Lately the choice of films on BA flights has been a bit poor. There was nothing remotely interesting to watch on the flight to Montreal last month and there was little choice this time around too. I opted to watch Forgetting Sarah Marshall as I quite enjoy listening to Russell Brand. What a mistake! This film has about 2 scenes featuring Brand that are worthy of a slight titter, the film is one of the worst I’ve seen. Really, don’t waste any time on this film.

I got more entertainment watching fellow passengers trying to figure out how to open the toilet doors! Why is it people can’t figure this out? It clearly says push on a large flat hand-sized panel indicating where and what you need to do to open the door but people always seem to want to try and pull something to get it open.

Ever been stuck on an airplane in economy where the person in front has the temerity to recline their seat back? It’s especially infuriating when you’re trying to eat the stuff they call food! Well, this video might offer a solution!

How To Keep Motherfu#%s From Putting Their Seats Back from fi5e on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags: travel

I received an e-mail from Tripadvisor today indicating that they’ve just released their “2008 Travelers’ Choice Destination Awards” (pdf).
The list is broken out into the top 100 in the world and then the top 25 in the various global regions. It seems I’m a very well travelled man as I have been to 24 of the world’s top 100 destinations! At the end of this month I’ll be going to two more places I’ve never been before; Dallas, Texas and San Juan, Puerto Rico. Sadly neither of those are in the top 100.

So there’s been quite a lot going on that’s meant I’ve not had time to post here in a while. Well not until this week anyway.

The main thing has been that I’ve been working very hard on a new project…to get a new job! I’m pleased to say it has now been completed and I’m now into my third month with Mobeon, a Swedish company that produce voice and video mail systems for the telecommunications industry.

There are several benefits for me in this change:

1. I’m working with software.
2. I’m working with messaging software, i.e. e-mail servers and the like.
3. I get to work from home.
4. I get to travel around the world.
5. I get paid a bit more!

It’s not all roses though, the travel is quite extensive and can be at very short notice. So far, I’ve been to Sundsvall in Sweden (twice) and Jakarta, Indonesia. This can cause some problems with child care for Euan on the mornings when Louise works, but we’ve managed to work it out so far.

Working from home is cool, but I do have to be careful about not spending all my time working. It will be much better when I get a dedicated home office in which to work. At the moment I’m having to sit at the dining room table, so end up spending almost my entire day there!

Another reason why I’ve not had too much time for blogging is that I’ve been working quite a bit on the websites that I manage for various organisations. In particular, I’ve been working on one for the band I now play in, Northwood Volunteer Band. I’m particularly pleased with this one as it’s my first foray into content management systems, and it seems to work quite well with Joomla. However, now that I’ve been asked to do Euan’s school website I’ve discovered there some reasonably fundamental issues with both Joomla and Drupal. Joomla doesn’t have great frontend support for editors and both Drupal (at least the beta version of 5.0) and Joomla don’t have great permission/role frameworks, at least not natively. I’ll have to try the non-beta version of drupal plus extensions.