First Visitor

Posted on Friday, 27th January, 2006 by ianmacd

Last weekend was a lot of fun. My friend Peter ventured up here for the

weekend at short notice. Peter who?

I shared an office with Peter at Google in Mountain View for about three years

between 2002 and 2005. We listened to each other’s CDs, watched episodes of

The Office and Ali G, shared company gossip, discussed our post-IPO plans,

reviewed the day’s Tour de France stage… shit, we were even known to work on

the same project together. Rarely did we piss each other off.

Yes, I could have done a lot worse for an office mate, and so it was with a

broad smile that I headed towards Schiphol airport Friday evening to pick him

up. Peter lives in Zürich now, having moved there from Mountain View just

a month ago to work in Google’s Swiss office.

Peter’s still very much a Google employee in heart and soul, whereas I have

only token Googler status these days. He’s probably more motivated in his job

now than at any time during the period in which we shared an office (a causal

relationship?). For me, on the other hand, Google feels very much a part of a

bygone era. I harbour vaguely romantic feelings for that phase of my life, but

it’s all wistful nostalgia and doesn’t feel real any more.

Anyway, apart from talking about the good old days, we spent the weekend

walking around Amsterdam and drinking plenty of good coffee.

On Monday, we drove to Zandvoort and went for a walk on the beach. In spite of

the freezing temperature, it felt relatively mild, as there was very little

wind. Later in the day, we drove to Haarlem and had a look around the city

before dropping Peter off at the airport on the way home.

It was nice to have a visitor for a few days, especially since we know so few

people in Amsterdam these days. Human contact rarely goes beyond interaction

in shops and cafés. Sad, but true; we need to put some effort into

changing that.

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Just How Stupid Is The KPN?

Posted on Wednesday, 18th January, 2006 by ianmacd

OK, it’s a rhetorical question, but after my recent trials and tribulations with the moving of my DSL line, I wonder if the collective neurons of the entire administrative staff could raise a glimmer from a twenty watt light-bulb.

What’s happened now? you ask. Well, I’ll tell you.

When the KPN moved my analogue phone line on 21st December, I made an appointment with them by telephone to come back in January and install a second wall socket for me. The engineer who had installed the line had been unable to connect the downstairs socket, instead connecting the one in the front room on the first floor. This was inconvenient, however, because the base station and thus answerphone was then located upstairs, making it awkward to check for messages as one entered the house.

So, as I said, I made an appointment to remedy the situation. The first engineer had told me that his colleagues would be able to pull cable to allow the downstairs socket to be connected.

Well, come the day of the appointment, what happens? The KPN sends the engineer to our old address, the address from which the phone line in question had already been moved when the appointment was made. Go and stand in the corner with the dunce’s hat on.

Now, fair is fair, so I must admit that when I received voice mail from the engineer, saying that he had not found me at home (yeah, mate, I don’t live there), and I then called to ask if the situation could be rectified, I was put through to a very helpful woman who listened to my story, then called the works department of the KPN, then called me back to say they would still try to fit me in the same day at the new address. Grand.

A couple of hours later, the KPN engineer shows up with a second engineer, who he was clearly training. To cut a long story short, this new engineer was able to connect the second socket downstairs without pulling any cable at all. It was already wired.

In other words, the first engineer hadn’t done his job properly and had connected the upstairs socket needlessly. The supply of the first working socket is free, because that’s a prerequisite to be able to use a phone, but the connection of second and subsequent sockets is a paid service. Hence I am now expected to pay for the privilege of having the KPN enable me to use the phone where I wanted it put in the first place.

Doh!

Posted in House | 2 Comments

Wheel Meet Again

Posted on Wednesday, 18th January, 2006 by ianmacd

Audi Centrum Amsterdam have been kind enough to arrange a loan car for us whilst we await the manufacture and administration of our own. I took two trams and the metro down to station Bijlmer today to pick it up. Ernst, the salesman I’ve been dealing with, came and picked me up from the station, served me coffee, then handed me the key to a very nice 4.2 litre 2005 A6 Avant in Mauritius blue. We’ll basically get to keep this until the delivery of our own car, which should take place somewhere around the end of February.

What a nice car it is, too. It has a number of options on board, such as satellite navigation, rear-parking assistance, left and right climate control, hands-free car telephone and who knows what else?

It’s a fast car, that’s for sure, but I’ve driven only a few kilometres in it so far. I drove straight over to PCH, the company to whom my part of Amsterdam has tendered out its issuing and administration of parking permits. Audi Centrum Amsterdam had written me a letter to hand over to PCH, explaining that this car, whose paperwork was obviously not in my name, was a loan car in advance of my own.

It was surprisingly easy to get the permit. Thankfully, there’s no waiting list in this part of Amsterdam, so I was in and out of PCH’s office within a few minutes.

Interestingly, I met a Surinamese woman working at PCH, whose surname is Macdonald. You don’t meet many Macdonalds in this country, much less black Surinamese ones.

Anyway, I came straight home after that. The satellite navigation was fun to use on the two legs of my trip. When I got home, I was able to park the car right in front of the door, something that’s easy to do around here. Parking in Amsterdam is so much grief, it’s nice to know we’ll be able to easily park in front of the house.

Later in the day, I went to Primafoon to obtain a SIM DuoCard for my mobile phone. This will enable me to have the same telephone number in my normal mobile phone as in the car phone. Unfortunately, you have to turn one phone off before turning the other one on (otherwise things can behave unpredictably), which gives you the issue of receiving SMS messages on one phone that you then try to recall in vain on the other, but that’s as far as the technology goes at present.

Interestingly once again, the girl who helped me in Primafoon turned out to have the same birthday as me. Another strange coincidence. Two in one day. Life is exciting.

