I actually thought that I was over the jet lag, having had a couple of decent nights sleep but apparently not.
I woke at 3am this morning with severe sugar cravings (yay for Coca-Cola in the mini-bar) and having spent an hour reading Reddit and a further hour attempting to sync my Garmin FR 310xt by USB cable (you can’t), I’m still awake.
My alarm is going to go off in one hour when I’m supposed to be out for a run – I think I’ll push that back by thirty minutes.

I’m in Switzerland because I had to help one of our channel partners talk to a large swiss bank about email security.
Tomorrow I fly out to Dubai, UAE, to talk to our  sales force in the Middle East area about Symantecs security strategy.
I’m imagining the contrast will be crazy and not just a cultural thing but temperature wise more-so.

It was -3c this morning when I went for a run.  It has been snowing for most of the day too.
In Dubai it’s currently 8am and is already 20c.

After Dubai, it’s Amsterdam and Brussels for the same Symantec security strategy discussions.
By the time I get back home on February 5th, I’ll have been to 6 foreign countries in just over 3 weeks and have renewed my spg.com gold membership for 2012 .
This is a new record.

Flight time to Dubai is around 6 hours, maybe I’ll come up with something interesting to write about on here - Maybe I’ll just take a nap…..

//ian

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Most of the week was, understandably, tied up with work.  Some good presentations during the day, and a days course on Product Management MRD (Requirements That Work) which really was excellent.  The instructor had some awesome anecdotes (true or not) that really got you thinking about the requirements process.  For example,  take the zero gravity space pen.  Legend has it that after they discovered that the bog standard ball point pen wouldn’t work in zero G environments, NASA spent millions of dollars developing the aforementioned space pen.  Of course, when you look back at the potential product goals and use case (enable astronaut to write in space),  it is penned that the Russian Cosmonauts simply used a pencil.  An example of over thinking?  Maybe…

On the day I had free and after hitting Alcatraz, a colleague and I hired a couple of mopeds and spent 5 or so hours cruising around the city,  There is a handily signposted ‘scenic drive’ around that takes you past the obvious places (Fishermans Wharf, Golden Gate Bridge) and out to the not so obvious (names escape me now).
I also managed to go to the late-opening Apple store about 4 times in the week, further tempting myself with the Macbook…  I held strong, I’ve still got a feeling about an announcement this month..

Finally, the Wednesday evening 5 of us hired out a practice room and some equipment (drums, keys, bass, axes, mics, amps..) and had ourselves a wicked little jam session.  None of us having played together before, it was none too shabby.  Belting out such classics as Hold The Line (Toto), Run To You (Bryan Adams), Paradise City (GnR) and also a sweet rendition of Bohemian Rhapsody, intertwined with some ‘freestyle’ 12 bar blues and failed attempts at other tracks (Sweet Emotion, Don’t Fear The Reaper).

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Before I go:

I’ve been using Ebay for a good 5 or 6 years and never had a *real* problem at all, until January this year. I took a BiN auction and paid the (fortunately) reletively low price via PayPal. Ebay has this to say about PayPal:

When a buyer pays with PayPal for a qualifying listing, s/he is protected up to £500 at no additional cost if that item is not as described or is simply not received at all.

A week passed with no correspondance from the seller, which isn’t unusual. That became two weeks and 7 days later three. No response at all to emails so, out of principal more than anything I logged the claim case with paypal. I just got this response from them:

After careful review, we have concluded our investigation of the Buyer
Complaint described below.

We have decided in your favour, however, we were unable to recover any
funds from the seller’s account. As stated in the PayPal User Agreement,
recovery of funds associated with a Buyer Complaint cannot be guaranteed.

Brilliant.

Judging by the number of negavative feedbacks against the sellers paypal account, it wasn’t a one off. Now, I know about people getting their accounts hacked and everything but in most cases i’ve heard of the person on the wrong end of the hacking usually has the decency to reply to the emails sent – even if it is just to say WTF. Besides, in this day and age when EVERYONE should know about phishing and the importance of strong passwords I have zero sympathy for people who cannot protect themselves online, especially when other people lose out because of it.

Thanks Ebay, Thanks PayPal and thanks [email address redacted]

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I wanted to get a Wii out here but they are apparently region locked

I wanted to get a PS3 out here but they are sold out

My iPod is starting to wear out I think

Time for a new iPod

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1. Wii-ked

The last two days i’ve been one of the “experts” at one of our user groups, this one hosted at the Millenium Hilton on Church St.  If you know NYC, you might know this is *directly* opposite ground zero.
It’s been quite distracting really, the space where they are building doesn’t look big enough to house the 2 WTC towers, let alone the other one (or was it other ones?) that collapsed.
Apparently this Hilton was shut for 18 months after that day, there is a building to the left of ground zero that is still being fixed up from it.

From the heady hights of the presidential suite (swanky cocktail party, unfortunately i’m not staying in it!), which is atop of the hotel, the footprint just doesn’t compute.

Oh, and I went to the Apple store the other day and am gonna take the plunge and get me one!

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