andrewbuonocore.com

I just installed Spaz. A rather unfortunate name for an application.

I am testing the information posted here:

http://www.keyboardface.com/iis-permalinks/

As I use IIS, I have not been able to use decent permalink structures but now we will see.

Is Robert Scoble such an important figure that his moving jobs is such a topic for discussion?

He’s just a bloke who used to work for Microsoft and has spent two years frantically pushing himself to the point where some people think he is important.

Who cares?

OK, twitter is turned back on!

According to the BBC, supermodel Gisele Bündchen is refusing to accept payment for her work in US Dollars because she has concerns about the stability of the currency.

Instead, she has asked for Procter & Gamble to pay her in Euros.

I think it’s the most significant story of the year.

Perhaps a model asking for payment in Euros instead of Dollars is not significant on the face of it, but what if it were not a model, but a major oil producer asking for payment in Euros instead of Dollars?

If the OPEC members railed against the Dollar and decided that the price of Crude oil would be denominated in Euros, then the USA really would be struck with higher prices at the pumps. Not only would they have to stomach the upward creep in the price of oil, they would have to cover currency fluctuation too.

If the price of oil and the Dollar both went in the wrong direction, there is no ceiling on the liability of Americans in terms of what they will have to pay to fuel their thirsty vehicles.

I am a regular traveller and usually book flights from one of three services.

Keeping track of my travel plans usually means copying and pasting parts of confirmation emails from travel sites and airlines into events on Google Calendar. It works fine but it is a touch cumbersome.

I read about tripit.com on techcrunch and so far, it looks like the perfect site for me. The idea behind it is simple, but its execution of the idea is just as good.

When you book a flight, hotel, car hire etc online, you just forward your email from that company to the tripit.com address (you have to register your email address in your tripit account first) and an itinerary is automatically created for you.

The smart thing is that travel items are grouped intelligently so that the flight you hotel you booked in Zurich between two flights in and out of the same city are threated as part of the same trip, so moving items around between itineraries is minimal.

Also, you can mix your travel suppliers so you can get the flights you booked on ba.com grouped with the hotel you booked from Expedia.

The list of sites and travel companies supported is already pretty large. Here is the list of sites supported by tripit.

My only gripe so far is that each day of your trip is displayed on the itinerary, even if you have nothing booked against those days. I don’t need that, to be honest.

Other than that, my itineraries have gone thorugh perfectly. It seems the ideal service for me and one I hope will go from strength to strength.

Tripit.com

So the outage that caused everyone’s Skype connections to go down was down to the fact that a Windows Update required a restart of millions of PCs?

No way, I do not buy it.

If this were to be believable, I would have to accept that:

• The number of installed Windows machines has suddenly reached some critical number that restarting enough of them would bring down Skype, especially as….
• MOST Windows Updates require a restart! You can hardly make any changes to Windows or Office applications without needing to restart, let alone…..
• The fact that such is the crappy nature of Windows that millions of people will be restarting their Windows machines all the time.

Also puzzling was the advice given by Skype  gave to leave Skype running during the outage. How much bandwidth was wasted, how many networks were bogged down with Skype connection requests to a system which they knew could not accept them?

Skype have a lot of goodwill but an outage like this and what seem to be dubious reasons for it have knocked my confidence in them.

I have a Full Access pass to the Podcast And New Media Expo in Ontario, California, On September 28th to 30th. It is paid for in full.

The pass is worth $299.

Unfortunately, I am unable to attend but my misfortune could work to your benefit as I am giving the pass to someone for free.

You do have to do a couple of things to do in order to qualify, which I will explain in a moment.

All qualified entrants will be entered into a draw and the winner will be drawn at random on September 1st 2007.

So what do you have to do to qualify for the draw to get a free pass to Podcast And New Media Expo 2007?

OK. Firstly, you need to post a link on your blog or website to my site - http://andrewbuonocore.com.

You can choose from one of the following links to use:

<a href=”http://andrewbuonocore.com” title=”Online Marketing Advice From Andrew Buonocore”>andrewbuonocore.com</a>

<a href=”http://andrewbuonocore.com” title=”Make Money Online With Andrew Buonocore”>andrewbuonocore.com</a>

<a href=”http://andrewbuonocore.com” title=”How To Make Money Online? Ask Andrew Buonocore”>andrewbuonocore.com</a>

Second, you need to give the site a Thumbs Up using Stumbleupon and also add me as a friend on Stumbleupon.

When you have done these two, send me an email to FreePass (at) andrewbuonocore.com and let me know the name of the site where you have placed the link and your Stumbleupon username and that is it!

The winner will be sent a form which has to be faxed to the Expo organisers. It has already been agreed that the pass can be transferred. Only the pass is on offer, no travel or accommodation.

Good Luck!

I installed SPB Traveler on my Windows Mobile device, it didn’t last more than a day before I removed it.

The most comprehensive piece of software for managing travel itineraries is Worldmate but their licensing is nothing short of thievery. As if the initial price is not bad enough, incredibly, that only gives you use of the software for a year, after which you have to pay another huge fee.

So, when SPB announced Traveler, I thought that Worldmate’s grip on the travel market for Windows Mobile was over but sadly it is not.

SPB traveler is a good-looking applicaton, as are all SPB applications but in terms of functionality it falls way short.

My main gripes:

The only form of transport handled is flights
No hotel management
No flight schedule lookup
Crazy time management which is non-configurable.

Essentially you have a calendar input tool with some pretty pictures and weather lookups.

The time management is a real puzzle. I spend most of my time in Zurich, Switzerland but for me, London is home. Now, Windows Mobile does me no favours when it comes to time zones so I work around it by keeping my time zone as London and changing the time every time I fly.

I have no interest in comparing times between London and Zurich. If I make an appointment for 19:00, it is 19:00 regardless of time zone. While I am in London and make an appointment to meet someone in Zurich at 19:00, I don’t want that changing to 20:00 when I change the time zone on my device, so I leave it.

SPB Traveler does the same. If I book a flight from Zurich to London, the departure time is 19:05 and arrival is 19:45 (both local times) and that is how I want it recorded. Traveler inserts a calendar entry for 18:05 to 19:45 because it converts the departure time to the time zone set on my device, as if I want to keep track of the departure time of my Zurich flight using the London time.

I don’t.

I have no option to keep times as local times, as entered. It makes it useless for me.

SPB applications have started to fall short of what I would call full functionality. Pocket Plus is a great application, same with Diary and Backup but recent additions like Insight (the RSS reader) and Traveler do not cover their ground well enough for me.

I hope Traveler improves because Worldmate does not deserve to survive without competition. Their pricing structure simply cannot be defended.

I had a question for the AuctionAds support team and I am pleased to say that they came back with not only a speedy answer, but a very interesting and useful one.

I asked about the criteria for getting the correct ads to display on low-traffic sites. Specifically, sites that have just been set up.

AuctionAds support explained that the default ads (What’s Hot On Ebay) are displayed if your site has not had a visitor (to whom the AuctionAds ad has been displayed) within the last 10 minutes.

The AuctionAds site mentions that this happens on low-traffic sites but this is the first time I have had the timing parameters confirmed, so it’s very useful information.

To avoid this problem, I created a simple page that auto-refreshes every 8 minutes (which AuctionAds said was OK) so my sites satisfy the sub-10 minute criteria in their early days.