Now I have to dream up some excuses to take this car out for a spin. I like it so much already, however, that I’m almost tempted to change our order for the 3.2 litre engine to the 4.2, but I can temper my boyish inclination with the knowledge that the 4.2 is expensive to run and environmentally harsher. In addition, it would almost certainly incur higher road tax and insurance costs. You see? I’ve talked myself out of it already.

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Tour Comes To Limburg

Posted on Tuesday, 17th January, 2006 by ianmacd

The 93rd Tour de France is coming to The Netherlands in 2006. The fourth stage will see the riders travel from the very northern tip of Luxembourg, Esch-sur-Alzette, to Valkenburg in the province of Limburg. It’s a flat 216 km stage, but all the same; it will be an excellent opportunity to see the tour caravan close to home.

This is the first time the Tour has come to The Netherlands since 1996, when it started in Den Bosch. I had seats at the finish for the prologue and remember shivering and quaking in the freezing cold as the rain bucketed down on us.

With no Lance Armstrong this year, it’ll be a strange Tour, but perhaps all the more exciting for his absence. Being back in Europe and equipped with a car by then, it’ll be hard not to find a reason to head down south for L’Alpe d’Huez and other joyous moments.

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We Miss Our TiVo

Posted on Monday, 16th January, 2006 by ianmacd

Having had UPC‘s digital cable TV up and running for a few days now, I feel able to make a few comments about it.

Plus points:

  • Cheap: the first six months of basic digital service are free. After that, the basic digital package costs only €2.16 more per month than the basic analogue service, but has a few interesting channels, such as the Travel Channel, that are missing from the analogue package.

  • Interesting extra channel pack: BBC3 and BBC4, BBC Prime, Disovery Travel & Living, Discovery Civilisation, Discovery Science, obscurities like /Geschiedenis and Holland Doc, plus a large number of news stations, ranging from the loathesome Fox News to the unintelligible but intriguing Al Jazeera. This package gives one approximately 40 further channels for just €2 extra per month.

  • Canal+ free for first month: Canal+ Red, Blue and Yellow are all free for the first month. That’d be a handy way to quickly record some porn if I had a VCR or a DVR connected.

  • The decoder is supplied free of charge, but remains the property of UPC.

Minus points:

  • The EPG (Electronic Program Guide) is inflexible and lacking power. One can search only 8 days ahead in the programming, but more importantly, it’s impossible to pull up the guide for just the channel that one is watching. Instead, you have to choose either all channels or choose by programme genre. If one chooses the latter, only the channels currently showing a programme from that genre will be listed. Regardless of which option one chooses, the list of channels will be shown, together with the programme each is currently broadcasting. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to page through chronologically to see what will be on each channel an hour or a day from now. Instead, one must select a channel and then page through only that channel’s programmes. Paging from day to day is not seamless, either. One must press a coloured button to move from day to day. This should obviously offer contiguous paging.

  • Poor user interface: this complaint is really an extension of the last one. There are many problems with the software’s operating in an illogical or inconvenient way. For example, if one pages through a given channel’s programming to a programme that will be broadcast three days from now and then hits OK on the remote control, the decoder will immediately switch to that channel. It would be more logical for OK to do nothing here or to act as the info key and display information about that programme.

  • Poor picture quality: some channels are encoded at an embarrassingly low bit-rate. It’s like watching an Internet video fragment encoded for analogue modem users. Blocking and mosquito noise are abundant.

  • No way to automatically change channel or issue a reminder at a pre-set time. It would be nice if the decoder could remind one when an interesting programme is about to start on another channel.

  • Single tuner: one cannot send a different channel to the DVR, VCR or whatever than the one being watched. Similarly, since one has only one decoder, any other televisions elsewhere in the house will still have only the analogue signal.

  • Bugs: sometimes the channel guide is empty. Sometimes after performing several disparate operations in a row, the picture drops out, necessitating the pulling of the plug. This happened to me multiple times on the first day of use. In fact, as I write this, I see that the image has frozen without my doing anything. Sure enough, pulling the plug does the trick again.

  • No way to remove channels that one does not pay for and receive from the EPG.

  • The teletext button on the remote doesn’t call up teletext via the decoder; it works only if one first changes the mode of the remote from the decoder to the television. Of course, that causes the TV to change video input from the decoder back to the analogue signal. In short, to view the teletext of a digital-only channel, one must use the teletext button of the TV’s remote control, not that of the decoder.

  • Sticking with teletext, the service regularly drops out on various channels. AT5, for example, has had no teletext since I rigged up the decoder. If I want to view it, I have to switch to viewing the channel via the analogue signal.

  • No ability to compile a list of favourite channels or reorder the channels. One must remember each three digit channel number and the channels are not consecutively numbered.

In conclusion, UPC’s digital TV product falls quite a way short of, say, DirecTV and drastically short of a DirecTiVo. That device is a DVR as well as a decoder, so a direct comparison is somewhat unfair, but at the end of the day, I do want those extra features: the dual tuner, the built-in DVR, the ability to search the programme guide and record programmes based on content (keywords, actors’ names, etc.) rather than time of day, the intelligence to record programmes I haven’t asked for, based on past viewing habits, etc.

TiVo has spoilt me. I didn’t even watch American television apart from the Tour de France and a few things on HBO until we got our TiVo. That box of tricks managed to sift a couple of nuggets a week from thousands of hours of mindless dross, often finding them on channels whose existence I was scarcely aware of.

Whilst the selection of channels offered by UPC is vastly better than what is available in the US (which is actually more my European bias coming into play than an objective judgement), there is no way to find the stuff worth watching without manually reading through the EPG, something UPC has made painfully awkward to do.

Still, as an improvement over UPC’s analogue offering, it’s great. It’s barely any more expensive, provides generally better picture quality and offers some worthwhile extra channels.

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