I thought it was cold last night...

....but at least my car was in a better state than these poor peoples!

And no, as best I can work out it isn't a photoshopped image, but is sunny Versoix, on the shores of Leman Lake in Switzerland. You have to look at those pictures and wonder why people parked there!

Skype Mobile Phone

I was watching Breakfast on the BBC this morning, waking up to the news as I usually do, and in the Business section, with Declan Curry, there was an interesting anouncement. 3, the mobile phone network, is bringing out a handset, alowing you to make free, yes, free Skype calls.

Sounds wonderful - there's gotta be a catch though. They claim they'll make their money on regular calls, but I know personally that the vast majority of people I know already use skype for their calls, and given this I wouldn't make many regular phone calls anyway..

So - time to Google it! And, the new PAYG (Pay As You Go) version of this phone costs £49.99, and £10 per month basic top ups.. Hm.. Reasonable. Maybe its only skypemobile to skypemobile? No, Skype is Skype aparantly... Ugly handset? No, seems reasonable enough..


Hm. This bears thinking on. And whats this I've found - its free on pay monthly... For only £12 a month with 100 free normal minuites.

This really does seem too good to be true, and possibly it is. But I've yet to find the catch, and if I can't in the next few days I'm very seriously considering it as a communications solution better than my current layout.

So please, if anyone finds a catch, comment and let me know!

The Clocks

Tonight in the UK our clocks go back by an hour. For most people after the initial confusion this is just a matter of going from room to room and changing their clocks.

For me running a small hotel this is rather more complicated. I've been listing what clocks I have to change, and so far I've got to:

1. The wall clocks throughout the building.
2. The radio alarm clocks in every room.
3. The TV clocks in every room
4. The computers, both the customer use ones and the admin ones.
5. The electric locks - a big job as they are individually programmed and an hours difference particularly on check out times is huge. Locking a guest out of their room after they've gone down for breakfast isn't a good way to get repeat business!
6. The heating - individual timers for every room, and the public areas
7. The water de-lime scaler - set to go on just after lunch at the least intrusive time
8. The external lights - three separate circuits here.

And these are just the clocks I can think of at the moment - I guarantee I've missed one or two!

I'll report back tomorrow on how well it went, and what I missed!

UPDATE Well I've been round and I can add the phones, fax, coffee machine and microwave to the list, but am happy to report that with the exception of the microwave, everythings now on the correct time. Anyone know how to reprogram a Sanyo 900W Microwave/Grill?

Ever Seen...

Have you ever just seen something, and thought - I want that. If I had that my life would be better and easier and more efficient. Its cool!

You know its unrealistic, you know that it's unlikely that it would actually work properly and that there's no chance it would make life more efficient, but you want it.

Well that was my reaction when I saw the Blue tooth Laser Virtual Keyboard,


Isn't it pretty?

And even better the specs say it'll work with my PDA! Never mind the fact that it requires a flat surface, meaning I could just use my laptop, never mind that its almost 200 dollars or that typing on to a solid surface has got to be difficult in the extreme, its pretty!

I want one.

Outside help or onsite staff?

Well I'm proud to announce that after weeks of work our on site laundry room has reached another milestone in its refit. We've finally finished the ceiling and walls, and all that remains is linoing the floor and putting shelving in.

This room was originally a large point of discussion in the company - do we slowly refit it as staff hours are available, or do we quickly pay an outside contractor to do it?

The aregument for outside contractor ran that it would be quicker, there would probably be a better job overall and that it wouldn't distract staff from their normal responsibilities. The counter argument ran that it wasn't a customer facing area so the work didn't have to be perfect, that the time factor wasn't an issue (we've run the old way for a year and another week or two wasn't a problem) and that if we were paying the staff anyway, why not use up the slack periods?

To cut a long story short after much debate it was decided to have the staff do the work, and what a marathon it's turned out to be. To start with we've had damp problems and so many other demands on our time that its proceeded very slowly. But after putting a few minutes here and there into it, its sort of become ours. Its a very odd feeling to walk into a room and remember the damp, smelly and peeling place it used to be a see straight, dry white walls and say - "We did that!".

A contractor would have been quicker, it would have been easier, but doing it ourselves let us change the place ourselves, not a lot but it makes us more of a team. Defiantly something to do again in the same situation.

How Many Search Engines!?!

Think about it for a second, and tell me which search engines you can think of:

Google - easy.
Yahoo - Likewise.
LiveSearch - Well you've heard of it even if you haven't - its MSN.
Ask.com.

Now, if you'd asked me a few hours ago, I would have come up with that list, and maybe one or two more like Alta Vista and Lycos.

Ever heard of GigaBlast? WiseNut? ExaLead? Me neither, and they're amount the more popular of search engines out there.

What about Lucerne? Xapian? Nutch? Or even the unpronounceable Ht://dig?

Turns out there's literally thousands of them out there if you include the specialist engines, and they're all steadily spinning their spider webs throughout the web..