and the last part of our trip will see us in Boston.  Being a big Red Sox fan, I wanted to take my family along to a Red Sox vs Toronto Blue Jays game.  A few weeks ago I searched on Ebay for tickets (since all home games at Fenway Park are sold out for the season), and through that stumbled across a link to StubHub.com.

StubHub has loads of tickets available for the game I want to attend.  The site has some great security features for the wary ticket purchaser, including guarantees that you will get the tickets you pay for etc.  It all seems very professional.  With tickets hovering around $250 each, I wanted to feel confident that it was going to be a genuine purchase, and I was very pleased to have found a great looking solution to my ticket-purchasing desires.

Well, I finalised my travel details today, so decided to choose and buy some seats while there was still a good choice.  I found some excellent seats in the right price range, and proceeded to the checkout.  Now, as part of the checkout screen, there is an option to select your country of residence (and billing address) that includes the following items:

Naturally, I selected “United Kingdom”, entered the rest of my address details and pressed “Next”.  At this point, the page reloaded with the following error:

Just in case, I tried re-entering the post code without a space; this sometimes works.  Same error.  I was pretty much blocked completely!

I called the helpline to ask what I should do next.  The helpful lady on the phone informed me that I cannot order anything off the StubHub.com site unless I use a credit card that has a US billing address, and I have a US address to ship the tickets to!  I asked her why there were options for other countries, but she didn’t know.  All she could do was repeat that I needed US-based shipping and billing details in order to proceed.  So that is it.  The end of the road for me and StubHub.

I’ve looked everywhere on the site, and unless I am being useless (which is, of course, completely possible!) I cannot find a single reference to the fact that you can only purchase from the US.  Not even deep in the help files or the FAQ is it mentioned.  Why didn’t the error just say “I am sorry, you cannot purchase from this site unless you are in the US”.

Sites that restrict sales to “US only” generally frustrate me to a point, but I do recognise that there are often reasons for doing so – perhaps licensing laws (in the case of iTunes or radio services), or shipping difficulties for bulky items etc.  What annoyed me about this situation was the fact that the website lists the UK (and other countries) both during account registration and purchase, with the direct implication that I am perfectly fine to go ahead and spend a large amount of money with them.  I spent probably an hour in total checking out tickets, looking up the view from the seats on various other websites etc.  That is a wasted hour.  To get to the last hurdle and be presented with a particularly cryptic error message that required me to make an international phone call to address is completely unacceptable to me as a user.  To have wasted an hour on a site that could have told me up front that I was not able to ultimately use its features is doubly unacceptable.

Oh, and it means I don’t really have any options for buying Red Sox tickets either.  Which is going to upset my kids more than this experience has upset me!  Any ideas on where I *can* buy tickets from the UK, blogosphere?

I am wondering if it is only me that was confused by this, so I thought I'd post a picture and ask everyone out there what they think.

My satellite TV DVR has been playing up the last few weeks, often marking a programme as "not recorded due to no signal".  I went in to the settings of the system, and check the signal strength.  The screen is shown below, click for a larger version of the image.

Without thinking too much about it, what do you think my "Input 1 Signal Strength" is?  Is it high or low?  Please leave me a comment with what you thought.

Apparently, the very light gray is the "positive" colour, and it turns out that I have a very high signal strength for input 1.  However, for days I was fiddling around with the dish and the cables, because I believed I had a really *low* signal strength as indicated by the small dark blue portion of the box.  The dark blue colour was a much more obvious "positive" colour to me.  The predominantly dark blue areas for the Lock Indicator, Network ID and Transport Stream drew my eye to the dark blue of the strength and quality scales.  Without any cues as to the correct way to read this, I got confused.

My wife tells me I am being pretty daft, that reading the bars "left to right" is totally obvious, and that the light gray is obviously the "content" colour (see the 07d4 on the Transport Stream for example - the background is blue, the content gray).  I've asked two other people, and they also said the gray was the measure colour.

Even knowing the correct way to view this, I *still* see the dark blue of the indicators first.

So what did you think?  Is this easy, and I am just nuts?  Or is this a confusing UI?  Leave me a comment, let me know!

Microsoft's new financial year is just around the corner (July 1) and with it comes many new challenges for MSN International.  We have a couple of open positions in the PM and test disciplines, and will likely open up developer positions as demand for work increases over the year.

If you are interested in finding out more about working in a dynamic and fun environment while delivering fantastic interactive experiences to millions of Internet users around the world, please take a look at our site at http://london-msn-jobs.com/.