Contrary to popular belief I’m not dead

Posted by Lester Madden under Augmented Reality, Smartphones, Software, Symbian, Travel

I left Symbian at the end of August and have had a nice relaxing September at home. I haven’t been up too much, other than catching up on a few xBox titles I missed out on.

The Darker Side Of Travel

Posted by Lester Madden under Travel

Wow no blog for 2 weeks. But I have a good excuse. I have been on holiday.

2 weeks in the sun in Barbados doing nothing but sitting by the beach. Only on holiday do you get wife permission to drink alcohol at 10am each morning.(Probably no bad thing). With the holiday a dim distant memory its straight back into work now, I got home from holiday on Saturday morning, the first email I saw was asking if I could be out in San Francisco this week, so here I am. So far it’s been a trip from hell.

Universal Phone Charger – Finally

Posted by Lester Madden under General, Smartphones, Travel

One of my pet gripes about travelling is having to pack an assortment of chargers. A journey to the US and I end up with chargers for my laptop, phone, music device and sometimes my PSP. I have a few phones and it gets annoying to arrive only to find I have the wrong charger, or the phone wont charge from USB. Good news, all 5 of UK’s mobile phone companies have agreed to a standard micro USB style charger.

Symbian Foundation – Application Spotlight MWC09 Summary

Posted by Lester Madden under General, Symbian, Travel

A few weeks back we decided, wouldn’t it be great if we could have real developers speak on our Symbian Foundation exhibition stand at Mobile World Congress. So we sent out an email to our developer community, sweet talked a few bloggers into giving us a mention and generally made a nuisance of ourselves asking for developers to contact us if they wanted to give a 15 minute talk on our stand. The only requirements were the application had to run on a S60 5th Edition device (eg Nokia the 5800).

MWC09 – Party Review

Posted by Lester Madden under Travel

Greetings From Barcelona

Posted by Lester Madden under General, Symbian, Travel

Arrived safe and sound. Its not as warm as I was expecting but still nicer than London. We have just had the first two presenters for the Application Spotlight and so far they have gone well. If you are at mobile world congress drop by the Symbian Foundation stand in hall 8 and see me for your party tickets. I am posting this blog on my Nokia 5800 so short entry today.

Application Spotlight – MWC Update

Posted by Lester Madden under Symbian, Travel

A couple of weeks back I invited people to submit their applications for the chance to present them on the Symbian Foundation stand at Mobile World Congress. I’ll admit that I was a bit nervous about the idea, not because I doubt anyone’s ability to build great stuff, but because the device was so new (it only shipped in the UK a few weeks ago) I had no idea how many responses I’d get back.

Mobile World Congress 2009 is almost here

Posted by Lester Madden under Symbian, Travel

Just a few days to go until Mobile World Congress 2009 in Barcelona.
I’m flying out from London City Airport on Sunday afternoon and will be heading off to the venue to register and make sure everything Is ok with the Symbian Foundation stand. I’ve never flown out of London City Airport before. Now I live in East London I thought it would be easier to get to than Heathrow, we’ll see.

If you are going to the event, make sure you pick up your entry pass on the Sunday or expect a 2 hour queue on Monday morning.

Ouch that hurt.

Posted by Lester Madden under General, Travel

Oh my do I hurt this morning.

I went out last night, cool restaurant, very nice. After dinner did the usual pub crawl thing, and as you do in Tallinn sooner or later you end up in Hollywood. Generally speaking Tallinn is really cheap, less than £5 for a couple of G&Ts, this morning I am scratching my head wondering how I managed to spend nearly £80. I didn’t drink that much.

Random travel memories

Posted by Lester Madden under General, Travel

I was just updating my Facebook “where I have been map” to reflect my latest travel.

I have been lucky enough to travel to a good number of places, even luckier that in most cases someone else has picked up the bill. The trick is to get a business trip to a part of the world you want to visit.

Sorry sir, you need more beer

Posted by Lester Madden under General, Travel

I  went to a bar tonight with a friend from Realillusion. As I went to pay the waiter said “sorry sir there is a cover charge of TB 700” and I hadn’t spend enough to cover it.

Normally you think okay, fleece me and give him some extra cash, however he asked “would you like TB 700 of beer to take away”.

Bonus, 2 bottles of Taiwan beer back to the hotel.

Made in Taiwan

Posted by Lester Madden under General, Travel

Just arrived in Taipei and am completely knackered. The journey was long, seems like it was weeks ago that I left home. I left in darkness, arrived in Hong Kong in darkness and arrived in Taipei in the dark. When I arrived at Taipei airport I had a scary moment. I went to take some cash out the ATM so I could get a taxi to the hotel. As Taiwanese Dollars are not something you get at the travel exchange at Heathrow I though you can’t go wrong with an ATM. I put my card in the ATM machine and waited, and waited, and waited. After about 45 seconds I started to get a little worried, the machine still said insert card. After 2 minutes I was really worried that it stole my only means of payment. Eventually just as panic was about to set in it said enter your pin. Phew. I tried to take out 100,000 Taiwanese dollars, nope, insufficient funds, I tried 20,000 same problem. Now I thought I was really screwed with no money to get to the hotel.

As I turned around a guy came up to me and said “you want taxi? No problem I give you taxi, you pay at hotel”. Getting into a strangers car is never a good idea but he gave me a limousine hire card and look legit. Besides in my wallet all I had was: 3,000 Japanese Yen, 50 Czech whatever’s, £6.21 and 5 Tesco’s computers for schools vouchers. I was hardly a robbers dream. He took me to the taxi rank and indeed he called a limo over, no boring taxi for me. I expected the guy not to speak English, that’s why I printed out the address of the hotel. The only trouble was the driver didn’t read English, but at least we got to the hotel, somehow. At that point I was too tired to really care. I would have quiet happy slept the night in the back of the car.

Not seen anything of the city yet, the guys at PChome are taking me out to shops in a few hours. Perhaps having problems with the cash machine will turn out to be a blessing.