Paul Hammond's Blog

There's a story in the Shanghai News today about prostitutes not being welcome at Zapata's Mexican Cantina.  In an attempt to discourage the ladies from working at the bar, the management posted a notice.  The English translation made me smile:

"If you are a prostitute, please refrain from entering our garden or restaurant.  If you are unsure whether or not you are a prostitute, please ask one of our friendly security guards to sort it out for you."

Helpful guys...

I just arrived in Shanghai, here for a week on business.  I have only travelled East once before (to Thailand) so this is quite exciting!  Not much to report as yet, except that the taxi drivers are completely insane.  I am staying in the "world's highest hotel" which is pretty impressive.  Outside my room is the internal atrium that stretches 33 storeys below.  Looking over the bannister is NOT for the faint of heart!

Sorry about the quality of the picture - taken with my Smartphone.

Numark have released the iDJ mixing console for the iPod.  Just plug two iPods into the docking slots, and mix away.

What will the iPod lovers think of next?!

Russian scientists at Art Lebedev have created a very cool Optimus keyboard. Each key is a tiny 32x32 pixel display that uses OLEDs (Organic Light Emitting Diodes) to show full colour buttons.  The keyboard layout can change depending on the language or application you are using.  Check out the info and pictures for the Optimus; they show the keyboard in "English-mode", "Russian-mode", "Photoshop-mode" and "Quake-mode".

Ananova mention it will be on the market in the UK in 2006 and cost around £200.  A bit pricey maybe?  Or is it worth it for the "ice-cool factor".

In a world where software is becoming more and more bloated and complex, Bernard Belanger brings us NaDa Software.  Inspirational.

A few weeks ago, my friend Jon turned me on to a cool service called FolderShare.  This service allows you to transparently share files across multiple computers, so that you always have access to your important files.

It works very simply.  Install a small proxy application that sits patiently with your tray icons on each computer you want to share with.  This application watches the files you care about, and when they change it sends a notification message to the other machines in your sharing network.  Then, the application manages the copying of the changed files to all of the relevant destinations.  They offer 3 levels of service; the basic service is free to use/trial, and the two "paid for" services are $49.95 and $99.95 per year respectively.  The free service only allows 2 shared folders to be set up, with a maximum of 500 files.  The middle service allows a lot more folders/files, and the most costly service allows many more folders and files, as well as compression for transfers, file splitting and other efficiency measures.  No files are ever sent via the FolderShare servers - only notifications - so your transfers are secure.  You can turn on encrypted transfers if you wish.

So far I have been running this successfully on machines with all sorts of different connections - NAT connections, direct, proxied and firewalled etc.  It has done a great job with all of them.

One other great feature is the ability to access any of your machines from the FolderShare website.  Once you are logged in to your account, you can drill through your hard drive and download files as you wish (albeit unencrypted).  This means you can potentially access your important files whenever and whereever you wish.

Omar posted about a new addition to the service - the support of MSN Desktop Search in FolderShare.  As Omer says "Log on to FolderShare from any computer on the planet. Enter text in the search box, and watch as you get back results from anything that is indexed on your machine running MSN Desktop Search."

Wow!  So now, not only can you get to all your files from anywhere in the world, you can actually find the ones you only vaguely recall using the power of MSN Desktop Search.

I am currently only a "free" subscriber, but this service is becoming so useful, I may just have to upgrade to the pro version!

Just upgraded to dasBlog 1.8 - it was a breeze. 

More details on Scott's and Omar's blogs.

Way back in December 2003, I was travelling a lot more than I have been lately.  Frustrated with the cheaper headphones I had been using to listen to my Ipod and movies on planes, I splashed out on a pair of Bose QuietComfort 2 Headphones.  These things are fantastic, the noise cancelling is great, and the sound quality is everything you would expect from Bose.

A couple of weeks ago, the plastic shielding on the left arm broke; this meant that the left dome wobbled about in the breeze and made them pretty unusable.  Since I bought the headphones in the US, I only had a years warranty on them (it is 2 years if you buy them in Europe) so I was definitely out of my warranty period.  At first I was thinking that I would simply glue them back together to save me the cost of repair.  However, these headphones cost quite a lot of money, so I changed my mind and decided that the right thing to do would be to send them off and take the cost of getting them professionally repaired.

So, I called Bose and arranged for them to be sent in.  I told the guy on the phone that they were a US pair, and he confirmed that since they were out of warranty, they would take a look at them and then call me back with a cost to repair prior to doing any work.

They sent me a pre-paid UPS sticker for me to send the headphones back to them, which I duly did.  I then went away to Ireland for 8 days and thought nothing more of it.  When I returned, there was a parcel waiting for me at a neighbours house; I was surprised to see that it was from Bose, since I had not heard from them at all.

I opened the package fully expecting a note saying "we are sorry, this is not repairable unless you feel like superglueing it".  To my total surprise, inside the package was a completely unopened, brand new set of headphones.

So, to recap: they paid the postage in both directions, and replaced my headphones with a new pair totally free of charge, despite them not being under warranty any longer.  That gives them an A+ in Customer Service in my book.

Bose ROCKS.

My team at Microsoft put 3 new msn.com international homepages live last week that embrace AJAX technologies for page rendering.  These homepages (found at http://malaysia.msn.com and http://ch.msn.com) load their contents asynchronously, and allow real-time interaction with certain modules on the page.  Adding new weather cities and RSS feeds no longer requires a page reload, instead loading the data straight into the page.

The sites are in pilot mode right now, but we will be rolling out many more international version starting September.